IBM and the Holocaust

by Edwin Black

  The SS Economics Administration, under the leadership of Gruppenfuhrer Oswald Pohl, utilized Hollerith systems for more than specific prisoner tracking. IBM machinery helped the SS manage the massive logistics of the entire camp system. Although millions, representing many nationalities and religions, were imprisoned at various times in hundreds of installations, the total camp capacity on any given day was between 500,000 and 700,000.45 That required population management. Jews from across Europe were being continuously transported into the camps. At the same time, slaves within camp confines died or reached the limits of their utility to the Reich. The prodigious task of efficiently scheduling deportation from cities and ghettos in many countries, the daily work assignments, and outright extermination timetables would have been impossible without the daily strength reports. When the camps reached the maximum of even their inhumane overcrowded capacity, orders went out from Berlin to reduce the density. Those periodic orders issued by the SS Economics Administration were based on the well-honed statistics provided by the Holleriths both in the camps and at camp administration headquarters.46

  In fact, a special statistical bureau was eventually established in January 1944 to coordinate and tabulate all new registrations, death lists, daily strength reports, and transfers from site to site. This virtually unknown secret punch card facility was simply called Zentral Institut, that is, the “Central Institute.” Each day, camps would forward copies of their strength reports to Zentral Institut, located on a quiet, residential street in Block F at 129 Friedrichstrasse in Berlin.47

  Although the location was tranquil, the traffic in and out was constant. Couriers delivered weekly “Departure Lists” from the various camps. For example, Mauthausen’s list for week 37 of 1944 was six pages long—virtually all deceased. For week 40, the list was seven pages long. For week 41, it was six pages, recording 325 deaths. For week 44, seven pages listed 369 prisoners. An October 17, 1944, delivery of prisoner cards from Mauthausen’s Hollerith Department included data on 6,969 males and 399 females.48

  Zentral Institut, at Block F, 129 Friedrichstrasse, was able to render the big picture only because it processed the most individualized details. For instance, on January 2, 1944, the SS officer in charge of Mauthausen’s Hollerith Department informed his counterparts at Flossenburg’s Hollerith Department about three named and numbered prisoners who had recently transferred in. One died in transport and two others were utilized in an unspecified secret project. Since they were never actually registered at Mauthausen, the Hollerith Department suggested their names just be sent to Zentral Institut as “departures.”49

  Zentral Institut’s elaborate Hollerith banks at Block F, 129 Friedrichstrasse were expensive Dehomag systems. But the SS could more than justify the cost because slave labor was sold by the SS Economics Administration and managed as a profit center. Enterprises as large as the heavy industries of I.G. Farben, as delicate as Hotel Glasstuben, and as small as a local business, routinely contracted for slave labor with Department DII, which governed all slave labor assignments. For instance, in late July 1942, farmer Adam Bar of Wurzelbrunn, short on farmhands for his beet fields, applied to DII for two farm slaves from Flossenburg.50

  The SS Economics Administration, which had total operational control of all camps, could supply exactly the skilled workers required and transfer people from camp to camp, and factory to factory, by setting the dials of their Hollerith systems that had stored the details of all inmate cards. Two important inmate cards were utilized. The Personal Inmate Card was used for on-site camp registration and stayed with the individual in the field. DII’s centralized version was simply called “Inmate Card.” Every Inmate Card held in DII’s Central Inmate File listed the prisoner’s profession in a field to be punched into column 10 of the IBM card. For example, Spanish inmate 30543 was listed as a lumberman. That qualified 30543 to be assigned by the Neuengamme concentration camp as a “helper” in any slave enterprise. Occupational details for column 10 were provided by the top line of the reverse side of the Personal Inmate Card.51

  Maschinelles Berichtwesen, the Reich’s central punch card agency, had helped develop the slave labor punch card in conjunction with Dehomag engineers. These cards listed inmates by nationality and trade. After matching any of the millions of slaves and conscripted workers, both in camps and incoming foreign labor battalions, to the numerous requests by both private companies and public works, DII could promptly deploy workers where they were needed, when they were needed.52 In this sense, DII acted like any worker placement agency.

