The discussion of a banner image, while it has been fun, isn't really a "tough issue". However, the world continues on and there are truly tough issues to ponder.
The question that opens the thread is just one of many to think about when reading the following news item. Others to think about are:
How much time must elapse before a company is considered to be a "different" company? (Meaning that the company in this story has a significant number of employees on every level that have religious ties to those previously affected by the company's dealings, yet those people aren't the ones who made those very old dealings and they are now benefiting from the employment and success of that company.)
Can (should) a company be held liable for transfering technology to another entity (country, company, individual) who then uses that technology for nefarious, heinous actions?
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Book, suit allege IBM hid Nazi ties
By Reuters, 2/12/2001
EW YORK - International Business Machines Corp. is bracing itself against charges raised in a new book and lawsuit that the firm's tabulating machinery and its German business unit were instrumental in helping Hitler systematically identify and select victims of the Holocaust.
The book, titled "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation", was written by Holocaust investigator Edwin Black.
Historians have known for decades of Nazi use of Hollerith tabulators - the mainframe computer of its era - but the book sheds light on IBM business dealings and the lengths to which it may have tailored its machines to meet Nazi requirements.
IBM responded Friday to general issues that may be raised by the book in a letter posted on the firm's internal computer bulletin board that is read by its more than 307,000 employees.
"We recognize that its (the book's) very subject is an important and highly painful one for many IBMers, their families and the world community at large", IBM said in the statement.
IBM spokeswoman Carol Makovich declined to comment beyond the employee statement.
IBM was named in a lawsuit filed on behalf of five Holocaust victims Friday in a federal court in Brooklyn, according to Michael Hausfeld, an attorney with Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll of Washington, D.C.
The suit - timed to coincide with the publication of Black's book - asserts that IBM knowingly supplied technology used to catalog death camp victims and aided in the "persecution, suffering and genocide" before and during the Second World War.
"Hitler could not have so quickly and efficiently identified and rounded up Jews and other minorities, used them as slave laborers and ultimately exterminated them, without IBM's assistance", Hausfeld said in a statement yesterday.
An IBM spokeswoman reserved comment until the company had seen the filing.
IBM's punch-card-based tabulating machines dated back to 1890, when Herman Hollerith, a German American, first built them to compile the US population census.
Everything about the book had been a closely guarded secret for its promoters, Crown Publishers, a unit of German media giant Bertelsmann, which plans to announce the book today.
IBM is one of the world's largest suppliers of databases. Hollerith punch cards are the same technology blamed for the election counting breakdown in Florida last year.
This story ran on page 3 of the Boston Globe on 2/12/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
[This message has been edited by Panther (edited February 12, 2001).]