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Background: IBM, Dehomag, and the Hollerith Punch Card System In the early 20th century, International Business Machines (IBM) emerged as a leader in data processing technology thanks to a revolutionary invention: the Hollerith punched-card system. Originally devised by Herman Hollerith for the 1890 U.S. Census, this electromechanical system encoded information as holes punched in cards and could sort and tabulate thousands of records with unprecedented speed. By the 1930s, IBM’s punch card machines – consisting of keypunches to input data, tabulators to aggregate it, and sorters to organize the cards – were the state-of-the-art method for handling large data sets.…
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The Bureaucrat’s HolocaustHolocaust holocaust The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It was the culmination of a programme of escalating persecution, exclusion, and ultimately industrialised genocide without precedent in human history. The Holocaust — the Hebrew term is Shoah, meaning catastrophe — unfolded in stages. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 brought immediately a regime committed to removing Jews from German public life: civil service dismissals, boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of citizenship, Kristallnacht in 1938 which destroyed synagogues and Jewish…
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In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the world faced the horror of unprecedented atrocities and the challenge of building a new international order. The United Nations was founded in 1945 on principles of peace and justice, but by 1948 the Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War…
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When World War II ended in 1945, the Allies confronted unprecedented crimes – the Holocaust and aggressive wars of conquest. Determined to ensure “justice, not vengeance,” the victorious powers quickly turned to international law. In June 1945 the United Nations Charter was signed and came into force that October . Simultaneously, plans were underway to try the Nazi leadership. The Allies announced as early as the 1942 St. James Declaration that “those guilty of or responsible” for Nazi aggression would be punished by “organized justice” . In October 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill and StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5…
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Hitler, a cautious dictator for the first couple of years of his rule, had become reckless by 1941, and had gambled everything on a swift victory in the USSR. If StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More’s regime could be crushed and thirty million Russians starved to death as a result, then there would be enough living space for Aryan German settlers and the resources to defeat any enemy in the west. The defeat of…
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Most of the writing on individual perpetrators of the HolocaustHolocaust holocaust The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It was the culmination of a programme of escalating persecution, exclusion, and ultimately industrialised genocide without precedent in human history. The Holocaust — the Hebrew term is Shoah, meaning catastrophe — unfolded in stages. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 brought immediately a regime committed to removing Jews from German public life: civil service dismissals, boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of citizenship, Kristallnacht…