  Charges for DII’s workers could be easily tabulated on Dehomag’s well-established hourly wage cards, thereby generating instant slave billings. A typical monthly charge to Messerschmitt airplane works for Flossenburg slaves was the one itemized on DII’s invoice #FLO 680, which was issued December 1, 1944:

  • 50,778 full-time skilled slaves at RM 5 per day

  • 5,157 part-time skilled slaves at RM 2.50 per day

  • 53,071 full-time helpers at RM 3 daily

  • 5,600 part-time helpers at just RM 1.50 daily

  Messerschmitt’s total invoice for the month of November 1944 was RM 434,395.50. Although Messerschmitt employed 114,606 Flossenburg slaves in November 1942, once the month closed on November 30, DII was able to generate an itemized invoice within twenty-four hours. Prompt payment was requested.53

  Slave revenues for all camps totaled RM 13.2 million for 1942. This program of working inmates to death had a name. The Reich called it “extermination by labor.” Atop the ironwork entrances of many slave camps was an incomprehensible motto: Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work will set you free.”54

  * * *

  EVERY HELL has its hierarchy. Each Hollerith code carried consequences. In the concentration camps, the levels of inhumanity, pain, and torture were not the happenstance of incarceration as much as a destiny assured by Hollerith coding. Many unfortunate groups were shipped to the camps. But the Jews, coded as they were, were singled out for special cruelties that forced them to either live a more tortured life or die a more heinous death.

  It was impossible to shirk one’s Hollerith code. Most camps classed prisoners into sixteen categories:

  On arrival, all prisoners would register and receive their five-digit inmate number, as well as a striped uniform sewn with a color-coded triangular chest patch. The patch identified the man at a distance to both guards and more privileged prisoners. Generally, but not always, political criminals wore red patches. Homosexuals wore pink. Serious criminals wore green. Jews, coded 8, were forced to wear two triangular patches forming the six-pointed Star of David. Various additional markings and colors on the yellow star connoted either “race polluter” or political Jew.56

  As horrific as camps were for all, Jews coded by number experienced an additional nightmare of unspeakable dimension. Because Jews were instantly recognizable by their patches, they could be denounced at every turn as “Jewish swine,” or “Jewish muck,” with the attendant physical abuse.57 One could never escape his code.

  Coded maltreatment also meant segregated quarters and more severe work conditions for Jews. In Buchenwald, for example, Jews were almost always confined to the so-called Little Camp, where prisoners were housed sixteen to a 12′ x 12′ “shelf,” triple-decked. Many new inmates were initiated by spending time in the Little Camp, where they were expected to quickly lose about 40 percent of their body weight, and then move on to other barracks. But Jews were not released. Emaciated Jewish prisoners who “had been around long enough” or who refused to be mentally broken, were arbitrarily condemned to death—generally an entire shelf at a time.58

  Once the murder decision had been made, all sixteen Jews in the shelf were immediately marched to a small door adjacent to Buchenwald’s incinerator building. The door opened inwards creating a short, three-foot-long corridor. Jews were pushed and herded until they reached the corridor end. There, a hole dropped thirteen feet down a concrete shaft and into the Strangling Ro
om. A camp worker recalled, “As they hit the floor they were garroted… by big SS guards and hung on hooks along the side wall, about 61/2 feet above the floor… any who were still struggling were stunned with a wooden mallet… An electric elevator… ran [the corpses] up to the incinerator room.”59

  In another camp, Jews were once singled out on Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that features the lighting of small candles. Guards ordered Jews to gather round. Eight were selected and strung upside down. The Jews were then forced to douse the hanging men with oil, and ignite them one by one. As the immolating Jews shrieked in pain, the unfortunate audience was compelled to joyously sing the Christmas carol “Silent Night.”60

