Edwin Beck and historian Edwin Black dissect IBM's complicity in the Holocaust, revealing how Thomas J. Watson Sr.'s punch card systems enabled Nazi identification, isolation, and extermination of Jews across camps like Auschwitz. The discussion traces eugenics from 19th-century Germany to American "human weeds" rhetoric, noting Watson's 1937 Third Reich award and subsequent FBI espionage investigation. Black parallels these atrocities to modern digital ghettos in China and corporate censorship, warning that medicine-politics convergence threatens society unless listeners take a moral fork in the road against complicity. [Automatically generated summary]
Man, this is, this is one of my favorite episodes because this is one of my favorite modern day heroes.
He is a historian, and I just want to make it really clear on who we're talking about.
This man is the award-winning New York Times best-selling international investigative author of 200 award-winning editions in 20 languages in 190 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles, the leading publications of the United States, Europe, and Israel.
More than 1.6 million books in print.
His work focuses on human rights, genocide, and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropic abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy, and historic investigation.
He has been, his name has been submitted 11 times for a Pulitzer Prize.
He is the recipient of, I mean, it goes on, a list of awards.
He is probably the leading scholar on how mechanically the Nazis did what they did.
I quoted him a couple of weeks ago when I got in trouble with the press.
I think I was on Tucker Carlson's show.
And I said, we are seeing the beginning of a digital ghetto.
Well, people went crazy.
How dare Glenn Beck say that?
I was quoting our guest.
As soon as I said, no, I was quoting this man.
Everyone went silent.
He is respected.
I revere him.
It's the 20th anniversary of his book, IBM and the Holocaust, which outlined exactly what happened.
And I think it's important to go over the steps of what IBM helped with with the Nazis.
And is there any comparison at all?
Is there any warning signs that we might be seeing today on what's going on?
A very controversial line of questions with a man who is beyond question Edwin Black, our guest on today's podcast.
Hello, my friend.
How are you, Edwin?
I'm fine, Glenn.
It's good to be back.
Yeah, good to talk to you.
First of all, happy anniversary.
I don't know if this is a happy memory for you 20 years ago when you first released this book, because how long, first of all, how long did it take you to research and write?
How many years?
It took about three years from start to finish, but I was aided by a fleet of about 100 researchers.
Wow.
So we did what would normally take about 10 years in a compressed period of time.
So you, when you released it, I know you felt good about it.
You knew you had the research.
But how long did it take before the press started coming after you?
I don't know if it was 10 minutes or 15 minutes.
Basically, it was divided this way.
All the press that had been NDA'd and got to break the story on the first day lauded the book.
And all the press that were left out of the scoop did not like the book.
We obviously couldn't give it to both the New York Times and the Washington Post.
We couldn't give it to both Time and Newsweek.
And so one major news magazine, one major TV magazine, one network in each country, one network in the United States.
And all that was handled by the publishers.
Did you know that before it happened, did you have any idea of the wrath that was going to come your way, not only from the media, but from IBM itself?
Well, IBM worked its wrath in a very quiet way.
In the 20 years since the book first aired, IBM has never denied any fact in the book.
They've never threatened me.
They've never asked for any changes.
They worked through others by fomenting what you might now call fake reviews.
And if anyone goes to edwinblack.com, they'll see a special section on the left called Retractions.
And there are many famous historians and famous publications which are required to publicly retract falsehoods.
But, you know, the book has withstood the test of time.
So not a fact or a comma has been changed in 20 years.
So I want to talk to you about some of the details, look into what the meaning of that is, what we can learn from it for today and tomorrow.
But first, just lay out the premise of the book.
Because a lot of people were involved with the Nazi.
Henry Ford wrote a horrible, horrible book during the Nazi period called The Vanishing.
I think it was the, was it the Vanishing Jew?
No, the world's Jew.
Yeah, the international Jew, and it was the world's foremost problem by Henry Ford.
So Ford GM was involved.
A lot of big companies were involved.
What is the difference between that and IBM?
Well, that's a very excellent question.
First, there were more than 100 major corporations in the United States and England that were engaged in trading with the enemy.
So you had a department store in London that was selling needle and that was selling uniforms to the Nazis.
But by the same token, the Nazis already knew the secret of needle and thread.
The difference between plain trading with the enemy and five corporations, some of which you've alluded to, that were directly involved in the size and scope of the Holocaust.
And the first one we discovered was IBM.
And that was the first moment when the world realized that a major American corporation was directly involved and complicit in the actual execution of the Holocaust.
And in this case, much more than the execution, just the actually the organizing and the co-planning.
And thereafter, I discovered that the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Motor Company, not just Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company, as you said, and of course, one of the most criminal corporations in the United States, General Motors, were direct allies of the Nazi regime and or were integrally involved in the size, scope,
and shape of the Holocaust.
Those are the main five.
So I used to know the name of the company because it was kind of seared in my head for a while.
I remember going to Auschwitz and looking at the ovens and on the door of one of the ovens was the logo.
I think it said Toth, maybe, but it was the logo and the trademark or the patent on that device.
And I thought, oh my gosh, you not only knew what you were building, you patented it.
Right.
And that's an ironic question.
Of course, you are correct.
And that company actually bid on the business.
In the case of IBM, they also ran their name on every punch card.
It was Deutsche Hollerith Michine Gesellschaft, which means the German punch card agency, they ran a copyright on every matter.
And when anyone else tried to print a punch card in Nazi Germany, occupied France, any of the places where its machines were used, IBM actually sued them during World War II, during the Holocaust, for copyright infringement and or trademark infringement.
