Death Count

It proved a unique and critical tool for the Nazis in their task of cataloguing and dispatching millions of victims. All over Europe technology automated identification, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and extermination. Modern genocide is an enterprise requiring the resources of computers. Hollerith’s system reduced everything to number codes. With a Hollerith Abteilung in almost every concentration camp, the original Auschwitz tattoo was an IBM number.

In 1969, the “Latter Day Saints” church developed “Giant,” a mainframe computer system for mass rituals of the dead. Based on beliefs that only what is recorded on earth is recorded in heaven, more than two billion names of dead people are held in the Granite Mountain catacombs southeast of Salt Lake City. In mythical caverns with records dating back to the Middle Ages, the Mormon Church bunkers the world’s largest collection of genealogical material deep in the Wasatch Mountains. Joseph Smith, the latter-day prophet, claimed baptism to be a requirement for entry into the Kingdom of God and that this communion with the dead was necessary to bring on the last days. To keep track of the dead by conventional means proved impossible, so computer databases had to be established to automate the clearing of names. Today more than a billion souls are in their online searchable database. When it turned out the Mormons were baptizing high-ranking Nazi ghosts together with their non-Christian victims, the practice became controversial.


Konrad Becker - Planète Laboratoire
Text un "extract from Strategical Reality Dictionnary, Autonomedia, 2009" à paraître en français on 2012, Editions HYX. http://world-information.org/wii/strategicreality/