Court rejects IBM's Nazi associations

May 4, 2005 - 10:28AM

A Swiss court has rejected a lawsuit against IBM by a Roma group that claimed the US technology giant helped the Nazis exterminate millions of people during the Second World War, the plaintiffs' lawyer have said.

The Geneva court ruled that the case was subject to the statute of limitations, preventing legal actions decades after the event, said lawyer Henri-Philippe Sambuc.

Sambuc - who represents Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action (GIRCA) - said he would ask Geneva's appeals court to overturn the ruling.

Under Swiss law, he has 30 days to file. If that attempt fails, GIRCA could turn to the Federal Tribunal, Switzerland's supreme court.

The Geneva ruling is the latest development in a complex four-year legal saga.

GIRCA filed its lawsuit in 2001, claiming that IBM's Hollerith punch-card machines enabled the Nazis boost the efficiency of their killing operations.

The group sued IBM for "moral reparation" and $US20,000 each in damages, acting on behalf of four German and French Roma and one Polish-born Swedish Rom. All five are Holocaust orphans.

In addition to their six million Jewish victims, the Nazis are believed to have killed around 600,000 Roma - although Roma organisations say the number could have been around 1.5 million.

GIRCA launched its legal action after US author Edwin Black said in his book "IBM and the Holocaust" that the punch-card machines were used to codify information about people sent to concentration camps, as well as gather census data on Jews, Roma and other groups singled out by the Nazis after they came to power in 1933.

There are no ties between Black and GIRCA, both have said.


It has consistently said that its German subsidiary was taken over by the Nazis and that the parent company was in no way responsible for the way its punch-card machines were used.

GIRCA maintains that IBM continued to deal with its customers despite the takeover.

The group chose Geneva for the legal action because it maintained that IBM's wartime operations in Europe were run from an office in the city in neutral Switzerland.

In 2003, a Geneva court initially threw out GIRCA's suit, saying that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case - on the grounds that IBM only had an "antenna" here.

But the appeals court last year overturned that ruling.

It noted that Geneva's archives showed that IBM set up an office in 1936 with the name "International Business Machines Corporation New York, European Headquarters."

IBM challenged the jurisdiction ruling, but lost that case at the Federal Tribunal in December.



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