When we talk about companies that were involved, IBM was, and I've said this to you so many times, the things that Hitler was dreaming of doing, the things that Hitler wanted to do of kill every Jew on the planet, he couldn't do it because he didn't have the technology of today.
He would have celebrated the technology that we have now.
It would have made his work really a job done quickly.
But IBM, as you have said, and I think you got a lot of heat for it, that, you know, high-tech didn't start in Silicon Valley.
It started with Nazi Germany.
These guys explain all of the steps.
You know, you lay out six different steps of the Holocaust, how to get there.
And they were involved in every single one, right?
Right.
There would have always been a Holocaust of some proportion, even without the IBM.
And that's because thousands of Jews were being mowed down bullet by bullet in the ravines and gullies and forest clearings of Eastern Europe by the Einzez group.
And along with their local militias, we should always remember that local militias were complicit in all of these murders.
But that can only go so far.
It was IBM that allowed the Nazis to escalate into the high-speed, industrialized high-tech genocide.
Okay, so what are the things that we can we go through the six stages?
And you just talk to me about what each of these mean.
You say the six stages identify the Jews.
How did IBM play a role in that?
IBM said we are the solutions company and there's no solution we won't give you, including the final solution, of course.
And so they said, what to the Third Reich, what would you like?
What is your goal?
And the first thing Hitler said is, I'd like to know how many Jews there are in Germany, because some of these Jews were wearing the fur hats, the curls, and could clearly be identified.
Others looked like regular business people were just going to synagogue and temple.
And a large number of them were already converted to Lutheranism and Catholicism and other forms of Christianity, and they were going to churches.
But according to the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, something you know well from your studies in eugenics, they were racially Jews going back in their ancestry because the famous motto,
Rassenblüt, race and blood, that the Nazis sloganized actually came from the president of Stanford University 30 years before in his book, Blood of a Nation.
So Hitler says, I'd like to know exactly how many Jews there are.
So IBM invented the racial census.
They actually hired thousands of individuals to go door to door in Nazi Germany and ask a series of census questions.
And then they had all those written forms sent into a single giant warehouse in Alexanderplatz in Berlin.
And then day and night, they were punched in to these punch card forms and machines.
In one column, they would ask, what is your religion?
You could either be a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Lutheran.
In a second column, what is your nationality?
And you could either be German, you could be Polish, Ukrainian.
In another column, they would ask, what is your mother tongue?
You could say, my mother tongue is German.
It's Croatian.
It's Yiddish.
It's Polish.
In yet another column, what is your profession?
I'm a bricklayer.
I'm an auto mechanic.
I'm a doctor.
I'm a lawyer.
And finally, the question, what is your location?
And then at the rate of 64,000 cards per hour, instantly, the Nazis finally learned exactly how many Jews of Polish extraction were practicing law in Berlin.
So is this.
I don't want to move off this step first.
We've always done America, has in its constitution a census, and it's become very controversial to, you know, to put race and everything else on this.
And we're getting it longer and longer and longer and more and more information.
And a lot of people are pushing back because they just inherently feel this isn't good.
It really is the first time we tracked racial bloodlines in a census was Nazi Germany?
Religion was always used as a measure of census.
The question is, how was the information used?
Remember, there have been censuses going back all the way to Moses.
But in this case, the census was weaponized.
In a similar fashion, we weaponized the census data from the Japanese in the 1940s when we had them picked up.
So this is what IBM did.
IBM Census and Bilt Bar Promo00:02:19
They modified and targeted their racial census for the specific purpose of identifying the Jews because there were overlapping questions.
What was your nationality, your mother tongue, and your religion?
Those identified the Jews.
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Okay.
Now, let's go to this.
Let's go.
Go ahead.
If I could say, it wasn't just one census.
There were constant censuses, registrations, over and over again, constantly honing the information, not only, of course, in Germany, but in other countries, because IBM was doing the census everywhere.
The IBM Hollerith Punch Card, this is the system by which IBM invents information technology, was a series of holes that were punched in a punch card about the size of a dollar bill.
And depending upon where those holes were punched, you could actually, once it was read through a high-speed reader, identify any information about a person, a place, or a process.
The Birth of the Information Age00:15:24
Before that time, you could count on your hands and toes.
But there's a raw number.
With this information that came out of these punch cards, these cross-tabulations, you could not only count how many people were in the room, how many were blonde, how many were brown, how many had jobs, how many were Jews, how many were Aryans.
And so this, not Silicon Valley, is the birthplace of the information age.
It was Berlin in 1933 that was the birthplace of the information age.
And what does that mean, the information age?
It means the individualization of statistics.
Not only could you count, but you could know something about the people you counted.
You knew their story.
Back in 2007, six, seven, I talked to somebody who was high up in Department of Homeland Security, and he was telling me about this new technology that they were employing to track terrorists.
And he said, you know, we identify the terrorists and then we monitor them.
And he said, we can monitor everything.
And he said, for instance, if we have a terrorist that we know is living someplace, if his water usage goes down, he said, we then know that he's gone someplace.
He's not in there, even though we might have a stakeout if his water usage, he's not flushing the toilets, he's not taking a shower.
We know something's up.
He said, then we just look at his circle of friends that we have on computer and access to.
He said, we begin to see if anyone's water usage has gone up by one person.
He said, then we can just find out exactly where people are, who's connected to whom.
That was in 2000.
It was before 2008.
I can't even imagine the information.
There is literally no place to hide anymore on earth if a government takes the technology that Hitler dreamt about and employs that to identify, count, separate, isolate, and round up.
And actually, it's going to be even worse than you just presaged because of a topic you probably know about RFID.
And soon they'll be measuring the garbage that we throw out, the cans, in our trash to see what our usage is.
