by Edwin Black
German magnates from the steel, finance, automotive, and chemical industries were also arrested and sent to the Nuremberg dock. Names such as Krupp, Thyssen, and Flick became synonymous with corporate war criminality. Even companies with American ownership or affiliation were spotlighted. For example Roehm & Haas of Darmstadt was investigated. The firm, which manufactured Plexiglas bulletproof materials in Germany, was affiliated with its American-owned counterpart in Philadelphia. Each of the corporate twins was half-owned by German and American citizens. The New York Times reported, “Files located in Darmstadt reveal the history of the joint efforts of the German Roehm & Haas and the American Roehm & Haas to nullify the action of the Alien Property Custodian and restore the German interest in the American firm.”79
By January 5, 1946, hundreds of German factories were slated to be sold to Americans to effect reparations. These factories covered a range of industry from entrenched armament firms, such as the Borgward torpedo plant at Bremen, to Norddeutsche Dernierwerke’s factory number 4 at Rothebeck, which manufactured simple household utensils and beds.80 They were sold both because they represented economic assets of the German people to be liquidated in war culpability, and because they were war vendors.
Within another week, OMGUS had destroyed or liquidated half of I.G. Farben’s forty-two German plants. Two dozen of its directors and corporate managers were indicted on five war crimes. One count specified “the planning, preparation, initiation and waging of wars and invasions of other countries.” A second identified “crimes against humanity through participating in the enslavement and deportation for slave labor of civilians.” A third count accused the executives of “participation in a common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace.” Ten of the defendants were acquitted. The remainder were found guilty and sentenced to varying terms in prison.81
By fall 1946, the Allies had selected 658 German plants to be liquidated for reparations: 157 in the American zone, 444 in the British zone, and 57 in the French zone. Only half of the firms were from the war industry. Russia had already received 15,500 tons of commercial deliveries as part of its reparations levy.82
In Belgium, prosecutors tried industrialists for commercial cooperation with the Reich. Defendants included a textile company executive, as well as financiers. All revenues received from Nazi Germany were confiscated; prison sentences ranged from four to eight years. Newspapers reported the Belgian court’s declaration that the executives had embarked upon a “two-way gamble designed to pay rich dividends either way—if Hitler won the war or lost it.”83
Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief Nuremberg prosecutor, told Armed Forces Radio that he feared that while German industrialists were “one of the chief causes of the war,” most would never be brought to justice. Jackson’s fellow prosecutors felt the number of defendants would simply be too large to pragmatically try in the first wave of Nuremberg Trials. The other Allied prosecutors suggested that perhaps businessmen could be indicted later. “I feared failure to include them,” said Jackson, “would mean they never would be tried. Time only will tell which was right.”84
Indeed, the trial process was slowed by the necessity of translating all documents, exhibits, and testimony into several languages of the war crime tribunal: French, Russian, German, and English. Justice Jackson turned to a newly invented process called “simultaneous translation.” One company reviewed all the evidence and translated it not only for real time usage at the trial proceedings, but for posterity. That company was International Business Machines. It made the final translated record of all evidence back and forth from French, Russian, German, Polish, and English. Watson offered to undertake the massive evidence handling free of charge.85
Many wealthy men stood in the dock at Nuremberg. Publishers, financiers, bankers, and industrialists were summoned to account for their commerce. Hjalmar Schacht himself, former president of the Reichsbank and out of power for years, although ultimately acquitted, was forced to explain his involvement at the bar of justice.86
But it was a far different story for IBM. It seemed to be immune from the debate itself. Every bloodstain and barracks blueprint in the camps was examined, catalogued, and probed. Machines such as Dachau’s D11-A, inspected by Chauncey, and those at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Westerbork, and at the Warsaw Ghetto, were simply recovered and resorbed into the IBM asset list. They would be deployed another day, another way, for another client. No answers or explanations would be provided. Questions about Hitler’s Holleriths were never even raised.
* * *
IBM WAS MORE than important to the Allies. It was vital.
