IBM and the Holocaust

by Edwin Black

  A global movement was loudly organizing to shatter the German economy and topple the repressive Hitler regime by denying economic recovery, prolonging German joblessness, and boycotting German commerce. But IBM was mobilizing its financial and engineering might to do the opposite. General Manager Rottke echoed IBM’s attitude at the Lichterfelde factory opening, declaring, “We are able to hereby assist our government in its battle against unemployment.” Work and bread was the theme IBM and Dehomag used again and again to describe their venture—all in support of the National Socialist goal. As Heidinger told his audience, “Public interest prevails over private interest.”50

  Hollerith technology had become a German administrative way of life. Punch cards would enable the entire Reich to go on a war footing. For IBM, it was a bonanza.

  Dehomag’s client list sparkled. Electrical combines such as Siemens in Berlin and Lech-Elektrizitatswerke in Augsburg. Heavy industry such as Mannesmann in Dusseldorf and I.G. Farben in Frankfurt. Automakers such as Opel in Russelsheim and Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart. Retail stores such as Woolworth and Hertie in Berlin. Optical manufacturers such as Zeiss in Jena and Zeiss Ikon in Dresden. Chocolate factories such as Schokoladenfabrik in Tangermunde. Coffee producers such as Kaffee Handels A.G. in Bremen.51

  Aircraft engines: 10 customers; coal mining: 7 customers; chemical plants: 18 customers; electrical products: 10 customers; motor vehicle industry: 11 customers; shipbuilders: 2 customers; railroads, buses, trams, and other transportation: 32 customers; insurance companies: 26 customers; banks: 6 customers; public utilities: 16 customers; iron and steel: 19 customers; turbines, engines, and tractors: 7 customers.52

  Leather tanning, washing machine manufacture, liquor, paint and var-nishes, cigarettes, perfumes, railway car assembly, ball bearings, rubber, petroleum, shoes, oleomargarine, asbestos, explosives.53

  Reichspost, Reichsbahn, Pension Funds, the Luftwaffe, the Navy.54

  Payroll, inventory control, material strength calculations, personnel, finance, scheduling, product usage, and manufacturing supervision.55 There was virtually no business that could not benefit from punch card technology. Dehomag deftly controlled the data operations of the entire Reich.

  Moreover, one Dehomag customer account could represent dozens of machines. Hollerith systems involved an ensemble of interconnected devices that could be manufactured in a variety of configurations. Punchers, proofers, verifiers, sorters, tabulators, alphabetizers, multipliers, printers. I.G. Farben in stalled arrays in Offenbach, Bitterfeld, Berlin, Hoechst, and other locations. Daimler-Benz utilized machines in Berlin, Stuttgart, Genshagen, and other sites. Junkers employed Hollerith devices in Magdeburg, Leopoldshall, Kothen, Dessau, and numerous other cities. Municipalities everywhere used the machines. Frankfurt am Main’s Public Works Department alone maintained an extended suite of punchers, verifiers, tabulators, multipliers, and sorters. Statis tical offices—federal, regional, and local—could not lease enough systems.56

  Gleichschaltung, that is, total central coordination, demanded that endless accountings be submitted regularly to government bureaus, Nazified trade associations, and statistical agencies. Kommissars and government regulations required companies to install Hollerith machines to ensure prompt, uniform, up-to-the-minute reports that could be reprocessed and further tabulated. The Reich Statistical Office’s Department I was officially charged with the responsibility of helping companies transition to the elaborate Hollerith methodology. Statistical bureaus hired thousands of new staffers just to keep up with the data flow.57

  Hitler’s Germany began achieving undreamed of efficiencies. The Reichsbahn was a vital customer for Dehomag, deploying full or partial systems in Essen, Cologne, Nuremberg, Mainz, Frankfurt, Hannover, and nearly every other major connection point. Some 140 million passengers annually were booked through Dehomag card sorting systems. Punch cards made the trains run on time and even evaluated engine efficiency when pulling certain types of freight. Records in some railway operations that previously required 300 people six months to organize could now be computed by a staff of fifteen working for just a week.58