And that's literally just right around the corner.
Well, they say, and I read this five years ago or so, that just by tracking people through their supermarket, hey, do you have a super saver card?
Yeah, I do.
And they can tell which clients or which supermarket shoppers are conservative, which are liberal, which are Jews, which are Christians, just by the foods we buy and the products we buy.
We can actually tell, I think it was at the time, 80% accuracy on political backgrounds because of the products we buy, which is insane.
To know that we are being analyzed and grouped at all times is a little disturbing.
I believe there was a group of behavioral scientists that they working with the Obama campaign when Obama won twice, and they were analyzing and data mining that information.
That's what you just said is the reason I don't get those super saver cards, those loyalty cards.
In fact, our pharmaceuticals are being reported in a similar fashion.
And there is now a grocery chain being operated by Amazon where no money is required.
You just walk in.
They know who you are.
They have face rec.
And more than just face rec, they're watching you as you pick up a can of peas, look at the label, put the can back, and then pick another can of peas.
So they understand the decision-making process.
So these decision trees are all now being woven into AI.
And so we are approaching a not so brave but very scary new world.
Yeah.
All right.
So there was step one.
And I think we understand that it's happening again.
The second step, you say, to six stages of the Holocaust, stage two is isolate the Jews.
How did IBM do that?
And what does that mean?
Well, the first step was identification, as you say.
The second step was exclusion or isolation.
And they took all the names that they had gathered of Jews and they juxtaposed them against the Bar Association, the faculty roles, the medical association, the journalist association, and all those people were immediately fired.
This is in the first year of 1933.
They were fired.
And so now the Jews were excluded from society.
In the place of the Jews were loyal Nazis, commissars, and others were put into their position.
So step two was exclusion.
Now, you may say that sounds just like cancel culture.
And actually, it is like canceled culture.
It is like canceled culture.
And I worry about this because I see we're now going through a purge in this country, similar to the purge that we've seen elsewhere and in Nazi Germany.
Edwin, somebody just lost their job yesterday from Disney.
Big star on a very big hit show and lost her job because she tweeted out, you have to understand the Nazis first turned neighbor against neighbor.
They convinced the German people that the Jews were bad.
And that's how you originally started to do.
You have to teach people that this group is bad and needs to be isolated.
And she said, isn't this the same thing we're doing right now?
And she was fired for saying that by Disney.
I just read that.
I think it's extraordinary.
There's an extra step to what you just said.
It's not only trying to convince people through propaganda, in the case of Goebbels, in the case of things we're seeing today, that an entire segment of the society is bad, but then punishing those who would speak out against it.
So for instance, and I know once again, I refer to your eugenic background since I know that you've studied that topic.
Eugenics was public health.
Eugenics was pseudoscience amongst doctors.
The Jews were said to be carrying a contamination.
There was the whole idea that Jews were medically unfit.
And so can you imagine if anyone would resist that in Nazi Germany?
And it was Twitter and Facebook today that we have back then.
Their information standing up for Jews or any persecuted minority would be considered medical misinformation.
Well, I know that I don't know when it started, but it got so bad that if you even went to the window, if you heard a skirmish outside, your neighbors were being escorted into a truck forcibly.
If you even came to the window and looked outside, you could receive exactly the same punishment.
So they eventually scared everyone into compliance.
You wouldn't speak out against it, and you were encouraged to participate.
But if you even recognized it, you would receive the same fate.
But people miss the step that, you know, one of the best police forces in Poland actually became one of the most brutal in killing the Jews out in the woods and hunting them down and burning whole villages with people trapped in their houses.
They were ordinary men at one point.
The propaganda and the pressure and the fear turns people into monsters.
It was said during the Stalin era, during the purge there, how do you create terror, not only by punishing the guilty, but by punishing the innocent.
And what you said to me is very important about these militias in the East, not just Poland, in the Ukraine and Lithuania and other Eastern countries.
Those militias were doing most of the actual killings in those ditches.
There were some Einsets grouping guys, but it was their allies in these militias who were doing a great deal of the actual shooting.
So I'm sure you know and you'd be able to correct me.
I think the book is called Ordinary Men.
It was, yes, okay.
Reading that book, I've, for a long time, have said every police officer, everybody in charge of anything needs to read this book to mentally know where you're going to stand if things ever would go wrong.
I've been mocked about that, but it is truly amazing how the Germans didn't have to do very much to get their order pushed through.
Well, there was a commissar or representative of the party, and I think we've discussed this before, in every newspaper office and radio station.
Correct.
And you and I were discussing this.
And I said, we no longer need that level of censorship where the man is standing at the next desk waiting to see your typed up copy.
Now the censor is in cyberspace.
And so we have commissars, if you will, functioning through mass media today.
And I really see a very dark path ahead.
And I understand that you have spotlighted this in the social credit system in China.
Yeah.
So Edwin, I'm trying to find out because if I had this conversation with anyone else, I mean, the heat that will come on me for this conversation with you in a long form format is going to be phenomenal or nothing.
It won't be in between.
It will be nothing.
Listen, no one is going to come at you because of this conversation.
If anybody has a question, you have my address.
Get in touch with me.
Well, one reason why I come to you with these things is because you know it inside and out.
You are the world's leading authority on this.
And there seems to be this trouble of connecting the past with today.
And I don't understand because if we really mean never forget, we don't mean don't forget the end.
We mean don't forget any of it.
So it doesn't happen.
There's warning signs along the way.
IBM was enabling, but they were still under the direction of the German government.
They still hired them and under the direction of the German government.
In today's world, I think people have a hard time connecting things because the government isn't saying ban them.
