Brad Pitt producing and possibly starring in true historical drama IBM and the Holocaust?

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Brad Pitt may be retiring from the acting side of things in the near-ish (and thereby kind of heartbreaking) future, but that isn’t stopping the man from working up until the very last day – provided the clustercuss that is his WORLD WAR Z reshoot experience hasn’t put him off filmmaking entirely, Pitt is set to produce and possibly star in IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST.

A 2001 New York Times bestseller, the book deals with “the computer solutions giant’s indispensible role in facilitating the Third Reich’s extermination of European Jewry” as a part of a greater question examining the question of “how did the Nazis identify and round up so many Jews with such precision and speed?”

In terms that no doubt feebly sum up the depths plumbed by the best-selling book, a simple version of the 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.”

Now again, Pitt may very well not star and have simply attached himself in that capacity to attract the attention of investors and distributors.  IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST was originally set up at HBO with a script from Marcus Hinchey (ALL GOOD THINGS), but the project is now actively being shopped around to both the world of cable (as opposed to pay-cable) and Hollywood so hopefully we’ll hear more soon.

This may or may not be in poor taste, but I’ve found humor to be an effective way of dealing with the such horrors.  Not that all of my fellow Jews necessarily agree with me.