Word: ibm
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...IBM's troubles are expanding into the legal sphere: Saturday, five Holocaust survivors filed a class action suit against the company, demanding that IBM open its archives and pay for any "ill-gotten gains... from its conduct during World War II." Lawyers for the plaintiffs estimate those gains to be about $10 million in 1940 dollars, or roughly $120 million today...
...IBM, according to Black's book and the lawsuit, was responsible for punch card technology used by Nazi demographers in the years leading up to World War II - and eventually by the SS, which was charged with rounding up Europe's Jews. Although it has long been known that IBM's German arm, which was taken over by the Nazis, had cooperated with the regime - and, indeed, was in a consortium of companies making payments to survivors and victims' families - Black says that the American parent was fully aware of the use to which the technology was put. And after...
...charges against IBM are hardly unique. Many U.S.-based multinationals, including Ford Motor Company, Coca-Cola and Colgate-Palmolive, have weathered charges of aiding and/or operating for profits under the Nazi regime. A few years ago, when a lawsuit was brought against Ford, the company fought (and won) for a dismissal, but not before it acknowledged that its German subsidiary used labor from the Buchenwald concentration camp to build vehicles. Ford's U.S. offices maintain they were not responsible for what went on after its assets were seized in 1941 - a claim many companies, including IBM, make in the face...
...Seltzer's mind, IBM's claims that they "lost control" of the German affiliate during the war don't ring true at all. "IBM says they lost control during the war, but that depends on what you mean by 'war,'" he says. "Certainly after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, they were still very much in control, and even coordinated transfer of equipment from occupied Poland to Romania. Then, after the U.S. and Germany entered a state of war in 1941, IBM arranged to have conservators run the German subsidiary - with the understanding that the profits would be turned over...
...IBM says it's nothing...