It's these private corporations.
And gee, don't they have a right to do and run their business the way they want?
But it's all leading us the same place.
Can you, for anybody who says that's not going to happen here, can you help draw these lines together on, we're just on step two, identifying and then isolating people?
Because that's what is happening here.
Well, if I could say, just to append what you said, it wasn't so much that the Nazis were giving the orders to IBM in Germany or New York.
I think what you meant to say was they were giving the purchase orders.
Yes, thank you.
Very good.
The decisions, the aggressive pursuit of this line of business, the customization of all of these punch cards and machines, and everyone was customized for every single application.
All of this was micromanaged by one man, Thomas J. Watson Sr.
He was a narcissistic and sociopathic criminal.
He was a convicted extortionist before he ever got to IBM.
He was convicted of extortion in the famous National Cash Register case.
He didn't go to prison because of an evidence technicality.
And the people who set up the IBM said, that's the man that we want to run our company.
And Watson received a share of all the business with the Third Reich.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
Not only did he receive a share, he micromanaged it.
So you couldn't even paint a corridor in a bomb shelter under an IBM factory without his permission because paint would cost money.
That would come out of his own personal pocket.
IBM's Cutthroat Wartime Business00:12:59
And so this was not a situation where IBM was compelled.
IBM went after this.
They were cutthroat against any competition.
They sued for trademark infringement during World War II.
And even when the Nazis, even when America entered the war in 1941 in December, because Germany declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor,
when the Nazis placed the company under their custodial control as an enemy company, all the same managers were left in place.
They were all working with IBM through intermediaries in Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Vichy France.
IBM senior executives, including their top lawyer, were in Berlin in 1942, executing secret orders to move the equipment around.
This was IBM making a conscious decision to go after this line of business.
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Well, I know that you have exposed, and it is, it's one thing to think about that and to think that Watson had dinner with his client, Adolf Hitler.
And as horrid as that is, you have exposed that they actually went and repaired the machines.
If there was a problem, they'd send out an IBM repairman to the concentration camps.
Well, all of these machines were Clipley clocked, and they had to be repaired and maintained once every two weeks.
And that was done on site by an IBM repairman.
And whether that was in downtown Frankfurt or in Auschwitz III, where they had an IBM facility, which was right near the sportsplatz and not far from IG Farben.
And of course, these machines could have never been useful without punch cards.
It would be like rifles without bullets, because each punch card could only be used once.
And I just did some calculations about five minutes before I came on this show.
Just one plant, just one plant in Germany produced just during the war years alone, 2.3 billion punch cards for the Nazi use.
That is not 33, 34, 35.
That is just during the wartime years to assist the Nazis in their war effort.
If that had been stopped, if the spare parts had been stopped, these spare parts were machine-tooled with extreme precision, then these machines would have broken down.
Because wait, wait, wait, wait.
I just want to make sure I understand this.
Because you have gotten in trouble before 20 years ago, and then they retracted all this.
But they said, oh, he's engaged in hyperbole because he says just about every bullet was tracked by IBM.
What you're saying here is the evidence of it, that they would track all the machines, all of the bullets, all of the transports of everything, not just people.
We know that the Germans were meticulous record keepers, but IBM was their clerk, if you will.
And so if they didn't have IBM, if they weren't using that system, these machines in the war machine would have broken down.
Is that what you're saying?
Well, it isn't that they tracked every bullet.
They tracked every shipment of bullets.
Right, right, right.
And so, and I know that there's a lot of emphasis on all the on these few negative reviews and criticism that I got.
But you must understand, virtually an entire world supported me.
Oh, I know.
Jewish organizations within most of the media, colleges.
Edwin, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
You are the world's leading scholar on how all of this happened.
So I'm just bringing it up because I wanted to understand that they couldn't make these things.
They couldn't have shipped them or things would have broken down because when there was a repair needed, when there was a scheduled repair, it was all done through the punch card system.
That's right.
And as you go on in your six levels, you'll find out that this becomes even more odious on keeping track of things.
And so, yes, specific programs were devised to track military hardware and personnel.
In fact, there was an actual punch card agency in the German military in the Wehrmacht for the specific purpose of working with IBM.
When they needed a program, IBM designed the program.
They had to wire the machines.
They had to punch up the cards.
They had to design the cards.
They had to train the personnel.
It was all a multi-step process.
None of it could have been possible without the specific instruction and permission of Thomas J. Watson.
I can't believe I'm saying this in America, but I have to.
Let me ask you a dangerous question.
What's the difference between what was happening in Germany when IBM was starting and they were working and they were rounding people up and identifying?
What's the difference between them and companies like Facebook or Google that are working currently with the Chinese to track, identify, and help scoop up people, the Uyghurs, and put them into camps?
We have yet to investigate exactly what the role of American high-tech is in the genocide now being committed against the Uyghurs.
This much we know.
The social credit system, the Skynet system, the Facerek system, the system which you and I both know, which needs to be further investigated.
And I'm actually turning my attention to the Uyghurs right now.
Good for you.
So the question is: is American high-tech involved in that?
And if that should emerge, it'll be a war crime.
It'll be a crime against humanity.
And there will be an accounting.
We have yet to see if any of that's true.
Okay, let me take you to the next step.
And that is exclude them, which we talked about.
Seize their assets and then put them in ghettos.
Tell me how IBM.
Identification, exclusion, confiscation.
All right.
We've identified them.
We've pushed them out of their jobs.
Now we're going to take their money.
How do we take their money?
All the banks in Germany are running on IBM punch cards.
All the savings institutions, they have these names.
They cross and tabulate them against the professions.