The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was the Allied high command in Europe under General Eisenhower. SHAEF had established a classified statistical analysis office in Bad Nauheim, which in summer 1945 was serving the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). Roosevelt had established the Bombing Survey in November 1944 to evaluate the devastating effects of Allied bombing on Germany. This was to include the effects of civilian morale and whether bombs hardened the national will to fight, or collapsed it.87
The Bad Nauheim site was completely dependent upon Hollerith machines and Dehomag operators for its numerous calculations of bomb destruction and predictions of the resulting social disruption. The so-called Morale Division, staffed with a platoon of social scientists, psychologists, and economists relied upon the machines to quantify public reaction to severe bombing. Regular debriefing of civilians and experienced Gestapo agents regarding the dimensions of political dissension, as well as survey questionnaires, were all reduced to researchable punch card data.88
The USSBS was denied nothing. When its officers asked for one Hollerith, eight sets were flown overnight from the United States to London, along with the staff needed to operate them; from London, the units were rushed to Bad Nauheim. When another USSBS statistical office at Jena needed to be evacuated before being absorbed into the Russian zone, a convoy of trucks was immediately provided to transfer all the punch cards, machines, and German technicians in a single move.89
The man who made the Holleriths run at Bad Nauheim was Sergeant Hendricks. Hendricks was the same man who transferred the D-11A from Dachau to Dehomag’s Sindelfingen plant. He was also the man who drove Hummel from his prison release to Stuttgart. In Bad Nauheim, Hendricks had the knowledge and expertise to convert the prior Hollerith installation of a former Reich industry association into a pure USSBS operation. Hendricks made sure a continuous stream of army questionnaires on economic capacity were methodically processed by a range of industries in occupied Germany. In this way, the Allies could assess the ability of German industry to recover from the massive bombing it had endured. The system was identical to that employed by the MB when it monitored industrial output during the Nazi era. Hendricks even used the same forms.90
On July 30, 1945, a group from the Planning and Intelligence Branch of SHAEF’s Economic Division, led by a Brigadier General, visited the Bad Nauheim facility. Three days later, the Brigadier General reported on his visit and Hendricks’ indispensable value. “[T]he party was shown round by Sgt. Hendricks,” the General wrote, “in civilian life an employee of the International Business Machines Company, who are the patentees of the Hollerith system. Sgt. Hendricks has supervised a number of installations on behalf of his firm, and is obviously a competent technician in this particular field.” At Bad Nauheim, the General wrote, Sergeant Hendricks was supervising about sixty “carefully screened German personnel” operating fourteen sorters, two tabulators, and a host of punchers and verifiers. Hendricks told the tour group, the report noted, “There was practically no limit to the information obtainable through the Hollerith system, provided the right questions were asked at the outset. “ In the General’s original report, the words were underlined.91
The August 2, 1945, tour report noted that Hendricks was scheduled to complete the USSBS’s last economic surveys on August 4. Then the unit’s job in Germany would be fin
ished. The USSBS was scheduled to leave the facility on August 15, the note explained.92
From its inception, a stated mission of the USSBS was to apply all bombing impact information compiled in Germany to America’s air war against Japan. On August 6, a U.S. bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed. USSBS statistical analyses and predictions of economic and social ruination had been part of the decision-making process. On August 15, President Harry Truman instructed the USSBS to begin evaluating the effects of America’s atomic bombing of Japan. Anticipating the order, the statistic team had already departed Bad Nauheim. They left all their Hollerith equipment behind.93
As the best-equipped punch card center in occupied Germany, Sergeant Hendricks assured that with the USSBS gone, the Bad Nauheim location could serve all industrial data needs in the American zone. Sergeant Hendricks added that a similar data facility could be erected for the British zone. For their part, the Russians in their zone were already utilizing the experienced staff and IBM machinery of the Reich Statistical Office in Berlin.94 There was no need for the American and British to have anything less.
But industrial statistics were only the beginning. When occupying authorities needed a census of all Germans in the territories, they knew whom to call. Dehomag stepped forward. The company’s census experts simply took its existing census tabulation regimens and made certain adjustments for Allied requirements. Some of the column headings were adjusted slightly, but little else. Columns 1-6: unchanged. Column 7: Family Status. Column 8: Religion. Column 9: Mother Tongue. Column 10: National Descent (or Ethnicity). Column 11: Nationality. At one point in the preparations an American officer complained that some of the German column headings requesting ethnicity were “of Nazi memory and implying a racial idea which was most undesirable.” Eventually, however, American objections subsided.95
The Russians permitted the Reich Statistical Office, controlled in their zone, to help Dehomag implement the project. The four powers agreed that completed census forms would be destroyed after two years—but only after the individual information was transferred to punch cards. For Dehomag, the 1946 census of occupation was a project organized quickly and economically. People counting was what they did best. The questions remained the same. Only the client name changed.
By 1947, it was time to change the subsidiary’s name as well. On July 4, 1947, IBM’s Foreign Trade Vice President J. T. Wilson wrote to Watson, “Apparently now is a good time to change the name of the company and to discontinue the name ‘Hollerith.’ I have, therefore, given instructions to start the necessary proceedings to call it ‘IBM Germany.’96
As Germany was emerging from its occupation, Dehomag was edging back to IBM NY’s dominion. The company had received permission to undertake various contractual agreements with Dehomag. But only upon formal decontrol would IBM NY regain genuine custody of its German operation. In the meantime, Dehomag’s financial success was impressive. By the end of 1946, it had emerged from a bombed and dissected Germany with a valuation of more than RM 56.6 million and a gross profit of RM 7.5 million.97
A key toward regaining total control was fortifying the argument that Dehomag was not a German company, but an American-owned enterprise. On November 14, 1947, custodian Karl Hummel filed papers with OMGUS and German financial authorities averring that the token German shares in Dehomag that he, Rottke and Heidinger owned were not genuine stock ownership. “We cannot understand how our relationship with our parent can be subject to Law No. 56…. While a minority interest exists in Germany, such minority interest was granted as an inducement to the managers of the company; but they are not shareholders in the general sense of the term, because they are not free to sell their shares, but can sell them only to the company and only for their book value. They were retaining the share only during their holding a leading position in the company. Only one remains today. Mr. Heidinger died in 1944 and Mr. Rottke is reported to have died in a Russian camp.”98 Ironically, the one remaining shareholder was Hummel himself.
