GENEVA Romany groups said on Wednesday they could seek billions of dollars from U.S. computer giant IBM in a Swiss law suit alleging the company's machines helped Nazi Germany in the mass slaughter of Gypsies.

According to Reuters, at least 600,000 Gypsies are believed to have died before and during World War II, either murdered outright by the Nazis or killed in concentration camps and slave labor factories.

According to Romany groups, IBM's Hollerith Tabulating machinery, the mainframe computer of its era, was crucial to Nazi efforts to track people and identify victims.

"The spontaneous, unceasing, self-willed delivery to IBM Germany of IBM machines...is a conscious and deliberate act of participation in an administrative organization dedicated to...racial destruction," the groups' lawyer Henri-Philippe Sambuc told a news conference.

Sambuc said that the suit, which the groups hoped to launch by September, would demand some $10,000 each for the some 1.2 million people believed to have been left orphans when their parents were slaughtered by the Nazis.

But he said that identifying all these people would be difficult and time-consuming -- not least because of the high illiteracy rate amongst Gypsies which made communication difficult.

But the action would be launched as soon as the groups had succeeded in identifying 1,000 victims. "This should happen by September," he said, adding that the Gypsies were now seeking to raise some $4 million to finance the court case.

"The racial destruction of 600,000 Gypsies is a crime against humanity, condemned as such during the Nuremberg trial," he said, referring to the trial of Nazi leaders at the end of the war.