by Edwin Black
Never before had so many been counted so thoroughly and quickly. The Reich Statistical Office hired an additional 2,000 staffers to process the forms and race cards, which were enough to fill more than seventy boxcars. As in 1933, Dehomag created cavernous counting rooms and management offices at the Statistical Office headquarters in Berlin to tabulate the information. Initially, Dehomag’s army of operators punched 450,000 cards per day. With time, the volume reached one million daily. The company met its deadline. Preliminary analyzed results were ready by November 10, 1939, the one-year anniversary of Kristallnacht, and, more importantly for Hitler, the anniversary of Germany’s surrender in the Great War.10
Intense demand to access the final information on racial Jews came from competing Nazi organizations as well as state and national government bureaus. But anxious local and state agencies would have to wait. For example, municipal officials throughout Saxony asked their regional statistical offices if they could examine the census data first to speed their ghettoization and confiscation campaigns. But the Reich Statistical Office in Berlin said no. Greater priority was granted to the SD and Adolf Eichmann’s Referat II 112, which both received copies of all census registration lists.11
The census yielded exactly the data Nazi Germany needed, including data for the areas beyond Germany. Within months, for example, bureaucrats in the Austrian Statistical Office had compiled a complete profile of Jewish existence in the country. A report dispatched to Reich officials opened with the explanation: “In the census of May 17, 1939, the question was put for the first time whether one of the individual’s grandparents was a full Jew by race.” With stunning specificity, the extensive summary concluded, “According to the initial results of this year’s census, there were 91,480 full Jews and 22,344 part Jews of Grades I and II in Vienna as of May 17, 1939. In the remaining Reich Districts of the Ostmark there were 3,073 full Jews and 4,241 part Jews.” Tables displayed the Jewish totals divided into full Jews, as well as Grade I and Grade II Jews. Each of those designations was sub-divided between male and female and then delineated district by district for all of Vienna. In Innere Stadt: 116 Grade II female Jews. In Aimmering: 27 Grade II males. In Wieden: 31 Grade I males. Precise numbers were tallied for key regions as well: Salzburg, Tirol, and others.12
Dehomag’s final calculations yielded a grand total of 330,539 so-called “racial Jews” still dwelling within the expanded Reich—Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. This was far less than the wild projections of 1.5 million generated four years earlier when the Nuremberg Laws were drafted. The new count showed 138,819 males and 191,720 females—more females because about 35,000 Jewish wives had become widowed or detached from refugee men. Clearly, through persecution, emigration, death during incarceration, and outright execution, Greater Germany had lost about half its originally counted Jewish population of some 502,000, including Jews added when the Saar region was annexed in 1935. But, by adding Austria and the Sudetenland, the Third Reich discovered that by 1939 it had actually gained an additional 96,893 Jews.13
Moreover, there were hundreds of thousands more Jews in the old Czechoslovakia, now called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Millions more existed in Poland and other countries in Europe that Germany planned to conquer or dominate. Indeed, the same German refugees would be encountered again and again as they fled from nation to nation.
Emigration and deportation would not work. Jewish refugees were being, or would be, reabsorbed as Germany annexed or invaded new territories in Europe. Dehomag’s numbers told them exactly how many Jews could be found in the Greater Reich, and soon IBM subsidiaries throughout Europe would help compile the numbers for invaded territories as well. It seemed the more the Reich achieved its territorial goals, the more Jews it encountered.
A better solution would be needed.
* * *
BY 1939, Nazi race policy had evolved. No longer was Germany’s anti-Semitic crusade content with just ridding the Greater Reich of Jews. Hitler had always wanted all Europe completely Jew-free. In pursuit of that goal, NSDAP forces had spent years subversively cultivating paramilitary Fascist surrogates worldwide—from Brazil’s Integralite Party to Syria’s Phalange militia. Europe, of course, was the Nazi success story. Romania’s Iron Guard was highly organized and impatient. In Holland, it was the Dutch Nazi Party. Polish Brown Shirts terrorized Jews. In Hungary, the Arrow Cross Party agitated. In Croatia, blood-lusting Ustashi could not wait. Whether their shirts were black, brown, or silver, whether of German extraction or merely anti-Semites in other lands, these people could be relied upon to preach Hitler’s ideology of Jew-hatred, racial castes, and Aryan superiority.14
Wherever those of German ancestry or ultra-nationalists existed, the Reich sought to use them as advance troops organized around strict Aryan principles. The Auslandsorganisation of the NSDAP, an association of German Nazis living abroad, was the backbone of this movement. Berlin expected members to help achieve its goals. Typical was a published exhortation in the German press demanding all Aryans to observe rigid racial purity. In that same vein, Goering had demanded quite publicly in his speeches that Germans living in other countries terminate all Jewish employees and “be the servants of this Homeland.”15
But keeping track of potential German sympathizers globally was a prodigious task. As early as summer 1938, the German Foreign Institute at Stuttgart began compiling what it called a “German world migration register” to help identify its friends in other countries. Advocates insisted “[t]he World Migration Book must represent more than a card index but a German world… [where] eternal Germanism may live.” The Stuttgart Kurier asserted that the Migration Book would remind Germans worldwide of their “never ending task to work with word and deed for the maintenance of the German race.”16
Even as it rallied Nazi cohorts throughout Europe, Berlin pressured its neighbors to adopt anti-Semitic policies along Aryan lines to forestall German aggression. For example, just days before the Reich invaded Czechoslovakia, Berlin offered to respect Prague’s borders only if it submitted to a three-prong ultimatum: delivery of one-third of its gold reserves, dismantling of its army, and an immediate “solution of the Jewish problem” according to Nuremberg racial definitions.17
Country after country adopted laws identical to German race policies, ousting Jews, confiscating their assets, and organizing their expulsion long before the Reich crossed their borders. By spring 1939, Hungary had already passed a series of anti-Jewish measures, including land expropriation, professional exclusion, and citizenship annulment. A New York Times headline on the question declared, “Aim to Head Off Nazis.” Waves of pogroms and Nazi-style anti-Jewish boycotts and economic expulsions had long been sweeping Poland, especially in areas with many so-called Volksdeutsche, those of German parentage. By 1937, a leading party in the Polish government, “the Camp of National Unity,” declared the popular campaign had become official, to the delight of German-allied Polish Fascists. Similar persecution was regularly debated in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania. Eventually the majority of Europe would soon legislate Jews out of existence. It was all part of Berlin’s new continent-wide irresistible sphere of anti-Semitic influence.18
While Berlin was igniting anti-Jewish campaigns everywhere, NSDAP forces were quietly gathering population details on Jews throughout the Continent and preparing for the day when Nazi-inspired coups or outright invasion would permit the instant liquidation of one Jewish community after another. Nazi race and population scientists utilizing punch card systems were a crucial component of this effort.
