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IBM i-n Auschwitz Concentration Camp? No Hollerith Machines at Auschwitz Concentration Camp
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum historian Franciszek Piper denies that Hollerith machines were used to keep records at the camp. Edwin Black states that IBM assisted Hitler in carrying out the destruction of the Jews. Black makes the assertion in his book IBM and the Holocaust, published simultaneously in 20 countries in mid-Feburary. One of the most powerful images from American writer Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust is that of a Hollerith machine, using punch cards produced by IBM, standing in the Auschwitz administrative offices. Yet Franciszek Piper, director of the Research Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum denies that there was such a machine at the camp. Nor were punch cards used to keep records on prisoners at Auschwitz, states Piper.
Black may have been misled by the fact that some documents on Auschwitz prisoners bear stamps indicating that data on those prisoners was entered into the Hollerith system. Such cards are on exhibit at the Museum. When asked about them on Monday, Piper stated that the data were not entered at Auschwitz. Instead, the cards accompanied prisoners transferred to Auschwitz from other camps. Prisoners from Mauthausen, for instance, had such cards. "I have seen nothing in the literature on Majdanek or Sztutowo about such a system being used there," Piper said when asked whether the Germans used IBM office machines at any of the camps that they established in occupied Poland.
PAP, mak
[I would like to complete the part of this statement relating to concentration camp Stutthof (Sztutowo). According to the researcher Marek Orski, in August 1944 the Stutthof camp authorities established the Hollerith Department which began to register prisoners using Hollerith cards (F. Piper).
Marek Orski, Niewolnicza praca więźniów obozu koncentracyjnego Stutthof w latach 1939-1945 (Gdańsk 1999)]
