While Thomas J. Watson the head of IBM accepts Hitler’s contract to track and count Jews in German, local papers swell with stories of anti-Semitic outrages committed by that government. On March 18, 1933, The New York Times reports that the Nazis have ousted all Jewish professionals—lawyers, doctors, teachers—from their jobs. A front-page story under the headline “German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis” describes Brown Shirts dragging Jews out of a Berlin restaurant and forcing them to run a gauntlet of kicks and blows such that the face of the last man through “resembled a beefsteak.” Other stories tell of Jews being forced to clean the streets with toothbrushes, of book burnings, of 10,000 refugees fleeing Germany, and of 30,000 people—Jews, political prisoners, gays, and others—imprisoned in concentration camps. On March 27, virtually outside your window on Broadway, a crowd of more than 50,000 at a Madison Square Garden mass rally demands that American firms boycott Nazi Germany. In these circumstances, with this knowledge, Thomas Watson, bids for the census contract. Thomas J. Watson knew these things.

When the Reich needed to mount a systematic campaign of Jewish economic disenfranchisement and later began the massive movement of European Jews out of their homes and into ghettos, once again, the task was so prodigious it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed. When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.

However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler’s program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.