IBM and the Holocaust (41 page)

Schotte's spring 1940 memo also cited the organization of all "automobile records: (military and in some cases also the private cars)." Private vehicles were routinely seized by invading Germans, first from Jews, and then from other citizens as well. Identifying cars and trucks was one of the first statistical efforts Germany generally mounted after invading any foreign territory.
³⁴

Hollerith machines were deeply involved in combat records as well, according to Schotte's spring 1940 memo. For example,
Luftwaffe
missions were all duly recorded to calculate the details of aviator combat, asserted the report. Schotte's memo bragged that punch cards maintained a "record of each flight of a military aviator, for his personal record and calculation of premiums." In addition, all German war injuries were analyzed by complex Hollerith programs that allowed Reich planners at the Central Archive for War Medicine in Berlin to conduct sophisticated medical research. In World War I, it was Hollerith analyses of head-wound injuries that helped the Austrian military design the most protective helmet possible.
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Schotte's spring 1940 report also listed "decoding" of enemy dispatches as a prime Hollerith application.
³⁶

As each month advanced, Hollerith machines became more involved in each and every move of the German forces. Eventually, every Nazi combat order, bullet, and troop movement was tracked on an IBM punch card system.
³⁷

In 1940, IBM NY knew the exact location of its machines in the Reich on an updated basis. Without that tracking, it could not audit IBM Europe's charges and depreciate its equipment. One typical machine list in its Manhattan office was entitled "International Business Machines Corp. New York" and labeled in German words "Machines as of September 30, 1940." This particular thirteen-page inventory identified each machine by client, location, type, serial number, and value. Five alphabetizers in the 405 model series, for instance, were located at the German Army High Command. Those five machines bore serial numbers 10161, 10209, 11316, 13126, and 13128, with each one valued between RM 8,750 and RM 11,675.
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Other alphabetizers were placed at a myriad of offices, according to the list, including various military inspectorates, offices of the punch card control agency, the census bureau, the branches of Reich Statistical Office, and strategic arms manufacturers such as Krupp and Junkers Aircraft. Again, each installation reflected the type of machine, serial number, and value.
³⁹

Ironically, all the rush orders placed into the militaries of such countries as Holland and Poland worked to the Reich's advantage. When the Nazis invaded, all Hollerith machines were seized and converted to German use. IBM subsidiaries were then on hand to service the Reich's needs. Sales to Germany's enemies never bothered IBM's hypersensitive Reich sponsors. Indeed, some in the Nazi hierarchy may have even viewed such sales as a virtual "pre-positioning" of equipment in neighboring nations, nations that many throughout Europe and America expected to be invaded imminently. In the case of Poland, for example, IBM leased Hollerith equipment to the Polish military in 1939 just before the German invasion, and then immediately after the invasion created a new Berlin-based subsidiary for the occupied territory. Accounts in annexed regions were transferred to Dehomag. In the case of Holland, systems were leased to the military in early 1940; a completely new subsidiary was planned in March 1940, just weeks before the invasion, and rush-formalized just after the invasion.
⁴⁰

IBM had almost single-handedly brought modern warfare into the information age. Through its persistent, aggressive, unfaltering efforts, IBM virtually put the "blitz" in the
krieg
for Nazi Germany. Simply put, IBM organized the organizers of Hitler's war.

Keeping corporate distance in the face of the company's mounting involvement was now more imperative than ever. Although deniability was constructed with enough care to last for decades, the undeniable fact was that either IBM NY or its European headquarters in Geneva or its individual subsidiaries, depending upon the year and locale, maintained intimate knowledge of each and every application wielded by Nazis. This knowledge was inherently revealed by an omnipresent paper trail: the cards themselves. IBM—and only IBM—printed all the cards. Billions of them.

Since Herman Hollerith invented his tabulators at the close of the nineteenth century, the feisty inventor had fought continuous technologic and legal battles to ensure that no source but his company could print a card compatible with the sorter's complex mechanisms. Once a customer invested in a Hollerith machine, the customer was continuously tied to the company for punch cards. This exclusivity was nothing less than the anchor of the lucrative Hollerith monopoly.
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Watson vigilantly continued Hollerith's legacy. During the Hitler years, the Department of Justice litigated IBM's monopoly, focusing on the firm's secret pacts with other potential manufacturers, which forbid any competition in punch card supply. Unique presses, extraordinary paper, near clinical storage, exacting specifications, and special permission from Watson were required for any IBM subsidiary to even begin printing cards anywhere in the world. Should any non-IBM entity dare enter the field, Watson would shut them down with court orders. For example, when the German paper manufacturer Euler, associated with the Powers Company, tried to print IBM-compatible punch cards, Watson restrained them with an injunction. For good measure, IBM wrote special clauses into its German contracts prohibiting any client—whether an ordinary insurance company or the NSDAP itself—from utilizing any card other than one produced by IBM. In short, Hollerith cards could only be printed at IBM-owned and -operated printing facilities and nowhere else.
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Until 1935, IBM NY was the sole exporter of punch cards to Hitler's Germany. Eventually, Watson invested in high-speed presses for Germany so Dehomag could print and export its own throughout Europe. During the next few years, he authorized IBM printing presses in Austria, Poland, Holland, France, and greatly expanded capacity in Germany. Deep into the war, as late as 1942 additional IBM printing facilities were opened in Finland and Denmark. All these plants acted as a coordinated cross-border European supply line. For example, in the first three months of 1939 alone, IBM Sweden sold 1.9 million punch cards to Denmark, 1.3 million to Finland, and 696,000 to Norway. IBM NY sold 1 million cards to Yugoslavia and 700,000 to Fascist Spain. Dehomag sold 261,000 to Hungary. It was all done under the constant supervision of IBM Geneva, which in turn kept in continuous contact with IBM NY. European General Manager Schotte regularly flew back and forth from Switzerland to America conveying reports.
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IBM printed billions of its electrically sensitive cards each year for its European customers. But every order was different. Each set was meticulously designed not only for the singular client, but for the client's specific assignments. The design work was not a rote procedure, but an intense collaboration. It began with a protracted investigation of the precise data needs of the project, as well as the people, items, or services being tabulated. This required IBM subsidiary "field engineers" to undertake invasive studies of the subject being measured, often on-site. Was it people? Was it cattle? Was it airplane engines? Was it pension payments? Was it slave labor? Different data gathering and card layouts were required for each type of application.
⁴⁴