  Customers such as Krupp, Siemens, and the Deutsche Bank were able to reduce their operating costs and clerical staffs by as much as half, and plow those human and financial resources into sellable goods and services. Manpower could be shifted as needed from plant to plant by companies and deployed from city to city by the German Labor Front.59

  To meet fast-expanding demand, Dehomag hired more than 1,000 new employees to staff the new factory at Lichterfelde. Everywhere throughout the plant, newly installed machine tools were fabricating Hollerith devices. Workshops buzzed, cranked, and whirred with Beling & Lubke precision lathes, Jung surface grinders, Boley milling machines, Hille high-speed drills, Auerbach & Scheibe 3-spindle drill presses, Thiel metal saws, Karger thread-cutting lathes, and Universal grinding machines.60 Metal shavings, oil cans, iron rods, tin coils, ball bearings, alloy sheets, and rubber rollers combined with bent elbows, squinting eyes, wedging hands and brows wiped by the sleeves of work smocks to create a manufacturing miracle. IBM zeal and Nazi devotion coalesced to help the Reich recover and strengthen.

  Lichterfelde was overwhelmed with orders. It established a “shock department” for the speedy manufacture of spare parts, retrofitted an old disused IBM plant from pre-merger days, and converted it to a workshop. Outside storage, some 1,200 square meters costing more than RM 12,000 annually, was rented. Workmen shuttled materials back and forth from the storage site to the overcrowded Lichterfelde site where even corridor space was at a premium. “Our own workshops (technical) grew to such an extent,” complained Heidinger in a report to IBM NY, “that every square meter of space was overfilling with machines and persons, and the acute shortage of space became more and more critical.”61

  Dehomag’s explosive growth arose not only from a dictatorial mar-shalling of all commerce, but also because of a completely new industry within Nazi Germany: race science. Identifying who was a Jew—either by certifying Aryan lineage or exposing Jewish ancestry became big business overnight. Hollerith alone possessed the technology to efficiently provide the answers Nazi raceologists craved.

  * * *

  RACE SCIENCE, rooted in the international Eugenics movement, had long been a pseudo-scientific discipline within the Nazi culture. In Germany, the field transformed from vague debates into a lucrative reality when two factors converged. It began when a multiplicity of anti- Jewish decrees and private provisos demanded Jewish ousters and pure Aryan descent. But these racist requirements clashed with what Dehomag had exposed when it compiled the 1933 census: not all the Jews could be identified by a mere census.

  Census tabulations isolated nearly a half million Jews, less than 1 percent of the overall German population, and 65,000 less than the previous national census in 1925. Reich statisticians saw this drop as validation that “the new political order had induced a strong emigration trend.” But in the Nazi mindset, the half million identified were merely the most obvious Jewish layer, the so-called “practicing Jews.”62

  Nazi ideology defined Jewishness not as a function of religious practice, but bloodline. How far back? Nazi theoreticians debated tracing parentage. Some looked at grandparents. Some suggested searching back four generations. Still others focused on the year 1800, before Jewish emancipation, that is, before assimilation into German society.63

  Reich statisticians concluded from the occupational yields of the Dehomag census that “there are quite a number of Jews in these ‘independent occupations’ who have left the community of the Jewish faith. Those ‘Jews’ could not be recorded as Jews in the 1933 Census. That means that Jewish infiltration into our cultural life is probably much greater than the numbers for practicing Jews would otherwise indicate.”64

  Estimates of how many ancestral Jews, baptized or not, really dwelled within the Reich ranged far above the traditional 600,000. But no one knew just how many. Nazi raceologists devised a bizarre pseudo-ma
thematical formula that grouped ancestral Jews into a series of grades, such as fully Jewish, half-Jewish, and quarter-Jewish, depending upon how many Jewish parents and grandparents could be calculated from their past. All of it defied logic once one added other generation-to-generation dynamics such as remarriages and divorces.65

