Computer giant IBM allegedly colluded in the Nazi Holocaust according to a new book.
The US firm supplied vital technology allowing the Nazi party to round-up and kill millions of Jews in the death camps.
Mr Edwin Black, an investigative writer, says he has uncovered new evidence of IBM's role during the Nazi era after years of exhaustive archive research.
He claims the book shows, "IBM's conscious involvement - directly and through its subsidiaries - in the Holocaust."
"For the first time in history, an anti-semite had automation on his side. Hitler didn't do it alone. He had help."
Mr Black, the son of Polish-Jewish death camp survivors, claims IBM punch card-sorters, a precursor of computers, were used to facilitate all aspects of Nazi persecution - from the identification of Jews in censuses in Germany and occupied Europe to the running of concentration camp slave labour.
IBM says it cut its links with Nazi-era Germany in 1940. It admits its German subsidiary used punch card technology in a 1933 census, soon after Hitler took power.
IBM's founder Mr Thomas J Watson was awarded the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star by Hitler. His son, Thomas J Watson Jr, who moved IBM into computers after the war, once wrote: "Dad's optimism blinded him to what was going on in Germany."
The book, IBM and the Holocaust, is serialised today in The Sunday Timesand published tomorrow in America and Britain.
PA