Once the problem was intimately understood, Hollerith technology was carefully wedded to the specific mission. This process required a constant back and forth between the IBM subsidiary's technical staff and client user as they jointly designed mock-up punch cards to be compatible with the registration forms, and then ensured that the plug and dial tabulators could be configured to extract the information. Only after careful approval by both IBM technicians and the client did the cards finally go to press.
⁴⁵

Once printed, each set of custom-designed punch cards bore its own distinctive look for its highly specialized purpose. Each set was printed with its own job-specific layout, with columns arrayed in custom-tailored configurations and then preprinted with unique column labels. Only IBM presses manufactured these cards, column by column, with the preprinted field topic: race, nationality, concentration camp, metal drums, combat wounds to leg, train departure vs. train arrival, type of horse, bank account, wages owed, property owed, physical racial features possessed—ad infinitum.
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Cards printed for one task could never be used for another. Factory payroll accounting cards, for example, could not be utilized by the SS in its ongoing program of checking family backgrounds for racial features. Differences in the cards were obvious. Dehomag's 1942 accounting cards for the Bohlerwerk Company, for instance, featured the manufacturer's name centered. The card contained only 14 columns preprinted with such headings as
hours
worked
above column 8,
pieces produced
above column 9, and
suggested processing
time
above column 11. The right hand third of the punch card was empty.
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In contrast, SS Race Office punch cards, printed by Dehomag that same year, featured a bold
Rassenamt SS
logo.
Rassenamt
cards carried custom-labeled columns for
years of marriage
above column 7,
height
above column 47,
height while seated
above column 48, and
weight
above column 49. A separate grouping on the
Rassenamt
card listed "ethnic categories," including sub-divisions such as
Nordic
printed above column 50,
Oriental
above column 57,
Mongolian
above column 59, and
Negroid
above column 60. SS Race Office cards were crowded from margin to margin with column designations.
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Dehomag's 1933 Prussian census cards featured a large Prussian Statistical Office label and used only 48 columns in total. The census card bore such preprinted demographic headings as
religion
over column 24 and
mother tongue
over column 28; columns 49-60 were left empty. Coal survey cards listed sources, grades, and carloads.
Luftwaffe
cards listed bombing runs by pilots. Ghettoization registration cards listed Jews block by block. Railroad punch cards listed cities along a route, schedule information, and the freight being hauled—whatever that freight might be.
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Each card bore the distinctive ownership imprimatur of the IBM subsidiary as well as the year and month of issue, printed in tiny letters—generally red—along the short edge of the card. An IBM punch card could only be used once. After a period of months, the gargantuan stacks of processed cards were routinely destroyed. Billions more were needed each year by the Greater Reich and its Axis allies, requiring a sophisticated logistical network of IBM authorized pulp mills, paper suppliers, and stock transport. Sales revenue for the lucrative supply of cards was continuously funneled to IBM via various modalities, including its Geneva nexus.
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Slave labor cards were particularly complex on-going projects. The Reich was constantly changing map borders and Germanizing city and regional names. Its labor needs became more and more demanding. This type of punch card operation required numerous handwritten mock-ups and regular revisions. For example,
MB
Projects 3090 and 3091 tracking slave labor involved several mock-up cards, each clearly imprinted with Dehomag's name along the edge. Written in hand on a typical sample was the project assignment:
"work deployment of POWs and prisoners according to business branches."
Toward the left, a column was hand-labeled
"number of
employed during the month"
next to another column hand-marked
"number of
employed at month's end."
The center and right-hand column headings were each scribbled in:
French, Belgium, British, Yugoslavian, Polish.
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Another card in the series was entitled
"registration of male and female
workers and employees."
Hand-scribbled column headings itemized such conquered territory as
Bialystok
[Poland],
Netherlands, Protectorate
[Czechoslovakia], and
Croatia.
Noted in pen near the bottom were special instructions about the left-hand row:
"columns 56-59 members of Polish ethnicity go with
hole 1"
and
"columns 56-59 members of Ukrainian ethnicity go with hole 2."
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Yet another Dehomag mock-up card in
MB
Project 3090 was hand-titled
"registration of male and female foreign workers and employees."
The scrawled column headings included:
road worker, miners, textile workers, construction workers, chemists, technicians.
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Cards were only the beginning. All decisions about precisely which column and which row could be punched in order to properly record, tabulate, and sort any portion of data were studiously determined in advance by Hollerith engineers. Making the cards readable by IBM sorters required special settings on the machines that only company engineers could adjust. This involved review of machine schematics to ascertain which adjustments were needed for each data run. Once an assignment was undertaken, the subsidiary or its authorized local dealers would then continuously train the Nazi or other personnel involved to use the equipment, whether puncher, sorter, or tabulator. The delicate machines, easily nudged out of whack by their constant syncopation, were serviced on-site, generally monthly, whether that site was in the registration center at Mauthausen concentration camp, the SS offices at Dachau, or the census bureau in any country.
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Without this abundance of precision planning, assistance, and supply of systems, IBM's Holleriths just could not work—nor could their benefits be derived.