  Logical or not, everywhere Germany was buzzing with the need to trace ancestry by cross-indexing births, deaths, baptisms, and other data going back generations. Since racial decrees mandated that only Aryans could participate in many walks of life, German individuals, companies, schools, associations of every size and caliber, and even churches, were gripped by the necessity to prove their Aryan purity and to exclude everyone else. Moreover, physical characteristics such as height, stature, and blond, blue-eyed features, were all thought to be coefficients of racial descent.

  Linguistics played a dynamic role. Words such as public health and medicine, nationality, foreigners, family and family genealogy, hereditary, and even the word German, took on special anti-Semitic implications. Jews were foreigners, and in many cases thought to be disease carriers. Racial impurity was a public health issue. Only Aryans could be Germans. The word German became exclusionary.

  A competitive, confusing, and often overlapping network of governmental, private, and pseudo-academic agencies with constantly evolving names, jurisdictions, and sponsors sprang up into existence. Many of them directly or indirectly benefited from Hollerith’s high-speed technology to sort through the voluminous handwritten or manually typed genealogical records needed to construct definitive family trees. These machines were often housed elsewhere, such as the Reich Statistical Office departments, which processed pen and paper forms into race statistics. No one shall ever know how many race tracking agencies accessed which machines in which locations during those first chaotic years. But this much is known—the Third Reich possessed only one method of cross-tabulating personal information: Dehomag’s Hollerith system.

  Germany’s complex of race science agencies ultimately took on a bureaucratic life of its own. The Fuhrer’s Office operated the Race Political Office. The Justice Ministry empowered one of its lower court divisions to rule on matters of hereditary health. Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda vested its Department II with questions of Jewish policy, popular health, and population. Labor and unemployment offices under the aegis of the Labor Ministry maintained an index of foreigners, meaning Jews and non-Aryans.66

  Race science in the Interior Ministry was the provenance of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood. Department I dealt with issues of race law and policies. Department IV studied population politics, genetic hygiene, and medical statistics. Department VI was concerned with foreign groups within Germany.67

  The Reich Health Office, also part of the Interior Ministry, included two special units: Department L supervised genetic health and racial hygiene; Department M was authorized to oversee genetic research. In addition, the Reich Committee for Popular Health, which advised the Interior Ministry, maintained a sub-office for genetic and race hygiene.68

  In the Reich Statistical Office, which was completely dependent upon IBM equipment and technical assistance, Department IV was responsible not only for traditional data such as census, household, and family data, but nationality and race statistics as well. The Ministry of Science and Education de veloped special offices for racial and genetic research and oversaw the work of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics.69

  The Nazi Party itself also maintained a plethora of structured and informal special advisory bureaus on race and public health.70

  Offices devoted to race science melded genuine documentation with rumors, poison pen letters, and vengeful tips. Challenges to one’s Aryan background were commonplace. Whether driven by a sense of national duty or ordinary fear, everyone was forced to confront their racial make-up. At the apex of racial grading was a bureaucratic entity attached to the Interior Ministry. This section began its existence before 1933 as the Nazi Information Office. Ultimately, after numerous name changes, it became known as the Reichssippenamt, or Reich Family Office, endowed with the final authority to decide who was Jewish or Aryan.71

  Lists were distributed, exchanged, and updated continously, often in a haphazard fashion. To cope with the growing bureaucratic fascination with punch card records, senior Interior Ministry officials reviewed one fanciful proposal for a twenty-five-floor circular tower of data to centralize all personal information. The proposal was rejected because it would take years to build and stock. But the futuristic concept opened the eyes of Reich planners. Each of the twenty-five floors in the imagined tower would be comprised of 12 circular rooms representing one birth year. Every circular room would contain 31 cabinets, one for each day of the month. Each cabinet would in turn contain 7,000 names. Registrations and updates would feed in from census bureaus. All 60 million Germans could then be organized and cross-indexed in a single location regardless of changes in residence. Data could be retrieved by some 1,500 couriers running from room to room like so many magnetic impulses fetching files.72

  Lists were indeed everywhere. Non-German Registries were maintained in police stations, employment bureaus, professional associations, church organizations, local Nazi departments, and the SS Security Office, the Sicherheitsdienst, known as the SD. The SD was under the control of Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed the Hangman.

