Liberation of Auschwitz 70 years ago today: A Reflection

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere. - Primo Levi, 1986 The Drowned and the Saved

Seventy years ago today on January 27, 1945 the concentration/extermination camp known as Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops. Today 300 survivors of this death camp together with world leaders gathered there to remember. This day is now recognized by the United Nations as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and is observed around the world but not in Israel. In Israel in 2015 Holocaust Day (Yom HaShoah ) will be observed on April 15 at sundown.


Today the world remembers the role Soviet troops played in liberating the camp, but without the Soviet Union's actions in 1939 the atrocity in Auschwitz may have never happened. Auschwitz came into existence on May 20, 1940 when the Nazis and Soviets were still allies. This event took place following the August 23, 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact which included secret protocols to divide up Poland through military conquest. Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the West on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East on September 17, 1939. The two armies met and marched together in Brest-Litovsk, Poland on September 22, 1939. Russian revisionists would like to rewrite this history.

Unfortunately, the Russians are not the only ones that would like to forget what really happened. American corporations played a role in making the Holocaust possible. For example, beginning with the National Socialists arrival to power the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) provided the Nazis with ground breaking technologies, precursors to computers, that were used to identify and categorize holocaust victims. According to an October 8, 2002 article in The Village Voice "the infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.

IBM engineered a strategic business alliance with Nazi Germany and provided the punch card technology that would be used in managing the vast apparatus of the Nazi death camps. Equally troubling is that the NAZIS were able to arrive in a town with lists of names of people identified as being Jewish to round them up. Where did they get the data? From IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies. IBM technologically enabled the Holocaust.

Henry Ford of Ford Motors, in addition to himself personally being extremely antisemitic, had extensive relations and investments in Nazi Germany. This included factories assisting the Nazi war effort that continued through World War 2.

This blog is based out of the Cuban exile quarter which is in Miami, a city shared with a large Jewish population. Holocaust survivors are present here among us with the tattoos on their wrists bearing silent testament to this great crime. Sadly, Cubans too bear responsibility for Jewish suffering. May 27 through June 6, 1939 spanned the period when corrupt Cuban officials extorted desperate Jewish refugees aboard the SS St. Louis fleeing Nazi Germany and then thanks to popular anti-immigrant fervor refused to grant them safe harbor leading the ship to try its luck with the United States only to be denied and forced to return to Europe where many of the passengers would later perish in the gas chambers of the holocaust.Nor is it a coincidence that Jewish refugees were not let into Cuba in 1939 and a  Jewish man was not allowed to leave Cuba in 2009 but rotted for five years in prison for trying to help Cuban Jews.

S.S. St. Louis docked in Havana Harbor in 1939

A Cuban exile sculptor, Tony López, worked on The Holocaust Memorial located on Miami Beach which is a powerful work that preserves memory for future generations of this terrible crime. We will never forget this horrendous crime or remain silent before future injustices.

Historical Lessons from Engaging Totalitarians: Business and High Technology

 A look back over a shameful and overlooked history

Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number. photo: Ian Waldie/Getty Images

Over the past few months there has been a vigorous debate around continuing economic sanctions on the dictatorship in Cuba and a series of manufactured controversies surrounding democracy promotion programs directed at the island. However, a couple that have gone  unaddressed are the conceits that American tourists, business, and high technology would somehow be game changers in Cuba and that "evolutionary change" would take place within Cuba.

Solidarity with dissidents in Eastern Europe from the West and a policy that took human rights into consideration did achieve great things there 25 years ago: the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union two years later in 1991 with predominantly nonviolent movements.

The end result of ignoring the crimes of totalitarianism and engaging these regimes was one world war, and at least four genocides. Winston Churchill called the Second World War the "Unnecessary War" explaining in the preface to his book, The Gathering Storm:  "How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm." Would sanctions have prevented the death of over 60 million people between 1939 and 1945? When one does not support the nonviolent option for real and profound change that challenges the fundamental injustices of a dictatorship only two options remain: war or collaboration with tyrants. Both are unacceptable.

What did engagement through tourism, business and the exchange of high technology achieve in the early twentieth century? This first entry will focus on the role of engaging totalitarians with business and high technology. In the Cuba debate there is a lot of talk about computers and the internet as the magic bullets that will end the Castro dictatorship but often times attention is not paid to who is empowered in the transfer of technology. History demonstrates that this can be a disaster.

American businessman Armand Hammer played crucial rule in Soviet Union

 Saving the Soviet Union

Armand Hammer, and Henry Ford, both sold tractors to the Soviet Union. Such endeavors facilitated commercial ties between the Soviet Union and the United States, establishing the basis for further cooperation, dialogue, and diplomatic relations between the two countries. Pravda described Armand Hammer as a confidant of Vladimir Lenin and a "red millionaire" in the article titled "The Soviet Union that Hammer Built." Hammer was a key player in Lenin's New Economic Policy that consolidated Soviet rule in the 1920s. The Black Book of Communism estimates that 20 million were killed by the communists in the Soviet Union. The United States established the Export-Import Bank to encourage more trade with the USSR and having US taxpayers assume the risk during the Roosevelt Administration.

In addition to investments in the Soviet Union, Henry Ford had extensive relations and investments in Nazi Germany. This included factories assisting the Nazi war effort that continued through World War 2.

Enabling the Holocaust

Thomas J. Watson, (middle) head of IBM and president of the International Chamber of Commerce, and members of the ICC's board meet with Adolph Hitler in 1937.

Beginning with the National Socialists arrival in power the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) provided the equipment with ground breaking technologies, precursors to computers, to identify and categorize holocaust victims. According to a October 8, 2002 article in The Village Voice "the infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number. IBM engineered a strategic business alliance with Nazi Germany and provided the punch card technology that would be used in managing the vast apparatus of the Nazi death camps. More troubling is that the NAZIS were able to arrive in a town with lists of names of people identified as being Jewish. Where did they get the data? From IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies. IBM enabled the Holocaust.

