by Edwin Black
Unlike many structures, the pillbox-like Hollerith building survived the Allied bombardment of Germany, and still stands today just outside what remains of the main gate of the camp. Local police continue to refer to the concrete cube by its original name, the Hollerith Bunker.4 With so many machines needing monthly repair and ongoing maintenance, and with millions of job-specific punch cards required, Dehomag technicians were undoubtedly stationed in Dachau almost continuously.
In Buchenwald, where reinforced bunkers had not yet been built, the inherent nature of information technology allowed the Hollerith system to survive Allied bombardment. No one is sure when Buchenwald’s Hollerith Department was inaugurated, but the camp’s Hollerith group was dubbed Kommando 68.5
Allied bombing raids in August 1944 destroyed several buildings at Buchenwald, including the provisional Hollerith office. On September 23, Nazi bureaucrats, probably in Berlin, wrote to camp officers asking when the Hollerith files would be restored. Buchenwald’s labor placement leader, SS Captain Albert Schwartz, reassured that the card files could be reproduced quickly. “[T]he Hollerith file burned completely,” Schwartz answered, “… But because prisoners’ cards for Buchenwald concentration camp had already been created, a copy is available in the file of the Arbeitseinsatz fuhrer [labor placement leader]. We are currently investigating just how many cards are missing… about 8,500 cards will have to be tediously reconstructed.”6
Captain Schwartz added, “As labor assignment leader, I myself have the greatest interest in the reconstitution of the card file as soon as possible. In the meantime, I have found a provisional solution using data gathered solely for labor assignments, for which an auxiliary card file was created. However, this contains only number, name and occupation as well as the current labor brigade assignment. This auxiliary card file is also constantly needed in order to enter occupations and changes.” To safeguard future operations, Captain Schwartz explained, “It is planned that the Hollerith card department be given a separate barracks as a workspace. However, the promised building supplies have not yet arrived.”7
Nonetheless, Buchenwald’s Hollerith operation continued at quite a pace, according to documents just discovered in the camp’s archives by Buchenwald’s tenacious historian Harry Stein. These documents reveal the almost daily fluctuations in the number of inmates working in the Hollerith unit. On August 18, 1944, just as the Allied bombing raids started, thirty-three prisoners worked in Abteilung Hollerith; their names were handwritten in a two-column roster with Prisoner Fanczak 55/55999 being the last entry. Beneath Fanczak’s name, Prisoners 34/21813 and 56/42723 were listed as too sick for work.8
Five days later, on August 23, the Abteilung Hollerith workforce in creased. Scribbled tallies began with fifty prisoners, then subtracted two un avail able for work, creating a new total of forty-eight. But later three new prisoners were added to the detachment—Inmates Susic 40/44416, Muller 34/21756, and Cielecki 15/3988—these marked on scraps of departmental notes. Their last names and Hollerith prisoner numbers were also the final entries on yet another handwritten two-column roster. By August 27, the Hollerith Department’s roster of fifty had been reduced by half when twenty-five prisoners from Buchenwald’s notorious Little Camp, probably Jewish, had become unavailable, most likely due to illness or death. By the end of the month, a restored total of forty-eight was again reduced by illness or death in the Little Camp to a new work contingent of forty prisoners.9
On November 17, 1944, the Abteilung Hollerith at Ravensbruck concentration camp sent the Abteilung Hollerith at Buchenwald a group of Hollerith-codable paper prisoner identification forms and a Hollerith transfer list concerning five women transferred to Work Camp Taucha on November 6. The cover letter also complained that Buchenwald’s Hollerith cards had not yet been received for hundreds of prisoners transferred to Ravensbruck in prior weeks. The list also mentioned 244 prisoners moved from Work Camp Torgau on October 5; plus 169 prisoners moved from Work Camp Leipzig, 128 prisoners from Work Camp Altenburg, and 64 prisoners from Work Camp Taucha—all on October 13; as well as six prisoners from Work Camp Leipzig on October 30; and finally, five from Work Camp Taucha on November 5. “We again request that these file cards be sent as quickly as possible,” chastised Ravensbruck, “since they are urgently needed for new transfers.”10
On January 25, 1945, the SS Economics Administration—the Oranienburg-based agency that operated all camps—dispatched a ten-page Hollerith list of slave laborers deployed in mines at Buchenwald, asking the camp to annotate each miner’s current location and status.11
Prisoners servicing the Abteilung Hollerith at Buchenwald regularly came and went, but the card sorting continued almost until liberation. In fact, fourteen prisoners were still laboring in the department on February 2, 1945. By then, Prisoner Muller 34/21756, who was added less than six months earlier, had “exited.” Thirteen men still remained hard at work on February 13, 1945.12 On April 11, 1945, Buchenwald was overrun by Allied troops. The clock above the concentration camp gate was permanently stopped at 3:15 p.m., the moment of liberation. By then, no more card sorting was possible.
