Maggie's Farm

Syria analyst Jennifer Cafarella of the Institute for the Study of War noted the importance of continuing the US military occupation. She observed that “Whether Washington chooses to admit it or not, the US now has direct influence over the vast majority of Syria’s most productive oil fields,” and that the territorial gains of the SDF “are Syrian national treasures that when added up amount to brute geopolitical power for the US.”

“Who was the snitch? Who gave up the Frank family?” Betrayal on this level surely happened, and, in the case of the Frank family, it may well have been “neighbor informing on neighbor.” In the main, however, it was the Nazis’ abuse of technology that made the Holocaust so frighteningly efficient.

Punch-card systems were the technology behind the Holocaust, the electro-mechanical machines that Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before: the automation of genocide. These punch cards were created from personal information that millions of Jewish “heads of household” provided voluntarily in censuses conducted by the Third Reich in the 1930s.

In 21st Century parlance, they liked it.

. . . That census required all respondents to state not only if they were of the Jewish faith, but also whether they had a Jewish grandparent. The idea was to cast the net wide enough so as to identify even non-practicing Jews. The results were processed using IBM technology at the rate of 25,000 punch cards per minute. It produced chilling results. People identified in the 1938 census as having a Jewish grandparent later ended up in concentration camps. Some of them didn’t even know they were Jewish – a cousin, an uncle or an aunt may have unwittingly linked their relatives to a Jewish grandparent who was completely unknown to other members of the extended family. But the Nazis could connect the dots. It was in the census data they’d collected and processed with state-of-the-art IBM technology.