In the review by Howard P. Segal of IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black (Nature 411, 993–994; 2001), one paragraph stated: “Polish ghetto exterminators ... never had punch-card machines, and the SS Race and Settlement Office obtained them only in 1943.” In fact, the SS Race and Settlement Office was an SS officers' marriage and adoption-screening bureau, not a prime mover in the extermination process.
The review also stated: “Black minimizes the inefficiency of many Nazi procedures, which, for example, delayed many trainloads of Jews en route to concentration camps.” In fact, custom-designed IBM programs helped the Nazis to locate and deploy the locomotives and boxcars. Virtually all European trains were at that time tracked by Hollerith cards.
These small errors do not affect the rest of the review, or its general conclusions.
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The online version of the original article can be found at 10.1038/35082640
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Correction. Nature 415, 370 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/415370b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/415370b
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