I was elbowing my way through the crowds at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC a week ago. The feeling of squeezing through the narrow corridors, craning to read the exhibits, eerily reminded one of other crowded corridors, decades ago.

I was on vacation, and computers were the last thing on my mind. At that moment I was contemplating misery and meanness, and the mystery of human nature. Then I saw, through the spaces between people's heads, a computer exhibit.

It was an old Hollerith machine. The Hollerith was the invention of turn of the century statistician and census taker Herman Hollerith. Hollerith combined the Jacquard cards used to "remember" textile weaving patterns, with conventional business data. Hollerith machine sensed punched holes in cards by means of static electricity.

In 1911 his Tabulating Machine Company became a cash cow division for a company that would someday be called IBM. Holleriths continued to do office tabulating work -- what IS people fondly remember as batch computing -- into the 1960s. The cards he designed remain in use by big batch processing mainframes today. Your federal tax return check was printed on one. Eighty columns across, their design dictated the size of computer monitors into the 1990s.

Nazi Germany modified Hollerith's census-taking ideas only slightly. They used it to take a census of the country in 1939. But they were less interested in who was the head of the household than what was the racial makeup of the household. So thorough was the Hollerith team that it even listed Jewish converts to other religions -- even families whose conversions occurred generations earlier.

Likewise armed with these primitive but powerful computers, German doctors also mad, measuring noses and ears with eyebrows with calipers, and compiling a nationwide punch card batch of who was truly German and who fell wide of the mark.

Thus the Hollerith machines created a list of the doomed. Germany authorized doctors to destroy people whose records indicated they were undesirable -- Jews, Poles, Gypsies, etc. When doctors found patients whose "conditions" were deemed "incurable," they marked their cards with a "+" -- designating them to die.

The Hollerith machine made it easy for Nazis to locate and identify the mentally ill, handicapped, Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables. Between 1939 and 1941, doctors sentenced 70,000-100,000 Germans to death. The Hollerith led to the mental model underlying the Holocaust -- industrial genocide.

In the early implementation of genocide, German soldiers manned firing squads for ten hour shifts, shooting, reloading, shooting, and reloading. After days of this the shooters became depressed, and productivity flagged. Indeed, once-good Germans were ruined for war.

Ever sensitive to human factors, the Nazi brain trust decided to eliminate the human factor as much as possible, and created impersonal killing factories, where a system of cross-signatures ensured that no one felt responsible. Managers were simply doing their jobs, feeding the machine. Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and homosexuals, whose deaths were the corporation's product, worked until they could work no more, and then they died.

For the Holocaust was a form of factory quality control, turned inside out. A conventional factory had inspectors stationed at the end of assembly lines, armed with statistical tools to detect defects, making sure that unsuitable products were not shipped to markets. The Nazis used the same technological vocabulary, but it pulled its products from its markets, and shipped them to factories, where the defects were burned out of them.

Today we rave about systems thinking and human reengineering and above all the technological revolution. But we made the Hollerith, and with it the attitude that the machine insulates us from the deeds we program it to do, from push button war, and "I was only following orders."

Adolf Eichmann told his hangman merely hours before his execution in Jerusalem in 1961 that all the Jews had to do to defeat the final solution was to avoid registration on the Hollerith cards. Just not be there when the census taker called. Once the holes were punched, he said, their fates were sealed.

As the crowd I was part of pressed against the glass of the exhibits, I thought about my career as a technology enthusiast. And I thought about what most of my peers' response would be: Garbage in, garbage out. Computers don't kill people, people kill people.

But as with guns, computers create a cloud of unreasoning, a wall of emotional distance, and a swirling cape of techno-heroism that prevent us from acknowledging the chaos that follows the click of the trigger.

And here is another quote, from the enigmatic philosopher Martin Heidegger, himself drafted into the Nazi Party in the 30s, but a lifelong questioner of the ease given us by machines:

"Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we affirm it or passionately deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst way when we regard it as something neutral. It is not that 'Technology can be dangerous.' Rather, the essence of technology is danger."