The unique igniting event was the most fateful day of the last century, January 30, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler came to power.

Hitler and his hatred of the Jews was the ironic driving force behind this intellectual turning point.

But his quest was greatly enhanced and energized by the ingenuity and craving for profit of a single American company and its legendary, autocratic chairman.

But for the first time in history, an anti-Semite had automation on his side.

He had help. In the upside-down world of the Holocaust, dignified professionals were Hitlers advance troops.

Police officials disregarded their duty in favor of protecting villains and persecuting victims.

Lawyers perverted concepts of justice to create anti-Jewish laws.

Doctors defiled the art of medicine to perpetrate ghastly experiments and even choose who was healthy enough to be worked to death-and who could be cost-effectively sent to the gas chamber.

Scientists and engineers debased their higher calling to devise the instruments and rationales of destruction.

And statisticians used their little known but powerful discipline to identify the victims, project and rationalize the benefits of their destruction, organize their persecution, and even audit the efficiency of genocide.

Solipsistic and dazzled by its own swirling universe of technical possibilities, IBM was self-gripped by a special amoral corporate mantra: if it can be done, it should be done.

The destruction of the Jewish people became even less important because the invigorating nature of IBMs technical achievement was only heightened by the fantastical profits to be made at a time when bread lines stretched across the world.

So how did it work IBMs Hollerith Machine When Hitler came to power, a central Nazi goal was to identify and destroy Germanys 600,000 Jews.

To Nazis, Jews were not just those who practiced Judaism, but those of Jewish blood, regardless of their assimilation, intermarriage, religious activity, or even conversion to Christianity.

Only after Jews were identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and ultimately extermination.

To search generations of communal, church, and governmental records all across Germany-and later throughout Europe-was a cross-indexing task so monumental, it called for a computer.

When the Reich needed to mount a systematic campaign of Jewish economic disenfranchisement and later began the massive movement of European Jews out of their homes and into ghettos, once again, the task was so prodigious it called for a computer.

When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer.

However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer.

IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitlers program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success.

IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitlers Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction.

Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp.

People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.

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