In case you haven’t heard by now, there’s a new book out claiming that a) IBM created a data collection system for Nazi Germany that specifically allowed it to track racial categories and b) IBM should have known (or did in fact known) that this system would be used in an effort to murder Jews and others “undesirables.” The law firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll filed suit today in U.S. District Court seeking damages against IBM for its alleged collaboration with the Nazis.
The book has been seriously embargoed — even from Holocaust experts — so there’s no way at this point to assess how accurate the claims are. My question, however, is if this suit is valid then where does that leave Executive Order 9066?
The various stories about the Nazi/IBM connection act as if Nazi Germany was the only country at the time classifying people by race for possible later confinement in a concentration camp. In fact the United States was also busy engaged in such a practice and Franklin Roosevelt put America’s own racial profiling plan into effect by signing, in February 1942, Executive Order 9066 which ordered all Japanese Americans confined to concentration camps.
Despite the fact that a review carried out by the State Department reported that there was almost no chance of any serious organized rebellion by Japanese Americans, Roosevelt ordered the round-up of 93,000 residents of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens.
Rarely a man of principle, Roosevelt waited until after his re-election in 1944 to formally order the dismantling of the campus (Roosevelt was afraid that he might lose California if he ordered the campus abolished sooner). It would not be until March 21, 1946, however, that the last camp would formally close.
Estimates of the total income lost by Japanese citizens for the four year period of confinement is on the order of $6 to $7 billion. It is interesting that the lawsuit against IBM was filed in New York, because a lawsuit brought by survivors of the Japan failed completely. You can sue over German war crimes in U.S. courts but you can’t sue over U.S. war crimes because of a little thing called sovereign immunity — it doesn’t matter that the U.S. committed a crime, they’re the government and can’t be sued for such things.
Congress did take up the issue and George Bush signed a bill vacating the sentences of all victims of the internment who resisted it as well as giving a lump sum $20,000 pay out to each internee, which was a few billion short. Also that settlement did not apply to Japanese nationals living in Latin America who were shipped, on the orders of the United States, to the United States and held in the internment camps. The bill signed by Bush pretends those people simply didn’t exist, although there were more than 2,000 of them (the law only gives the pay out to Japanese nationals who became U.S. citizens by 1952.
Somebody had to create the lists of Japanese nationals and Japanese American citizens. Why not sue the people who knowingly created that list? Because for the most part the data necessary for the Japanese roundup was produced by the U.S. Census Bureau — the same Census Bureau, you might remember, who told Americans last year not to worry, that the data they provide for the Census is completely confidential.
In fact the Census department was so eager to aid in the internment of Japanese Americans that it didn’t even wait to be formally asked for such data. Just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau on its own initiative produced a report for the government, “Japanese Population of the United States, Its Territories and Possessions” followed by another report on December 10, 1941, giving block-by-block data on the location of Japanese living in California.
When will we see a lawsuit allowed in U.S. district court over that miscarriage of justice? Don’t hold your breath.