A Swiss court has cleared the way for Gypsy campaigners to sue IBM over allegations that the computer company's expertise helped the Nazis commit mass murder more efficiently, the plaintiffs' lawyer said Tuesday. The Geneva appeals court threw out an earlier decision by a lower tribunal which last year said it lacked jurisdiction, said the Gypsies' lawyer, Henri-Philippe Sambuc. The Gypsies filed the lawsuit in Geneva because IBM's wartime European headquarters was in the city. They claim the office was the information technology multinational's hub for trade with the Nazis. "IBM's complicity through material or intellectual assistance to the criminal acts of the Nazis during World War II via its Geneva office cannot be ruled out," said the appeals court ruling.
It cited "a significant body of evidence indicating that the Geneva office
could have been aware that it was assisting these acts."
In June 2003, the lower court said IBM only had an "antenna" in the Swiss city,
but the Geneva official archives contain documents showing that in 1936 IBM opened an office under the name
"International Business Machines Corporation New York, European Headquarters."
No immediate reaction to the ruling was available from IBM's Geneva lawyers, who have previously referred requests for comment to the company's U.S. headquarters. The news of the ruling came before business hours at the IBM's New York base. The company has said its German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH -- or Dehomag -- was taken over by the Nazis before World War II, and it had no control over operations there or how IBM machines were used by the Nazis. Sambuc maintains that the company's Geneva office continued to coordinate Europe-wide trade with the Nazis, acting on clear instructions from world headquarters in New York. The group represented by Sambuc
-- Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action -- sued IBM for "moral reparation" and US$20,000 each in damages on behalf of four Gypsies from Germany and France and one Polish-born Swedish Gypsy.
All five plaintiffs were orphaned in the Holocaust.
+++Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler meets IBM founder Thomas J. Watson in 1937.
The campaigners began planning the lawsuit after U.S. author Edwin Black claimed in a book published in February 2001 that IBM punch-card machines enabled the Nazis to make their killing operations more efficient. Black said the punch-card machines were used to codify information about people sent to concentration camps.
The number 12 represented a Gypsy inmate, while Jews were recorded with the number 8. The code D4 meant a prisoner had been killed. The Nazis are believed to have killed around 600,000 Gypsies along with 6 million Jews.
Although Gypsy groups say the number of Gypsies killed could have been as high as 1.5 million.
"It does not appear inconsistent to conclude that the respondent (IBM) facilitated the task of the Nazis in their committing of crimes against humanity -
- acts which were counted and codified by IBM machines," said the court ruling.
IBM's German division has paid into Germany's government-industry initiative
to compensate people forced to work for the Nazis during the war.
In April 2001, a class action lawsuit against IBM in New York was dropped
after lawyers said they feared it would slow down payments
from the German Holocaust fund.
German companies had sought freedom from legal actions
before committing to the fund.
The Geneva case is the first Holocaust-related action against IBM in Europe,
said Sambuc.
A city court will likely hear the lawsuit in the fall,
unless IBM lodges an appeal at the Federal Tribunal, Switzerland's supreme court.
IBM and the Holocaust tells the story of the involvement of this major US corporation in the establishment of Hitler’s Third Reich
and the destruction of European Jewry.
Author Edwin Black shows how technology developed in America by Herman +++Hollerith —a punch card and punch card sorting system—
enabled the Nazis to organise their war machine and carry through the efficient and systematic genocide of the Jews.
At the time of the Nazi dictatorship,
IBM had a near worldwide monopoly over the technology
and the production of its vital ingredient - the punch cards.
Edwin Black is not new to the subject of the Holocaust.
His parents were both Jews of European decent and survivors of the Holocaust. Black first encountered the punch card technology at the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
where he saw a Hollerith card sorting machine on exhibition.
He explains that it was then that questions started to nag at him
—What role did this machine play for the Nazis? ---What was the role of IBM?
This became the starting point for his investigation.
In 1998, he began to pursue these questions vigorously,
recruiting a team of researchers, interns, translators and assistants,
until it comprised more than 100 people.
In his introduction, Black explains
“I was fortunate to have an understanding of Reich economics
and multi-national commerce from my earlier book,
The Transfer Agreement,
[which dealt with the secret pre-war agreement between Zionism and the Nazis that enabled a limited number of Jews to leave Germany for Palestine]
as well as a background in the computer industry,
and years of experience as an investigative journalist
specialising in corporate misconduct.
I approached this project as a typical if not grandiose investigation
of corporate conduct with one dramatic difference :
the conduct impacted on the lives and deaths of millions.” (p15)
Black explains that ultimately,
IBM helped the Nazis carry through their policy of genocide.
Without this assistance,
Hitler’s regime would not have been able to carry through its extermination plan with such efficiency.
