To murder millions of people, hatred is not enough. You need logistics. You need to know who lives where, of what nationality, on what street, how many in the family. You need to put it into tables, sort it, plan the transports, log the arrival at the camp and the "departure." The Holocaust was not only an ideology. It was a gigantic data-processing operation. And that means someone had to supply the machines.

In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, computers did not yet exist. But there was a machine that did exactly what was needed: it counted, sorted and tracked people by attributes. The punch-card tabulator. And the best maker of such machines in the world was the American corporation IBM.

The Hollerith machine

The technology was named after its inventor — the Hollerith system. A cardboard card with holes: each hole is an encoded attribute. Occupation. Age. Mother tongue. Religion. The machine runs thousands of cards through and answers in minutes a question that would take months by hand: "how many people in this town have this set of attributes, and where do they live."

Today we would call it a database and an SQL query, only built from relays and cardboard. A query like "select all by attribute — and sort by address." For a population census, a useful thing. For a state that has decided to find and deport a particular group of people, the perfect instrument.

Dehomag and the client

IBM had a German subsidiary — Dehomag. Through it the American corporation supplied the Third Reich with punch-card machines and serviced them through nearly the entire period of Nazi rule. The journalist Edwin Black documented this in detail in IBM and the Holocaust (2001), drawing on corporate and state archives.

A key detail worth noting: the machines were not sold. They were leased. A sold machine is a one-time transaction. A leased machine is a stream of payments and ongoing service. IBM supplied the equipment, printed billions of special punch cards (a consumable, like printer cartridges), and sent engineers to maintain them. So it was not a single 1933 deal but a long relationship that brought in money year after year.

The 1933 census helped the Nazis identify Jews. Card files were used for tracking in the ghettos, for managing the rail transports to the camps, for cataloging prisoners. The inmates had numbers. The machines were good at working with numbers.

Watson and the medal

IBM's chief Thomas Watson accepted a high decoration from Hitler's regime in 1937 — the Order of Merit of the German Eagle, given to foreigners who had rendered services to the Reich. Watson returned the order only in 1940, when collaboration with the Nazis became politically toxic. During the war, direct control from New York grew difficult, and much ran through the company's European structures in neutral countries — but the machines kept running, and the lease kept accruing.

Where fact ends and myth begins

Let's draw the line honestly, because this is a hot subject. Myth: "IBM invented the Holocaust," or "without IBM the genocide would not have happened." That overreaches. The genocide was conceived and committed by the Nazis, and the responsibility is theirs. Also disputed is the striking image of camp-inmate arm numbers directly tied to punch cards — that specific claim is contested by historians.

Fact: IBM, through Dehomag, genuinely supplied and serviced tabulators for the Nazi state, genuinely profited from it on a leasing model over many years, and that equipment genuinely was used in the tracking systems without which the scale of the operation would have been different. This is documented.

And here is the real, uncomfortable conclusion. IBM was not an ideological ally of Nazism. It was an infrastructure supplier. What mattered to it was not what was counted on its machines, but that the machines were leased and the payments were coming. Technology is neutral, we are told. Yes, technology is neutral. But a business model that profits from any use while asking no questions is not.

Neutrality as an alibi

This is a very modern plot, when you think about it. "We just supply the platform. We're just a tool. What users do with it is not our responsibility." That is what today's tech giants say about surveillance, about data, about algorithms. An engineer would call it "we're not liable for the content, we just host it." IBM in the 1930s was the early, most terrifying version of that same alibi.

This is Isfet in a technological form: a structure embeds itself into a working organism, extracts a stream of payments, and declares itself neutral as to what its service is used for. The parasite does not hate its victim. It simply does not care — as long as the lease keeps dripping.

Where is the ordinary person

He is a line in the card file. An attribute encoded in holes. The most frightening thing in this story is not the villain with the mustache, but the calm thought that any of us, to a large system, is a record in a database that can be managed, sorted and "processed." Tracking technologies have since become billions of times more powerful. The question stayed the same: who holds the database, and who answers for how it is used.

The answer: the MAAT token and DAO

The strength of such systems is that the data and the control over it are centralized and opaque: somewhere there is a table in which you are a row, and you see neither the table nor who is querying it. The counterweight is built through transparency and distribution — so that the system has no single owner of the card file who is "just neutral."

That is MAAT. The MAAT token is membership in a cooperative and a single vote, on the principle one human, one vote — not "whoever holds the server with your data decides." Governance runs through a DAO, a decentralized organization with a transparent treasury and open rules, where every decision and every movement of funds is visible to all, and there is no quiet intermediary leasing out our shared fate without asking questions. The entry is simple: read the book, take the token, get your vote — and go from being a row in someone else's card file to a participant who can see the table.