Yahoo identified Chinese dissidents for regime who were jailed, tortured and killed

Hunting Dissidents and Building the Great Firewall in China
The optimists would say that was 1933. It couldn't happen now. Wrong. It already has in Communist China. Western companies are assisting Communist China in spying on Chinese nationals and having dissenters rounded up. Amnesty International in 2002 reported on Chinese prisoners of conscience including some who had died and been tortured while in detention. American corporations such as Cisco assisted the Chinese totalitarians in building an internet that serves the interests of the dictatorship and spies on the people of China. American companies have also assisted in targeting independent journalists and activists trafficking in information censored by the dictatorship and providing their location to the Chinese communist regime. Shi Tao, an independent journalist, was imprisoned for a decade because of Yahoo but thanks to having family in the United States he was able to sue and the American technology company settled out of court. Other dissidents were not so lucky and were jailed, tortured and killed. The communist regime in China has been in power since 1949 and according to The Black Book of Communism has a tally of 65 million victims.

Principled diplomacy, international human rights standards combined with nonviolent interventions by civil society have been shown to produce positive change without wholesale bloodshed.  Democracy, or human rights, promotion using principled nonviolent means can always be improved, but should not be discarded.

Unfortunately, the history of the twentieth and twenty first centuries have shown that corporations engaging with totalitarian dictatorships be it the Nazi Third Reich under Adolph Hitler, the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, the Peoples Republic of China under Mao Ze Dong and Deng Xio Peng, or Communist Cuba under the Castro brothers businessmen peddling high tech equipment have not only provided legitimacy to these dictatorships but assisted in systematizing gross human rights violations and prolonging their rule.

History Repeats Itself

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana

Qaddafi and Obama shake hands on July 9, 2009

Events unfolding in Libya demonstrate that so-called realism, a combination of Machiavellian realpolitik and moral relativism that refuses to identify evil systems as evil until it is too late and the body count unacceptably high is dangerously naive and unrealistic. In addition in the effort to make peace with evil and engage it in commerce a policy of appeasement and collaboration turns democratic nations and institutions into accomplices of repression and in extreme instances genocide and in some instances creating existential threats to their own country's existence.



Victoria Cummock, whose husband was murdered by Gadhafi along with 269 others in Pan Am 103 on December 21, 1988 wrote in Sunday's The Miami Herald in an opinion piece titled "The Monster We Enabled" how this racket is carried out:

Today Gadhafi and his henchmen are brutally slaughtering their own countrymen in their homes and in the streets of Libya. Libya is thousands of miles away from the United States. So why should the average American care about the mass murder of these people?Americans need to care because the U.S. government has empowered and enabled the Gadhafi regime in their continual use of force and violence to maintain a dictatorial rule. Unbelievable but true.

Currently, the United States is importing billions of dollars in oil from Libya. Quietly, it is also using U.S. taxpayers’ dollars to support the Libyan government with numerous programs, even after Gadhafi ordered a variety of terrorist attacks killing hundreds of innocent American civilians. This is an outrage.Unfortunately, America’s need for commercial dominance and our addiction to oil has put us in business with countries whose rulers are among the leaders in abusing the human rights of their own people.

Time and time again, we see a government’s pursuit of money and power on a collision course with justice and people’s human rights. Depending on the country, these betrayals play out in many different ways, sometimes bluntly and violently, as in Libya, but most often silently and without much notice.

In “civilized countries” like the United States and the United Kingdom, when their citizens are attacked, brutalized, held hostage or murdered, our leaders are quick to voice outrage and indignation, publicly condemning violence and promising swift justice and accountability. Privately, it’s another story and actions speak louder than words. These very same “civilized leaders” immediately take action to mitigate financial loss, feverishly looking to protect what is much more important to them than the rights of their own citizens. They protect what keeps them in power – money and their administration’s commercial interests .

On Monday, November 17, 2008 the Washington Post reported that President George W. Bush spoke with Gadhafi and discussed closure over a "painful chapter" in US-Libyan history. On May 15, 2006 Time Magazine in an article titled "Why Gaddafi's Now a Good Guy" described how the Bush Administration normalized relations with Libya "when Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice announced that the U.S. was restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya and held up the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya as 'a model' for others to follow."

Richard Nixon shaking hands with China's mass murderer Mao Ze Dong

"Realism" led to a policy of transferring the manufacturing base of the United States and much of the Western world to Mainland China along with high technology to a regime that has murdered 65 million of its own people and inspired one of the worse per capita mass murderers of the 20th Century Cambodia's Pol Pot. This policy is not only immoral but national suicide.

Mao Zedong with Pol Pot in the background

Sadly, the United States has been down this road before in the early 20th century when American companies such as Ford and IBM assisted the Nazi Third Reich in its economic development. IBM engineered a strategic business alliance with Nazi Germany and provided the punch card technology that would be used in managing the vast apparatus of the Nazi death camps.

Thomas J. Watson, (middle) head of IBM and president of the International Chamber of Commerce, and members of the ICC's board meet with Adolph Hitler in 1937.

According to a October 8, 2002 article in The Village Voice "the infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number. And now it's been revealed that IBM machines were actually based at the infamous concentration-camp complex."

With regards to the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford received, in July 1938, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle medal from the Nazi government (photo above). He had built auto factories both in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany doing business with both odious regimes.

In the case of doing business with Imperial Japan and the Third Reich the price tag in American lives alone was 292,131 dead on the battlefield.

Sadly, history repeats itself because human vices such as short sighted greed continue to have great impact on policy hopefully the price tag this time around will not be as high as the last time.