Toronto, February 12, 2001

Holocaust expert denies IBM hardware ran Auschwitz

WARSAW (AP) - Poland's leading Holocaust historian said Monday that there was no evidence to support the claim that the Nazis used technology made by the U.S. computer giant IBM at Auschwitz, although he does believe it was used in other concentration camps.

Franciszek Piper, the Auschwitz museum's historian, said that contrary to a claim made by U.S. researcher Edwin Black in a book entitled IBM and the Holocaust, punch-card machines made by IBM were not used in the camp.

"Black maintains that the punch-machines were used in Auschwitz, but we have no sources to confirm that," Piper said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his home in the city of Oswiecim, in southern Poland, where Nazis built the Auschwitz camp during the Second World War.

According to Piper, documents from survivors of Mauthausen, the Nazis' most notorious concentration camp in Austria, show the machines were used there to organize information on inmates' personal data. Such files can be seen at the Auschwitz museum exhibit, he said.

The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps between 1940-1945.

The release of the book Monday coincided with a lawsuit accusing IBM of providing technology to the Nazis - knowing it could facilitate persecution and genocide.

IBM's German subsidiary during the Nazi era, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH, was taken over by the Nazis. A machine made by the company - believed to have been used in the German census in 1933, the year the Nazis took power - is on display at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The company hasn't yet seen either the book or the lawsuit and isn't commenting in detail, Ian Colley, IBM's European spokesperson in Paris, said Monday.

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The real reason why Edwin Black targets IBM: nothing to do with the Holocaust?

SO Auschwitz was using only manual bookkeeping methods? This may explain certain statistical discrepancies. For example the embarrassing discovery that the monument to four million killed in the camp by the Nazis -- erected by the above mentioned Mr Piper -- was wrong by a margin of up to three million. (See Auschwitz's memorial stones, furtively swapped, below).