  For the smallest of infractions, including not standing completely erect or speaking out of line, Jews were regularly flogged in an official method prescribed by Berlin administrators. For example, Jews were tied to a board for twenty-five lashes on the buttocks delivered by exuberant guards who often jumped into the air to increase momentum. If the Jew screamed out, the beating was increased ten more strokes. Because they were Jews—and only because they were Jews—if the guard was in the mood he could increase the number to sixty lashes.61

  Many random cruelties such as floggings, kicking, testicle beatings, and other sadistic acts were inflicted against Jews, especially by those of higher rank among the prisoners, such as Poles or German criminals. Other prisoners often attempted to curry favor with their guards by brutalizing Jews. Guards often demanded it as sport. Jews, no matter how broken or bloody, could not be admitted to the infirmary at some camps; one inmate recalls Jews were classed as “well or dead.”62

  Hollerith codes afflicted not just Jews, but others at the bottom of the hierarchy of camp victims. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses were coded 2. Known as “Bible Researchers,” Jehovah’s Witnesses were singled out for their abstinent refusal to register for the German draft and their Christian rejection of anti-Semitism. They were rewarded with a greater level of maltreatment than almost any prisoner other than a Jew coded 8. To relieve their daily agony of beatings and camp killings, Jehovah’s Witnesses needed only to sign a declaration denouncing their church and submit to the military draft. This they steadfastly declined to do. For their courage and conscience, Jehovah’s Witnesses were tortured and slaughtered.63

  Each special incarcerated group bore the horrors inflicted by their codes. Homosexuals coded 3 and assigned pink triangles were singled out for bestial treatment. Even traditional Germans who had been classed as “work-shy” or “asocial,” that is, people who simply did not fit the Nazi mold, found themselves the targets of specially prescribed mistreatment in ways that other coded prisoners were not. The bottom of the Personal Inmate Card logged prescribed tortures in a section headed Strafen im Lager, “Punishment Administered in Camp.” In addition to daily random brutalities, officially prescribed punishment was often meted out on specific orders issued by the SS Economics Administration in Berlin. The agency had instant access to an inmate’s history of prior infractions and punishment. Typical was the Personal Inmate Card for Auschwitz III prisoner 11457; directly over the section entitled Strafen im Lager was the telltale stamp, Hollerith erfasst.64

  When transferring to another camp, one’s coded identity was never left behind. Zentral Institut Hollerith Transfer Lists always included it. Even in death, Nazi victims were coded. Four main death codes were punched into Zentral Institut Hollerith cards:

  Most death reports were coded C-3, even when people were openly murdered. But the fourth death code was in fact a secret one. F-6 stood for SB, Sonderbehandlung or “Special Treatment.” Any punishment coded F-6 was in fact an order for extermination, either by gas chamber or bullet.66

  The multitude of columns and codes punched into Hollerith and sorted for instant results was an expensive, never-ending enterprise designed to implement Hitler’s evolving solutions to what was called the Jewish problem. From Germany’s first identifying census in 1933, to its sweeping occupational and social expulsions, to a net of ancestral tracings, to the Nuremberg definitions of 1935, to the confiscations, and finally to the ghettoizations, it was the codes that branded the individual and sealed his destiny. Each code was a brick in an inescapable wall of data. Trapped by their code, Jews could only helplessly wait to be sorted for Germany’s next persecution. The system Germany created in its own midst, it also exported by conquest or subversion. As the war enveloped all Europe, Jews across the Continent found themselves numbered and sorted to one degree or another.

  By early 1942, a change had occurred. Nazi Germany no longer killed just Jewish people. It killed Jewish populations. This was the data-driven denouement of Hitler’s war against the Jews.

