why is this always the first thing people bring up about ibm? like, literally every major corporation or government has ties to the nazis lol.

I'd say Thomas J Watsons "lets make competitor tills which work worser and so give their brand a bad name" is probably a better lead in to what IBM was, in corporate culture terms.

That, and the "Beards/No-Beards" and "Mens Shorts but only really ugly ones" dances.

Or maybe "Nobody ever got fired from IBM for being over 55 ha ha ha"

Not every, no. It’s brought up because IBM made the holocaust incredibly more productive. Japanese internment as well.

Very pertinent today—what do you think all the data collected about your family will be used for in the future? That’s right, what it’s been used for in the past.

Because Edwin Black wrote a book about it right around the time Silicon Valley kept lecturing people how it could do no wrong and would save the world.

Also because someone could have written a similar book about how IBM helped Stalin and the Communists but most anti-communists don't want to rehash old problems that would only hurt one of their best friends and best returning stocks.

It's a dirty, open secret that Stanford and most ivy leagues also participated in and continue to benefit from the military-industrial complex.

And checkout this partial list of openly-known startups with In-Q-Tel (CIA-affiliated) VC funding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Investments

I think many people have realised that FAANG is just a rebrand of mil-ind decorated with brightly coloured office furniture.

The list is shocking for me, and an even more shocking thought is that probably most of these startups are useless today. Google alone can now provide maybe more half of the technologies these startups tried to achieve in the 2000s.

I'm sure we can agree that no FAANG company has ever had Hitler as their client and FAANG companies are major corporations.

Pick any $EVIL_OF_THE_DAY and a FAANG company sure has done business with them - often directly and more than willingly.

Considering all the offices in Tel Aviv, it couldn’t be truer.

They weren't around during WW II, otherwise I have no doubt they would had as well.

See how they happily collaborate with China.

Not sure if joking or serious.

Not every company got a national medal of appreciation ("Iron Cross") directly from Hitler. It was the highest civilian honor German had to offer.

After the US declared war, all the IBM equipment leased to the Nazis was considered the property of the German subsidiary. After the war ended, it was all handed back to Watson, and all the rent the German subsidiary was able to preserve (e.g. in Switzerland) came back, too.

People think they are being clever or edgy by doing so. There is a certain smug self-righteousness about it.

They likely also suffer from the “tainted by sin” theory where any mistake or error by an individual or company requires eternal damnation (yet conveniently dont apply the same standard to themselves).

It makes for boring reading once you realize that’s about all they have to offer.

The difference is, and bear with me here - I didn’t contribute nor profit from a horrific genocide.

seems like a minor detail to me

Where are your tax dollars going, if they are dollars?

That’s a pretty big hop - I can’t choose to not pay tax, I can choose not to support a Nazi supporter.

do you support the space program? do you like any cars made by the VW group? do you drink coca cola products?

I don’t care about space, no, and no.

How did a discussion of IBM suddenly involve you?

From parent: ‘yet conveniently dont apply the same standard to themselves’.

Are you sure about that? That in your ethnic group or family's history there has never been any complicity in any genocides, and that even today, you're profiting from that?

No, not "literally every major corporation or government has ties to the nazis lol".

This moral relativism, whataboutisms and muddying the waters fits perfectly into this pattern https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

I'm not convinced that's really in scope here, given that the article more or less confines itself to pre-1924 history.

Of course you shouldn't seek to minimise it, but this is an origins piece, not a full history piece.

Now, if the book that this article is adapted from - The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon - skips over the awkward part, then I'd agree, it's lacking. It does at least seem to have chapters on IBM in World War II, but I can't speak to the content.

Does IBM stand out there? A lot of well respected German companies worked with the Nazis, e.g. Porsche, Volkswagen, BMW, all the successors to IG Farben like BASF and Bayer.

IG Farben and IBM stand out for their direct involvement in work camps and death camps.

Frben not just for their use of labor but also the manufacture of gas used to kill, IBM for their provision of data tools and tattoo'd tracking codes.

Many companies contribute to war efforts, fewer are closely involved with industrial scale genocide.

Absolutely. IBM sold machines and millions of punchcards to the Nazi war machine. Initially it was used for collecting familial information used to track down Jews and their extended families. Later these machines were used to directly manage concentration camps and the logistics of the war machine at large.

Yeah but IBM would never supply tech to genocidal monsters these days. No way on earth. They learned their lesson 1 million gazillion percent!

Edit: If someone tells me IBM collaborate with the IDF, I am going cry.

Guess what.

Godwin's law invoked. IBM is now just another hollowed-out, shitty megacorp that decided to screw over long-term employees out of 401(k) matching. The 2 ways out of corporate serfdom are unionization and employee-owned co-ops.

https://archive.ph/2qIU9

I don’t think Godwin’s Law applies to referencing uncontroversial historical facts about actual relationships to the literal NSDAP.