Now they cross-tabulate those against the financial institutions.
You immediately apply a 25% fuck tax or a flight tax against these accounts.
You start to penalize them, criminalize them, and eventually to argue them.
And the Jews are pauperized.
So isn't this, I mean, again, help me and correct me where I'm wrong, but isn't this already in place here?
And now I'm not saying it's an organized practice, but you can't go into a bank and pull more than $5,000 out at a time without being reported on.
If some companies like MasterCard have decided they're not going to do financial services for this company or this company or this company, and there is talk that if we don't turn this around, if we don't stop this, you're going to see financial services turn and exclude people in certain categories.
So in other words, if you're dubbed a violent extremist, you have no access to any financial institution.
The ones that have already been done, gun manufacturers, if you are selling or buying a gun in New York, The governor has already said there's going to be more inspections and more inspectors at your bank every year because we think something's hinky with the gun manufacturers.
And some of these financial institutions have said we're not going to provide any services for them.
There are two sides on either end of this corridor that you've discussed now.
What the Nazis were doing was confiscation.
They were grabbing the assets.
They already excluded them.
They were pauperizing them through exclusion and then confiscation.
They took their money.
They penalized them.
They taxed them.
They ironized them.
What's happening in the United States is people are being excluded.
So we have not yet come to confiscation.
a gap now whether we do have um what do we call that uh that confiscation that is going on It was started in the 1980s and it's got out of control in some cities where they could just, you're pulled over and you've got cash in the glove box.
They can just, the police can take it and have in some places.
We know of a guy in Virginia that had a store.
They came in, took the cash, took everything and said, we think this is illegal drug money.
They didn't even, he didn't even go to court, never got his money back, lost everything.
So there are some cases, but it's not a government policy.
I don't know anything about those cases.
But to more direct your inquiry, if you are found to be in violation and then fined and then or forced to pay some extra fee, then to enforce that, then your assets can be confiscated.
The Digital Ghetto00:03:46
And so what we need to watch now is whether we're going to see special taxation, whether we're going to see special asset seizures, whether we're going to see a differential in taxing procedures from one neighborhood to the next because of one status, we're a long distance away from that.
But in the 21st century, being a long distance away happens tomorrow.
Happens tomorrow at the speed of light.
All right.
So the next one is put them in ghettos.
And this has caused a big headache for me in the press because I quoted you and everybody said, Glenn Beck is crazy.
Listen to what he's saying.
And then when I pointed out, I'm quoting Edwin Black.
All of a sudden, everybody shut up.
But we've talked about the literal ghetto and how today there is a digitized ghetto.
Yeah, if Facebook and Google and everybody else wants to cut you off and not provide any services for you, does your voice even matter anymore?
Are you behind a digital wall?
Explain.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I looked at one of the articles in the Jewish media that dealt with your being attacked for using the digital ghetto.
And I checked, and they were one of the newspapers that originally ran my story in 2818 about a digital ghetto.
So as is now, I won't mention this particular LA paper.
So as is well known now, I was making a keynote address at Holocaust Day observance in the Detroit Rotunda State Capitol, the governor's commemoration.
And at that time, I introduced the concept of what I call the algorithm ghetto or the digital ghetto.
And that is where you'll be screaming from the rooftop and no one will hear you because you've been excluded by the Googles, the Facebooks, and the Twitters.
We've now, as a result of the server disconnects, we now see that you will not only be not heard from your rooftop, your rooftop will be taken away.
And I think that this is an extremely significant move.
And as Apple and Google, as I told you before, make these types of decisions, Apple could say, well, you're using our phone.
We're going to disconnect that.
Google could say, Edwin's using an Android phone.
We can disconnect that.
Pretty soon, they're going to be able to disconnect the cars.
Apple was working on a car.
And for many years, I, and I'm sure you have too, have been working on the concept of the cashless society.
And at the speed by which your credit card can be blocked, they can block you in a cashless society from even buying bread.
And now that I see that we're approaching the threshold of a global cryptocurrency and with the potential that world currencies may fall, we have another horizon to worry about.
Black Stork at the Horizon00:18:12
We have more to talk about, but I go back and forth in my head, you know, because it doesn't have to go, just because you're walking down a road doesn't mean you're not going to turn a different corner or turn around.
It does because you're saying we're headed towards this doesn't mean we arrive there if we slow down or stop.
And I'm not seeing, I've been talking about this.
I mean, Edwin, how long have we known each other?
10 years at least?
Back to the CNN days.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we've been talking about this forever.
And, you know, I keep saying, I'll stop saying these things when I see the star field start to roll in the opposite direction.
But right now, we keep going the same way.
And it is getting it was one thing to talk about it in theory.
It's another to be deep down this road where decisions that are critical are going to be made soon.
And it could mean the difference between nightmares or utopia.
How do you live with the knowledge that you have and the things that you see that are possible on the horizon?
How do you stay hopeful?
Our ability to see the horizon is limited to eight and a half miles.
So when you're standing at sea level and you look out, you can only see eight and a half miles ahead.
The question is, what can you see over the horizon?
What can you surmise?
And what do you know from the horizon just behind?
I've often said you cannot pursue your future without comprehending your past.
But now our history is being erased.
Our history is being modified.
We won't even have an ability to determine how bad we were in the past.
And I've often worried about the fact that people's collective knowledge usually only goes back to last Thursday.
It's people like you and people like me who spend our years looking at precedent, what has happened before.
So for me, the torment of society is full-time employment.
The nature of how bad it can be is a day and night, 24-hour a day challenge.