New documents and accounts have surfaced at other concentration camp memorial archives, some of them obtained from previously unexploited records in recently opened Russian archives. For example, weekly “Change Reports” were newly discovered in Russia by Sachsenhausen archivist Winfried Meyer. These included 1944 Change Reports from Gross Rosen, Hollerith-coded 5, and Sachsenhausen, Hollerith-coded 11. These weekly lists of camp-by-camp work assignment changes were typed or handwritten on large codable paper forms, each column of the form pre printed with its corresponding Hollerith column number. Inmate Hollerith numbers were to be punched into column 22, work assignments in column 23, birth dates into column 5, gender into column 6. Other columns re corded work skills, such as carpentry, mechanics, or unskilled labor. Two narrow columns on the form confirmed card issuance upon entering the camp and again when transferring out. Each paper form featured a box at the bottom preprinted on the left mit H-Liste vgl, indicating “compared to Hollerith List,” and gepruft for “punch card verified,” and both were initialed by the Hollerith operator.13
Generally, handwritten status notations were penned in German under the entries. One bears the note “all changes in assignments of numbers below reported in the Hollerith cards.” Another shows the notation Karten im Lochsaal to indicate “cards in punching hall.”14 A Lochsaal, or “punching hall” was a large Hollerith operation generally involving more than a dozen punchers and often as many as four hundred, as well as the sorters, tabulators, verifiers, multipliers, and printing tabulators to process the output. Thousands of Change Forms from concentration camps across Europe were received and processed each week by the Hollerith unit at Oranienburg, allowing the SS to efficiently execute its “Extermination by Labor” program.
More information also surfaced about IBM president Thomas J. Watson’s involvement in Germany. A former IBM employee, now in New York State, discovered a pamphlet in his basement and sent me a copy. It was the commemorative program of a luncheon held in Watson’s honor just before Watson received Hitler’s medal during the 1937 Berlin International Chamber of Commerce festivities. The program includes a picture of Watson surrounded by grateful Hitler Youth, and the text of toasts by Nazi finance wizard Hjalmar Schacht appealing to Watson to help stop the anti-Nazi boycott.15
Perhaps the most astonishing moment of my postbook travels was in Munich, after a historians’ symposium. A long line formed at my book-signing table. Two distinguished-looking men finally presented their books for autographing. One said, “Make mine out to Willy Heidinger, Jr.” He was the Dehomag chairman’s grandson. He and his cousin both congratulated the book for honestly retelling the story of their grandfather’s involvement with IBM. The next morning, the Heidingers and I enjoyed a long, delightful breakfast at my hotel. They declared their view that Watson engineered the outright theft of their family’s 10 percent of Deho
mag, now known as IBM Germany. Immediately after the war, they recalled, Watson’s representatives, accompanied by American army officials, drove out to their home near Munich and then pressured the family into signing away their stock. Pressuring Nazi businessmen was not difficult in devastated and occupied Germany. Today, the IBM shares the Heidinger family once controlled are worth many millions of dollars. The Heidingers also insisted my book conservatively understated Watson’s true sympathies for Hitler and his true knowledge of the events in Germany.16
In addition, smoking-gun information was found upon re-examining internal IBM correspondence. On July 4, 1945, just weeks after the war ended, the manager of IBM’s Czech subsidiary, Dr. Georg Schneider, wrote a letter to Thomas J. Watson in New York, summarizing his loyal efforts on behalf of the New York office. “I beg to give you my report about the IBM office in Prague, Czechoslovakia…. All the interests of the IBM were in good hands. The $-rentals were transferred to the account of IBM in Geneva, after begin [sic] of war with U.S. All $-rentals must be converted at the rate of exchange of K25.02 Crowns = $1 and stored on the blocked account of IBM in Prague.”17