  Buried within the bowels of Heydrich’s Berlin office was the Department of Research, which developed registries on Freemasons. In 1934, one of the SD’s nameless specialists on Freemasons demonstrating particular zeal was a corporal who had just transferred in from the Dachau concentration camp. He showed such promise working with registries that he was re-assigned to Referat II 112, the Jewish Department, where he could work with more lists. The corporal’s name was Adolf Eichmann.73

  As the cross-indexing capabilities and sorting routines of Dehomag’s machinery became more sophisticated, race researchers continuously discovered greater informational depth about Jews and those of Jewish bloodline. For Dehomag, such statistical feats were both its science and its competitive edge. Educating its customers was an everyday occurrence.

  An August 1934 article in the Dehomag publication, Hollerith Nachrichten, extolled the benefits of advanced data processing. The article, entitled “An Improved Analysis of Statistical Interdependencies via Hollerith Punch Card Process,” illustrated how difficult data calculations could be better interpreted and predict probabilities. As a prime example, the journal cited “the field of medicine, and the science of genetics and race.” Complex tabulations could be rendered, the article suggested, regarding “the size of fathers and their children, number of children and parents. Diphtheria and age, and the different racial characteristics.” The article explained, “Even though the gathering of statistical material in industrial and commercial businesses has steadily grown in size… in administrative archives and because of censuses and other surveys, the interpretation has not kept pace. Due to the lack of manpower… one is limited… to sorting out past developments…. This is not always enough…. The actual justification for the collection of data in great quantity is the ability to draw conclusions… and ensure a safe estimate of future and current occurrences.”74

  Racial purity was not just a catchphrase for Nazis, it was an obsession. Germany wanted more than a society of Aryans, it wanted a master race: tall, strong, blond, and blue-eyed, intellectually and physically dominant. Eugenics became an elite cult. Nazis sought to weed out the weaker elements of its population, regardless of parentage—even from among their own people. The mentally ill, diseased, handicapped, homosexual individuals, certain Jews, Gypsies, and a group of misfits termed “anti-social,” were not to be part of Germany’s future.

  Beginning in summer 1934, the Third Reich took the next step. Armed with statistical data and other information collected from medical offices, doctors, and insurance companies across the nation, Germa
ny began organized sterilization.

  * * *

  TWO DECREES were promulgated by mid-1934. One was The Law for Simplification of the Health System, enacted in July 1934, requiring doctors and other clinicians to fill out detailed forms about the health condition of their patients. These were filed with Health Offices and eventually processed by Hollerith systems at the Reich Statistical Offices in Berlin and its regional divisions. The information, combined with extensive information from health insurance questionnaires, created a eugenic profile.75

  The second decree was The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Sick Offspring, made active in January 1934. Eugenic theorists in Germany had developed a maze of precepts mandating exactly which bloodlines should be terminated based on the statistical probability of endowing defective genes. Sterilization guidelines initially specified individuals deemed insane, retarded, epileptic, or manic-depressive, among others.76

  But now eugenic pseudo-academicians and Nazi statisticians evolved an additional belief that a man’s right to live was determined by his net worth to Nazi society. “The only value of man—and this is a direct object of statistics—is his economic value… his human labor productivity,” wrote Fried rich Zahn in a 1934 edition of the German statistical journal, Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv. Zahn’s article, “The Economic Value of Man As an Object of Statistics,” reminded that, “statistics is identical in character with the National Socialist idea.”77