And so for the past 50 years, for the past half century, and all of my books and all of my human rights writing and all of my corporate investigations, I've tried to Lay out what has happened, how visible it was, how noisy it was, so that people could not repeat the same mistake over and over again.
And I fear now that we are once again making the same mistake.
And I'm going to fault one major sector of our society.
I know you'll agree with this.
I'm going to fault the media because the media is the indispensable intermediary, but between the governed and governance.
They are the necessary, permeable layer.
Well, the mass media has now turned into the mess media.
And the watchdogs have stopped barking.
And I hear it every day.
You hear it every day.
It's repeated by people in the major media every day.
Nobody knows what to believe.
And in such a vacuum, the vacuum jar can quickly be filled with smoke.
And this is yet another one of the challenges for us moving forward.
I have to thank you for all of your work.
I think you're an amazing man.
I really think you have, I think you deserve praise from all mankind.
The next step was to deport them and finally exterminate them.
I didn't know this until reading your book years ago: that the numbers were actually first punch cards, were they not?
The numbers that were tattooed on people's arms?
Yes.
Let me go back just a bit to recalibrate.
First, we have the identification, then we have the exclusion, then we have the confiscation.
And the fourth step out of six is the ghettoization.
One day, all the Jews who have been identified, excluded, isolated, are instructed to move across town into these World War I slums, which will become ghettos.
It's eight families to a small apartment.
Everybody knows their street.
Everybody knows their number.
Everybody knows their stairwell.
Everybody knows their floor.
Everybody knows which apartment all in one day.
That is traffic management from IBM.
All in one day?
Of course, that's how the ghettos were operated.
Now, maybe it took two days, but the point is it was one mass movement, and people were scooped up and forced into these ghettos.
Then of course the ghettos were fenced off and later ripped off.
So ghettoization was step four.
Identify the Jews, exclude them, confiscate, and ghettoize.
And now they have them where they want them.
Does it disturb you at all, the relentless talk now from people in leadership roles in media and in politics that are saying we have to know who these people are and we have to find out a way to deprogram them.
And, you know, at some point, in a free society, you have to accept that not everybody's going to agree with you.
And you have to go on the battlefield of ideas, as Washington said, every day.
And you fight it out in the battlefield of ideas.
But if you think that you are so right and everything you believe is the only way, and the people over there have nothing to teach me, and I am taught that this is a life and death situation.
The planet is going to be destroyed.
Everything is going to be destroyed.
These people are haters.
At some point, you have to exclude them.
You have to put them into a ghetto.
And then you have to either re-educate or exterminate.
And I'm so afraid that either all humans are capable of this.
It's not unique.
It's important not to jump ahead in how bad our society is becoming.
The key mission is to see how far down that road we are now traveling.
And do we need to be at the precipice?
I think the way such a situation would work is this.
People would be out of a job, no way to earn a living.
Where do they go?
Now, there is precedent for concentration camps in the United States, as you and I both know.
The first concentration camp was Andersonville, and that set the stage.
I had an uncle die there.
I know it well.
In Andersonville.
And of course, there were concentration camps in the Boer War and Cuba.
In 1938, as we talked about once before, Governor Wilper Cross launched a plan with the Carnegie Institution to go door to door, 1938, in the United States, door to door, and take a eugenic census of every citizen.
And they started this in a place called Rocky Hill, Connecticut, door to door.
And if people were found to be unfit, they were African American, they were white people with brown hair, the Appalachians, if they were mixed blood, if they were dark-skinned, they were deemed to be unfit.
They would all be rounded up.
Their assets would be taken, and they would be shipped to camps in the Ozarks.
And the further secret protocols, of that plan, which exists only in handwriting in one or two places, and I have a copy of it, was that those camps in the Ozarks would ultimately become euthanasia camps.
And they were already putting together the euthanasia precedents and protocols.
Now, that was in 38.
We all know what happened in the 40s.
Well, hang on, wait, wait, wait.
Before we go there, I think I learned this from you.
The eugenicists, they did a mass test on our military.
And they did a, to see if you are an imbecile or not.
And they came back with some staggering number of like 90% of our military were imbeciles and unfit.
But it was in the questions.
It was all in the question.
Some of these guys didn't learn how to read.
That doesn't make you an imbecile.
Some of the questions were about the latest car or whatever.
They hadn't seen any of those things.
And it shows the arrogance of the people who are in charge deciding who's fit and who's unfit.
That is really frightening because Wilbur Cross, there's the Wilbur Cross Highway.
It's the Parkway in Connecticut.
People don't know who he was.
He was just big, powerful, and important.
And the average person didn't know what was going on.
Well, the testing you're referring to is the alpha test and the beta test, which were given to the general population in advance or limited sections of the population to develop an army for World War I.
The term you used, imbecile, idiot, moron, those were not insults as they are today.
Those were the scientific terms.
Those were the terms that the psychology profession and the education profession used to designate lower forms of intelligence.
Once they branded you as an idiot, a moron, an imbecile on the scientific scale, using those particular terms, then they said that you were good for cannon fodder, meaning you were sent out across to run across the minefields and let them explode.
And by the way, that testing ultimately became the IQ test, and later it became the SAT test.
So those were bogus tests.
They had bogus trick questions.
First, they formed their conclusions, and then they fabricated the evidence and the testing to support their illicit and immoral conclusions about people who had great wisdom, such as the Sicilians who came to Ellis Island and knew all the great operas of the world, but they didn't know what music was on Broadway.
So they'd ask them Broadway questions.
The Jews from Eastern Europe who had all the wisdom of the Talmud and the Torah, they would ask them questions about sports, squash, racquetball.
They wouldn't know that.
They would ask Bible thumpers about the best-selling cigarettes, cigarette ads in the Saturday Evening Post.