Schneider added that he met Watson’s emissary Harrison K. Chauncey in Berlin, after the U.S. entered the war, to obtain IBM NY’s permission to disguise German machines as Czech. “I made in 1942,” Schneider reminded Watson, “with Mr. Chauncey, visiting Berlin, an agreement and so we were authorized to buy machines from the Dehomag and to sell or lend [lease] in our name. From each machine we had to pay a license-tax [royalty] to the IBM.”18
FRANCE
In Paris, I was contacted by Robert Carmille, the son of Rene Carmille. He met with my French publisher and I. Robert Carmille revealed an engaging story of his father’s long, patriotic service to France as a counterintelligence agent specializing in statistics and punch card technology. His father went to Germany twice before the war—in 1935 and again in 1938—to study IBM technology and German war preparations. During these visits, the elder Carmille met with Dehomag managers, and visited insurance companies for Hollerith demonstrations. While in Nazi Berlin, he wrote home with sadness about the deplorable conditions Jews were subjected to under the Third Reich, according to the written record of colleagues. Robert Carmille recalled that his father witnessed Jews being paraded around the city, wearing humiliating signs.19
The most gripping moment during the hotel-suite meeting came when Robert Carmille, himself now an elderly although still an eminently lucid man, emotionally declared that the French statistical service did indeed sabotage the Jewish tabulations. We asked him how he could be so certain? Carmille trembled with tears in his eyes and admitted that when he was twenty-two-years old he had been asked by his father to manage the Lyons regional office and that he had personally operated the machines in Toulouse. “We never punched column eleven!” Carmille emotionally declared. “Never.”20 Column eleven contained racial information.
The Vichy demographic service’s main office was at 10 Rue Archer in Lyons, but the machines themselves were installed at Cours de Verdun, near the train station, recalled the younger Carmille. Seventeen regional punch card offices were established. A typical installation might include three tabulators, five sorters, one calculator, seven or eight verifiers, and twenty or more punchers. In many offices, recalls Carmille, this equipment was generally 70 percent Bull and 30 percent IBM. However, Lyons, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Claremont-Ferrand relied more heavily on Bull, while Marseilles and some other offices relied more heavily on Hollerith.21
For three weeks in 1943, Robert Carmille actually worked at the CEC agency in Lyons. Of the several dozen CEC staffers he remembers seeing, at least ten were assigned to marketing because IBM continually tried to increase its share of France’s Nazi-era punch card business.22
Carmille then displayed posthumous commendations for valor and bravery bestowed on his father by both the Allies and the French government. And he showed us an IBM newsletter published during Nazi occupation for employees of the French subsidiary. The strictly business publication featured a photo of an IBM commemorative medal depicting Thomas J. Watson’s face set against a regal laurel wreath.23
Later, a contemporary of the younger Carmille’s sent my French publisher a CD-ROM filled with photographs of heretofore unknown documents. They indicate that the elder Carmille was in direct contact with officials of the Maschinelles Berichtwesen (MB), the Nazi government punch card agency in Berlin. Lieutenant von Passow of the MB exhorted the elder Carmille to replace the French demographic service’s Bull machines with Dehomag equipment, even as Passow lamented that the German machines were dependent upon “American money and technology.” The documents also support Robert Carmille’s chronology that his father’s service took pains not to extend the professional census to the occupied zone, thereby denying the Reich information it needed to complete its plan to organize slave labor in France. This instruction was reversed once the elder Carmille was discovered and taken to Dachau. But by then, it was too late to materially undo Carmille’s sabotage.24
Much more research has yet to be undertaken in France. Several French men involved in the statistical service have kept their stories quiet for decades but are now ready to offer the documents and testimony—long kept secret—to chronicle exactly what was and was not done with punch cards during the war.