  Hollerith codes, compilations, and rapid sorts had enabled the Nazi Reich to make an unprecedented leap from individual destruction to something on a much larger scale. No longer were such vague notions as “destruction” and “elimination” bandied ambiguously in speeches and decrees. From early 1942, the prophetic new Nazi word openly pronounced in newspapers was extermination. The context, as spoken in Europe and widely reported in the media, always connoted but one objective: mass killing. Systematic co-ordinated extermination would yield an unimaginable new solution to the Jewish problem in Europe. This ultimate phase was known as Endlosung. In German, the term conveyed a singular meaning: “The Final Solution.”67

  * * *

  SEVERAL FORCES were in play on January 1, 1942, as Hitler set the Final Solution in motion.

  First, the Reich was well along in implementing its policy of pauperizing and enslaving European Jewry. In this campaign, the goal of emigration had become essentially curtailed or nonexistent, replaced by a program of “extermination by labor,” organized ghetto starvation, and pit massacres. Still many Jews were hearty enough, or lucky enough, to survive the rigors of inhumane Nazi-style “forced labor,” or escape into the forests.

  Second, the long-standing goal of the Nazi movement, that is, the complete destruction of the Jewish people, was now crystallizing. For years, the debate within Nazi circles had taken many forms, including physical extermination. Hitler had publicly prophesied in 1939 that if the world again returned to war, he would utterly destroy the Jewish people. In Hitler’s view, the conflict in Europe became a “World War” when America entered after Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941. Der Fuhrer was now determined to unleash a long contemplated campaign of systematic, automated genocide, thus once and for all ridding the world of Jews.68

  Just weeks after America entered the war with Germany, the two related campaigns accelerated: extermination by labor, and the new drive to exterminate all Jews by the most expedient method possible. On January 20, 1942, a top-secret conference of Hitler’s key lieutenants was held in a Berlin suburb at the elegant terraced villa located at Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58. The purpose: coordinate the efficient murder of millions of Jews. The secret gathering was limited to senior Nazi leadership, including Reinhard Heydrich, the head of Security Police, and Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller. Yet the conferees in many ways relied upon three key lower-level experts. One was Roderich Plate, a racial census expert. The second was Richard Korherr, Himmler’s handpicked statistical overlord. The third was Adolf Eichmann. Plate was Korherr’s assistant and both were established Hollerith experts.69

  During the meeting, Heydrich presented a long list of Jewish populations, broken down by territory and country. Eichmann provided the list based on compilations by Korherr and Plate. Working with a coterie of current and former Dehomag experts, they developed the statistics. The conclave at Wannsee resulted in a Protocol, which outlined the massive demographic and geographic logistical challenge. The printed Protocol’s centerpiece was, in fact, the statistical report on the mission ahead.70

  Germany: 131,800; Ostmark region: 43,700; Eastern territories: 420,000; Occupied Poland: 2,284,000; Bialystok: 400,000; Bohemia and Moravia: 74,200; Latvia: 3,500; Lithuania: 34,000; Belgium: 43,000; Denmark: 5,600; Occupied Franc
e: 165,000; Unoccupied France: 700,000; Greece: 69,600; Netherlands: 160,800; Norway: 1,300…. The long enumeration of population statistics went on, country after country, and even included England and Ireland.71

  The Protocol’s grand total was 11 million including the British Isles and a broad estimate of 5 million for Russia. The conference was told, “the number of Jews given here for foreign countries includes, however, only those Jews who still adhere to the Jewish faith, since some countries still do not have a definition of the term ‘Jew’ according to racial principles.”72

  Korherr’s estimates for the conference were profoundly inflated. Certainly, Reich experts had been able to create precise population tables for Greater Germany and most of the occupied territories. But, at the time, the Nazis simply lacked accurate information about many other countries, especially Russia. Nonetheless, for the Nazi leadership assembled, the numbers, howsoever inaccurate, presented the outline of the genocidal task they faced. It was massive and unprecedented.

  A two-tiered genocide was emphasized: extermination by labor and expedient mass murder. “In the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East,” the Protocol recorded. “Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action, doubtless, a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.73