So these were trick questions designed to cast people in a roll and in a box where they could be disposed of.
Edwin, when did this start?
I mean, this is, you know, the world has people.
This is a disease in people.
Hatred, wanting to, you know, be the boss of everyone, make the decisions, et cetera, et cetera.
Power and money corrupt.
But when did this really become this kind of a business?
To my recollection, I would say back in Germany in the late 1800s, when science really kind of started to flex its muscles.
But is that right?
I would say it was the, we saw the most advancement in organized raceology in the 19th century.
It's important to understand that the Nazis, for instance, the Germans always had a sense of superiority.
It is only when the American eugenics movement medicalized it.
And here's an important statement that people need to listen to.
When medicine meets politics, the infection of the body politic can be irreparable.
And when you speak about utopia, yes, they were utopians.
Many of them wanted to improve the world.
Many of them wanted utopia.
Very few of them knew that even the ancient Greeks knew that the word utopia means nowhere, a place that you could not achieve.
By the way, behind Edwin right now is a poster of War Against the Weak, and it's all on the eugenics program.
And it is so valuable.
It is, you will read that and you will not believe what has happened in our own country and things like a blood test or a marriage license.
When you see where that came from, it changes everything.
Edwin, I found, and one of the things, I've thought about this three times.
Is your book available on acid-free paper?
Because I'm a historian and I like to keep records.
And because there were things in there, for instance, in your book, I learned about the Black Stork.
This is on War and the Week, War Against the Weak, the film The Black Stork, which is horrifying.
And I went to look for a copy of it.
was nowhere we found one guy yeah one guy One guy has a copy.
That's not good for history.
How did that happen?
Explain Black Stork.
All right.
And then I'm sure we'll get.
Yeah, we'll get to the sixth.
The Black Stork in my book, Banking, excuse me, War Against the Weak.
There was a surgeon in Chicago, and he was a eugenicist.
And there was a baby that was born with a birth defect.
He thought this baby did not have the right to live.
And so he refused to give the baby any medical attention, any nutrition, and just allowed it to die against the fervent shrieks of his parents.
This guy was celebrated, and they even made a Hollywood film about it called The Black Stork, where if you really love your baby and he's, you'll kill him and relieve him of the duty, excuse me, of the curse of living on this earth.
was actually the same thing that drove Margaret Sanger in Planned Parenthood because she referred to the unfit as human weeds.
And she loved humanity so much that she wanted to save it by eliminating two-thirds of the people on planet Earth.
And we need to really understand that some of this comes from a place of hate and some of this comes from a place of monstrous Frankenstein love and trying to make a better place.
But trying to make a better place in your own image is attempting to steal the show from God.
Monstrous Love and Human Weeds00:15:18
Well, as we go back to the Holocaust in the six stages, I think that's where people get confused.
The German people got confused.
They saw the imagery.
They saw the pageantry.
They were people that were humiliated.
They had lost their faith.
They had lost everything.
And somebody comes in and puts on a very good show and says, hey, we're going to recapture the glory.
And so a lot of people went for love of country.
But the most important thing was the hatred that was compelling Hitler to move on.
And many of his in his upper circles that made the Holocaust, his insane writings in Mein Kampf actually come true.
We are now ghettos, deport them and exterminate.
So let's go to deport.
Well, the Jews have been identified.
They've been excluded.
Their money and assets have been confiscated.
They've now been confined in these ghettos, ghettoization.
The fifth move is deportation, meaning throw them into trains and send them to concentration camps.
And here, once again, all the trains in Germany and Europe, or most of Europe, were running on IBM punch cards.
The railroad business was the single largest sector for IBM's business over there.
You said at the start of this show that they couldn't track a box of bullets or a shipment.
They couldn't track a boxcar in under two weeks without an IBM system tracking it.
Not only was I able to discover and exploit those documents, I was even able to locate one of the men in Krakow who was at the depot working with the IBM subsidiary to send these trains back and forth to Auschwitz.
And I questioned him and he gave me information on exactly what IBM did.
And so deportation by this IBM tracking, just the right number of Jews would be put into the right number of boxcars.
They would be sent over a one to two day journey like my mother was.
And they would arrive at the concentration camp.
And within 40 minutes, generally speaking, unless there was a problem on the Dutch track, there was smoke.
They were dead.
And this type of metering is what the IBM traffic management did.
Remember, millions of people went in and out of thousands of Nazi concentration camps and subcamps.
But the one-day capacity of all the camps put together was 235,000.
And so the IBM system kept track of the populations, how many could be used to work, how many had to be fed.
And all this information was delivered once a week by motorcycle to the IBM tracking center called Dietzwei.
It was the SS Department D2 in the T-shaped building at Iranienburg.
At least 24 machines calculated this stuff out.
And so the Nazis were able to keep track of every camp and subcamp through this deportation method.
And then the sixth realm is actual extermination.
There was an IBM customer site in every concentration camp.
The name, some had machines, some had sorting systems, some had just card identification systems.
In Dachau, for example, it was a two-story concrete blockhouse right across from the main gate.
In Madhausen, it was across from the parade grounds.
In Buchenwad, it was not far from one of the mess halls.
In Auschwitz, it was an Auschwitz III near the sports field.
And the name of this IBM customer site was the Hollerith of Teilung.
That means the Hollerith department.
And all these documents about the deathless and the prisoner transferred are all stamped Hollerith or FAST, processed by the IBM Hollerith system.
And that's how we knew that we had, I've got one right here that I've got for my show.
It's right here.
And you see, it's just pencil and paper.
Who would know?