Before the end of 1947, IBM would finally receive a Treasury License to re purchase the stock of Rottke, Heidinger, and Hummel, thus regaining 100 per cent ownership of its German unit. Ownership still did not convey control. It took two years of additional bureaucratic wrangling before IBM could legally change Dehomag’s name to IBM Deutschland. That happened in April 1949.99
In the years that followed, IBM’s worldwide stature became even more of a beacon to the cause of progress. It adopted a corporate motto: “The Solutions Company.” Whatever the impossible task, IBM technology could find a solution. The men who headed up the IBM enterprise in Nazi Europe and America became revered giants within the corporation’s global community. Chauncey became chairman of the IBM World Trade Corporation, and the European subsidiary managers were rewarded for their loyalty with top jobs. Their exploits during the Nazi era were lionized with amazing specificity in a promotional book entitled The History of Computing in Europe, published in 1967 by IBM itself. However, an internal IBM review decided to immediately withdraw the book from the market. It is no longer available in any publicly accessible library anywhere in the world.
Eventually, after ceaseless efforts, IBM NY regained control of its German subsidiary. The name had been changed, the money regained, the machines recovered, the record clear. For IBM the war was over.
But for the descendants of 6 million Jews and millions of other Europeans, the war would never be over. It would haunt them and people of conscience forever. After decades of documentation by the best minds, the most studied among them would confess that they never really understood the Holocaust process. Why did it happen? How could it happen? How were they selected? How did the Nazis get the names? They always had the names.
What seemingly magical scheduling process could have allowed millions of Nazi victims to step onto train platforms in Germany or nineteen other Nazi-occupied countries, travel for two and three days by rail, and then step onto a ramp at Auschwitz or Treblinka—and within an hour be marched into gas chambers. Hour after hour. Day after day. Timetable after timetable. Like clockwork, and always with blitzkrieg efficiency.
The survivors would never know. The liberators who fought would never know. The politicians who made speeches would never know. The prosecutors who prosecuted would never know. The debaters who debated would never know.
The question was barely even raised.
AFTERWORD: THE NEXT CHAPTER
FROM THE MOMENT IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST APPEARED worldwide on February 12, 2001, new information began to appear, especially during my travels. Former IBM employees, the families of principal players, and survivors of World War II emerged to offer eyewitness testimony, personal documents from the period, and memoirs. What’s more, archivists and historians began assembling previously overlooked documents and materials. None of it contradicted, diminished, or mitigated the information that launched the book. All of it deepened the documentation chronicling IBM’s twelve-year relationship with the Third Reich. Much of it reinforced the need to encourage research throughout the world, to persist in connecting the dots.
GERMANY
Information about numerous German concentration camps came to light.
In Berlin, during a historians’ panel at the Jewish Community Center, I was approached by an enthusiastic Georgia Peet-Tanover, a Bulgarian imprisoned for years during the Nazi regime. I had actually spoken to her by telephone several times during my re search, but at last we were able to meet. Peet, who speaks perfect English and maintains an impressive vitality, recalled her days as a young girl in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. When she became quite ill, the camp doctor re-assigned her to “easy work.” That work involved manual “sorting of cards with holes punched in them.” There was no Hollerith machine in her unit, just cards filed in wooden boxes. Peet, as she calls her-self, had no idea what the cards were called or what their purpose was other than “something to do with prisoner assignments.”1
The Ravensbruck cards Peet and others sorted were regularly couriered to a central processing bank for concentration camp labor, the Zentral Institut, on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Ironically, after the war, Peet settled in a quiet Berlin residential neighborhood on Friedrichstrasse. It was only after this book’s research revealed the location of the processing center that Peet realized her pleasant apartment was in the very same building complex that housed the Zentral Institut.
In Dachau, the Hollerith installation was far larger than first realized. IBM and the Holocaust has documented that in most camps the Hollerith Department, or Abteilung Hollerith, was ensconced in the Arbeitseinsatz, that is, the Labor Assignment Office, generally just an ordinary barracks. But after publication I learned that at Dachau, two dozen Hollerith machines were kept in a special two-story reinforced-concrete structure known as “the Hollerith Bunker.” Dachau memorial archives have discovered a photo of the fortified edifice. The archives also include a 1948 report by former Dachau survivors reconstructing various work detachments and the names of their supervisors at the camp. The report listed fifty leading slave labor battalions by the approximate number of prisoners, as well as the kapos and German officers in charge. The list includes the Political Department: 10 prisoners; Arbeitseinsatz: 10 prisoners; Sewing Department: 180 prisoners; but the Hollerith Bunker utilized 300 prisoners. The 1948 numbers are a personal estimate by the survivor group. However, by any measure, the Hollerith operation would have been one of the largest strictly administrative groups in Dachau.3