A Swiss appeals court yesterday ruled that the US computer giant IBM may have helped Adolf Hitler pursue mass murder more quickly and more efficiently than would otherwise have been possible, opening up the prospect of a $12bn lawsuit against the company by Gypsy organisations.
In the first case of its kind, the Geneva-based Girca organisation - Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action, representing around 600 Roma associations - won an appeal and the right to sue IBM after a lower court last year dismissed the case on the grounds that Switzerland did not have jurisdiction on the matter.
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IBM's pioneering punch cards and prototype computer systems were used by the Nazis to systematise and collate information on the Jewish population and others under the Third Reich from the 1930s, an operation that oiled the wheels of the Holocaust.
At least 600,000 Gypsies as well as six million Jews were ultimately murdered.
A book published three years ago documented how the model capitalist firm was implicated in mass murder.
The book, by Edwin Black, the son of Polish Holocaust survivors who has also written that Hitler's extermination policy was partly inspired by American eugenicists of the early 20th century, was the trigger for the initial lawsuit in Switzerland, launched in January 2002 and dismissed last year.
News of the appeal court ruling came yesterday from the Gypsies' lawyer, Henri-Philippe Sambuc, who argues that Geneva was the nerve centre of IBM's European operations in the 1930s. He told the Associated Press news agency that IBM's Geneva office organised business between the Nazis and IBM operations across Europe.
The litigation is being pursued on behalf of five European Gypsies who were orphaned in the Holocaust. Each is claiming $20,000 (£11,000) in "moral" compensation from IBM.
If they win, the ruling would open the way to Gypsy organisations demanding billions.
In 1936 IBM set up its European "headquarters" in Geneva. The appeals court ruling said: "It does not appear inconsistent to conclude that the respondent [IBM] facilitated the task of the Nazis in their committing of crimes against humanity - acts which were counted and codified by IBM machines ... IBM's complicity through material or intellectual assistance to the criminal acts of the Nazis during world war two via its Geneva office cannot be ruled out."
The lower court, dismissing the suit last year, did not find that IBM's European headquarters was based in Geneva.
Thomas Watson, who created IBM after starting his career as a sewing-machine salesman, was an admirer of Hitler and was decorated by the Third Reich in 1937.
IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag, which became IBM Germany in 1945, was principally involved in helping to automate Hitler's Holocaust through a punch card computer system.
The punch card system codified those murdered as D8 and numerically differentiated people by ethnic background, 8 for Jewish, 12 for Gypsy, according to Black's book, IBM and the Holocaust.
