Roma groups take IBM to court

The Nazis kept precise records of their Holocaust victims Keystone Archive

A Geneva-based Gypsy organisation has officially launched legal action against the American multinational, IBM, for its alleged role in the Holocaust.

The Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action (GIRCA) was specially created to launch the suit against IBM, believed to be the first ever by a Roma organisation against a private company.

The writ accuses IBM of “moral wrongdoing” resulting from the death of immediate family in the camps or resulting from their own time in the camps. The action is being pursued in Geneva because the European headquarters of the company was based in the Swiss city and the machines that were supplied to the Nazis passed through it.

GIRCA says state-of-the-art IBM machinery played a crucial role in processing Holocaust victims, and that the American corporation was fully aware of what it was being used for. It also believes that today’s IBM should be held responsible for what the company did 60 years ago.

“A lot of IBM’s money was generated by its activities in the Second World War,” says Retko Kawczynski, chairman of the Roma National Congress, which helped create GIRCA. “It’s blood money. IBM shares have the smell of Auschwitz.”

The organisation says it has tried to contact IBM, but the corporation has refused to reply. Swissinfo fared little better: “We would have to see the nature of the complaint before we can respond to it,” said IBM spokesman Ian Colley.

Test case

Initially, GIRCA is representing five elderly gypsies whose parents died in the Nazi concentration camps. Three are French, one is German and one is Swedish of Polish origin.

“This is just a test case, but we hope it will snowball,” says May Bittel, president of GIRCA. The group says that if the Geneva courts establish IBM’s complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity, it will open the way for thousands more claims.

At least 600,000 Gypsies perished in the Holocaust – the Gypsies themselves put the figure at well over one million. GIRCA estimates that the number of Gypsies whose parents died in the death camps or during forced labour is around 300,000.

“This is not like the United States, where we can launch a class action suit. We have to take it case by case. We cannot start with 300,000 cases,” says Kawczynski, whose umbrella organisation represents some six million people in 50 countries.

“These five cases have been thoroughly investigated. We can prove they’ve been harmed by IBM’s policies. So we’ll start with those and take it one step at a time,” he told swissinfo.

Recognition of history

GIRCA is demanding $20,000 per plaintiff. “But it’s not a question of money. It’s a question of recognising history,” says Bittel, whose father-in-law survived the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

Bittel, the leading spokesman for travelling people in western Switzerland, says one of the biggest obstacles has been getting those who survived the camps – and their children – to talk about their experiences. “Many are ashamed of what happened,” he says.

The Gypsy community is dispersed throughout Europe and beyond, and is often marginalised. While a number of organisations are involved in the action, the majority of Roma people are unaware that a case has been brought.

“We have a big job ahead of us to get the message across,” Bittel told swissinfo.

But the claim is not only open to Gypsies. GIRCA is inviting the children of others murdered in the death camps, such as Jews and political opponents of the Nazis, to join its action.

GIRCA’s lawyer, Henri-Philippe Sambuc, says the various recent Holocaust compensation funds, such as those organised by the big Swiss banks and German industry, have consistently given Gypsies a much smaller percentage than that to which they were entitled.

Automated Holocaust

The lawsuit follows the publication of a book last year by Edwin Black, the son of survivors of Auschwitz. In “IBM and the Holocaust”, he argues that IBM produced custom-built technology for the Nazis, which they used to catalogue their victims.

The cards had codes for the cause of death, the camp in which the victims were imprisoned and each race – the Gypsies were number 12. GIRCA argues that the details were so specific that IBM must have known their purpose.

Black admits that the Holocaust would have happened with or without IBM technology, but its punch-card machines allowed it to attain the magnitude it did: “It enabled the Nazis to achieve scale, velocity and efficiency,” he is quoted as saying.

“Black’s book is very important, because 60 years after the events, it is difficult to gather together the facts,” Sambuc says.

In February 2001, lawyers in the United States filed a class-action lawsuit against IBM for providing technology that aided the Holocaust, and for covering up the activities of its German subsidiary, Dehomag, but later withdrew the action. There was speculation that the case was dropped following pressure from the US government, which felt the action would hinder payments from the other international compensation funds.

In 1941 IBM’s headquarters in New York distanced itself from Dehomag, which was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s regime. But GIRCA claims the American parent company continued to supply Dehomag with its punch-card technology throughout the war via subsidiaries in places like neutral Geneva.

IBM insists it has turned over its archives to academics in the United States and Germany, and cooperated fully with Black in his research.

by Roy Probert