But up here, it's got a stamp, and that stamp says Hollerith or Fost, registered by the IBM system.
And so by this method, the Germans were able to control the population, kill the population when necessary.
And IBM even devised the extermination by labor campaign, where they would take all the professions.
I'm a bricklayer, I'm a doctor, I'm a tradesman, and match those up against the slave labor needs, work them to death.
And at the right time, the Jews are coded eight and gas chamber is coded six.
Did we, did the government know about the connection with IBM?
And why didn't we put a Raul Wallenberg?
I know you know who he is.
Why didn't we ask for a Wallenberg to go in as IBM and just throw some wrenches in the machine?
Did we know?
Two responses.
One, we knew.
When I say we, I mean the president of the United States.
Watson and FDR were great friends.
And every time Watson went to Germany, which was common, he would send a note to the White House and saying, I just want you to know I'm going to Germany and wish me luck or give me congratulations.
Second, Watson went to Germany in 1937 and got a special award from Hitler, which was invented for him, the German Eagle with Cross for, quote, service by a foreigner rendered to the Third Reich.
And it was said to be the biggest banquet in the history of Berlin.
It was miles and miles of festivities.
He led the entire U.S. Chamber of Commerce to go there to try to convince them to keep working with the Nazis.
So we knew at all times.
In fact, when we entered the war and when we made it illicit to communicate with Nazi Germany, the FBI was investigating Watson and IBM for working with the Nazis, for moving Nazi spies around here and there.
Tell me the end of his story.
Please tell me there's a happy ending where he's in prison or he is at least he doesn't leave this earth with accolades.
What happened to him after the war?
Anything?
Please.
No happy endings with me.
What?
No happy endings with me.
He died a millionaire.
His name was glorified.
His crimes were forgotten until I resurrected them.
His legacy was turned into a game show gizmo, Watson.
And all is that who Watson is named after?
Of course.
Oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh.
All these Watson smart cities and smart medicines and smart everythings are named for an unindicted war criminal, Thomas J. Watson.
Watson.
Not a game show joke, but an actual man who was involved in the mass murder of millions of Jews and other Europeans.
Can I ask you a question on a story that I saw this week?
It was, I think in Poland, I can't remember where it was, but a 95-year-old woman was tried in a juvenile court.
Do you know the story?
Sure, because if they committed crimes while if these Nazi collaborators were juveniles or under the age of 21 when they committed their crimes under certain laws and procedures, that is where they must be tried.
So, but tell me, but tell me this, because I have a real hard time with this because I'm seeing what's happening to our youth right now.
And what's happening to our youth right now is we're being split.
There are those who believe in one ideology and others that believe in the Constitution.
And there is a real war in our children's minds and schools and with media.
If you're 18 years old and you bought into this stuff, couldn't you make the case that they didn't, I mean, that's all they knew was that kind of world.
And if they were surrounded by people that were saying, no, that's all good.
We're doing the great thing.
We're creating a utopia.
Is there any if you're referring not to today, but the Nazi era, it's true.
The Hitler youth was exactly what you say.
It was raised on hate.
So not only from the moment they were born, but they grabbed them early in their teenage years, in their preteen years.
I mean, turned them against their own family, their parents.
They turned them against their own family.
But Under the war crimes, under the crimes against humanity that you have spoken of, there is a sharp line between just hating and being misinformed and being biased and actually pulling the trigger.
However, it's important to understand that war crimes are not only against those who pulled the trigger, but those who instructed or made possible that the trigger be pulled.
And for this reason, the genocide treaty says that the people who will be guilty of genocide are not only those who commit the acts of genocide, but who are, quote, complicit in genocide.
And one of the subsections clearly states whether they are public officials or private individuals.
And for this reason, we see not only mass murderers and camp personnel being tried for war crimes, we see journalists.
We see the people who publish the Sturmer.
We see radio broadcasters, diplomats, scientists, doctors, bankers, an entire slew of non-military men were placed in various of the war crime trials to show and to punish exactly what was done.
So the bias, if it was kept internal, was insufficient to qualify for prosecution.
But once people converted that into becoming concentration camp guards, ordering destruction, encouraging genocide, such as Stryker, the publisher of the Sturmer, such as these diplomats.
Once that was done, yes, then they qualified.
And so those people are being tried today when we find them.
So let me go back to the list and let's wrap this up with this.
The Holocaust had six stages, you write.
Identify the Jews, isolate them, exclude them, seize their assets, put them in ghettos, deport them, and finally exterminate.
Do they have to come in this order?
And where are we on this?
Shouldn't we have everybody have this kind of list in front of them and going, uh-oh, we're getting close to that one?
Where are we on this list?
Okay, so one thing we need to clear up is that the Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.
It was the number on your prisoner card, but eventually it was subsumed by many other systems.
Where are we on this?
People have been identified.
People are identified.
They're identified openly and they're identified in cyberspace.
Two, people are being excluded.
Now, no one is saying, Ronna, we're on our way to a Holocaust.
No one is saying that at all.
But people have been and are being excluded.
And there are major efforts led by a number of people in the media to continue this revenge campaign against half the country.
So people are being excluded.
In the process of being excluded, they're being pauperized.
We don't need to seize their bank accounts because their Facebook accounts, their shopping accounts, their bank accounts are being terminated with the flick of a switch.
So the question is, what happens now?
As I said to you, we're a long, long way from the horrors that IBM allowed the Nazis to inflict in the 1930s and 40s.
China Is Not Far From Horror00:00:26
We are a long, long way away from that.
China is not a long, long way.
And so what we need to do is look forward at where we are going, look backward from where we have come and ask ourselves, is it not time to take a fork in the road?