POLAND
The largest cache of discoveries involved Poland. In 1939, after the German invasion, IBM divided up occupied Poland into two commercial territories. The first centered in Upper Silesia, in land annexed by Germany and serviced by Dehomag. The second was conducted in the remainder of occupied Poland, the so-called General Government that encompassed cities such as Krakow and Warsaw. The General Government territory was to be serviced by a newly incorporated IBM Polish subsidiary, known as Watson Buromaschinen GmbH, directly controlled by IBM NY. Polish survivors and new documents have shed great light on the Hollerith presence there.
Historical journalist Christian Habbe of Der Spiegel first sent me information regarding the Abteilung Hollerith at the Stutthof concentration camp. The information has been quietly residing on the Polish government memorial’s recently established Polish-language website at www.kki.net.pl/~museum. Stutthof was Hollerith-coded 13. In recent years, Stutthof archivist and historian Marek Orski has documented more information about Hollerith than any other camp historian, including those at Auschwitz.
Stutthof’s Abteilung Hollerith was organized in early August 1944 as deportations intensified and the camp’s population suddenly grew to 50,000. SS Rottenfuhrer Werner Reiss was ordered to undergo training at a Zentral Institut seminar at the Storkow concentration camp, which maintained some two dozen IBM machines. On August 4, 1944, Reiss took the 6:20 p.m. train to Danzig where he connected to the Berlin express at 11:20 p.m., and then shuttled to Storkow. The next day, his training began. After Storkow, he attended additional seminars for “Hollerith file experts” at the Zentral Institut main office at Block F, 129 Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Thereafter, Reiss re ported to the SS Economics Administration, Office D II in Oranienburg, the agency overseeing slave workers and the Extermination by Labor campaign.25
When Reiss returned to Stutthof, he established the camp’s Abteilung Hollerith, assigning a group of Polish prisoners, including Leszek Zdrojewski, Bronis / law Pep / lonski, Julian Krawczyk, and Krzysztof Dunin-Wa“Hollerith Kartei” (even though they were paper, not punch cards) are preserved in Stutthof’s Hollerith archival files. The highest number belonged to Prisoner 99044, who entered the camp on October 27, 1944. The punch cards identified nameless prisoners by their Hollerith codes for scores of needed job skills. Duplicates of the professional file were maintained in Berlin.26
An extraordinary eyewitness is Leszek Zdrojewski, who headed up Stutthof’s Arbeitseinsatz and interfaced with the camp’s Abteilung Hollerith. In Fall 1944, he was sent to Zentral Institut in Berlin for Hollerith training. Accompanied by Reiss, Zdrojewski spent two to three days at Zentral Ins
titut, where he saw some twenty sorters and tabulators served by a staff of more than 100 clerks, frantically feeding machines and searching for specific professions among the camps’ populations.
During my presentation at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, I unexpectedly encountered Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz, one of the prisoners forced to work in Stutthof ’s Abteilung Hollerith. Dunin-Wasowicz is now a retired historian, who for some time was associated with the Polish Academy of Science and understands the uses of Hollerith. During a twenty-minute presentation, he outlined the history of IBM’s technology at Stutthof. An electrifying moment came when I held up an enlargement of the secret Hollerith Camp Codes. I pointed to code 6, Sonderbehandlung, that is “extermination.” Dunin-Wasowicz acknowledged the codes were the exact ones the Nazis used at Stutthof, including code 6 for extermination in the camp’s small but active gas chamber, which murdered some one thousand people.27
Other Polish eyewitnesses also came forward. The newspaper Slowo Polskie located Leon Krzemieniecki, probably the only man still living who worked in the Hollerith Department of the railroad office that kept tabs on all trains in the General Government, including those that sent Jews to their death in Treblinka and Auschwitz. It must be emphasized that Krzemieniecki did not understand any of the details of the genocidal train destinations. Indeed his duties required tabulating information on all trains, from ordinary passenger to freight trains. Krzemieniecki’s interview in the newspaper, and subsequent extensive oral history with me, revealed that the railway’s Hollerith Department in Krakow required a five-room office on Pawia Street equipped with fifteen punchers, two sorters, and a tabulator that he recalls was “bigger than a sofa.” The high-security office was guarded by armed railway police.28