Brad Pitt to Produce and Star in IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST

Brad Pitt has just attached himself to a very interesting film project called IBM and the Holocaust, which he will produce and star in. I imagine the title grabbed your attention, and the story is about exactly what the title says.

The movie is based on a book of the same name written by Edwin Black, and it examines IBM's indispensable role in facilitating the Third Reich’s extermination of the Jews. The book answers the following question.... How did the Nazis identify and round up so many Jews with such precision and speed?

According to Vulture, "The short answer is that IBM’s then-chief executive, Thomas Watson, formed a strategic alliance with Nazi Germany starting in 1933. Punch cards were used to help sort through mountains of German census information, cross-referencing data about the mother tongue, religion, nationality, profession, and location of 66 million Germans to quickly and ruthlessly identify, tax, ghettoize, deport, and ultimately exterminate through labor Europe's 6 million Jews."

Wow. This is going to make for an incredible film. The project was set up at HBO at one point with a script written by Marcus Hinchey, who wrote the Ryan Gosling true crime thriller, All Good Things. Pitt and his Plan B production company are currently shopping the project around to investors and studios. Pitt attached himself to the project to help get the project up and running. 

I might not wait for the movie on this one. I think I may end up getting the book so I can read it. I had no idea IBM was involved with helping Hitler carry out his evil plans. It just never got on my radar. What do you think about Pitt trying to get this movie made?

Here's a detailed description from the book:

IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. 

Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. 

But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor. 

IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.

IBM and the Holocaust takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries -- all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction. 

Just as compelling is the human drama of one of our century's greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit. 

Only with IBM's technologic assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust. Edwin Black has now uncovered one of the last great mysteries of Germany's war against the Jews -- how did Hitler get the names?