Typical was a Nazi operative named Carl Fust, who was scouting church records for familial information in Lithuania as far back as 1936. On June 29, 1936, he reported his progress to the Reichssippenamt in Berlin. “I have now also registered all known books of the Tilsit Mennonite Community,” wrote Fust. “It was quite a task to find the present location of the books… The entries… go partly back to the year 1769; however, individual data goes ba
ck as far as 1722.”19 The Reichssippenamt automated its files with Hollerith machines.
On July 2, 1936, several Nazis met in a Breslau inn to discuss the services of Fritz Arlt, a Leipzig statistician. Arlt had created a cross-referenced card file on every Leipzig Jewish resident, down to so-called quarter-Jews. What made Arlt’s expertise desirable was that his cards also listed exactly which ancestral Polish towns their families originated from. At the Breslau meeting, Arlt was assigned to work with the security offices of the Auslandsorganisation. His groundbreaking Polish demography was deemed so pivotal, Arlt was asked to journey to Berlin to assist Eichmann’s Referat II 112, with travel expenses to be paid by the SD.20
The Reich did everything in its power to extend its census, registration, and genealogical reach throughout Europe. Once it invaded or forced its political domination in a neighboring country, it could then immediately locate both racial and practicing Jews. Berlin proved it could be done in Austria and the Sudetenland. But such demographic feats Europe-wide would be impossible without detailed, automated information about Jewish citizens in other lands. That required more than the resources of the Reich Statistical Office, it required multi-national statistical cooperation.
IBM subsidiaries throughout Europe had long been working in unison to take advantage of political and military events in Europe. Salesmen constantly shuttled from various countries to either New York or Berlin for training, and were then transferred back to their original countries to oversee punch card operations. In late 1939, with Thomas Watson’s consent, an international training school for IBM service engineers throughout Europe was opened in Berlin. IBM lectures and demonstrations for military leaders and government leaders were frequent—all under the watchful eye of IBM’s Geneva office.21
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 Spain. Dehomag sold 261,000 to Hungary.22
On February 16, 1939, Reich legal authorities announced that the term Aryan would be replaced in many instances by a new term: European racial. Under the new guidelines, other ethnic groups and races, such as Germany’s Romanian and Hungarian allies, could be allowed to exist.23 But a Jewish presence would be allowed nowhere on the Continent.
By late spring 1939, Europe was wracked by incremental Nazi land grabs and invasions in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Memel region of Lithuania. Massive German military buildups, including troop concentrations on its extended frontiers, threatened Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, France, and England. European Jewry, including thousands of refugees, was threatened with extinction.
Regardless, Watson went full speed ahead with plans for the 1939 International Chamber of Commerce Congress. Originally scheduled for Tokyo, Watson had relocated the conference to Copenhagen after a troubled Japan withdrew. In Copenhagen, Watson planned to make his most strenuous appeal yet for raw materials to be handed over to Germany. As usual, Watson sought political cover for his activities. He wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 9, 1939, for the usual open letter of support. This time, Watson was more careful. “We should like very much to have a message from you to be read at our opening session on June 26… [as] in our last Congress in Berlin in 1937, and if it’s still consistent with your policy.”24
The world had changed dramatically since 1937. Germany was a prominent participant of the Watson-dominated ICC Congress. Diplomatic relations with the Reich had been sorely strained since Kristallnacht and the various invasions. War was around the corner. Washington did not want to act as though it was business as usual for Nazi Germany in international par-leys. Unsure White House staffers shunted the letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, asking him to prepare Roosevelt’s comment “if you approve the sending of such a message.”25
In Copenhagen, at the ICC Congress, Watson’s pro-Axis proposal exceeded anything the State Department could have expected. He championed a resolution whereby private businessmen from the three Axis and three Allied nations would actually supercede their governments and negotiate a radical new international trade policy designed to satisfy Axis demands for raw materials coveted from other nations. The businessmen would then lobby their respective governments’ official economic advisors to adopt their appeasement proposals for the sake of averting war. Ironically, the raw materials were needed by Axis powers solely for the sake of waging war.26
On June 28, under Watson’s leadership, the ICC passed a resolution again calling for “a fair distribution of raw materials, food stuffs and other products… [to] render unnecessary the movements of armies across frontiers.” To this end, the ICC asked “the governments of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States… each collaborate with their own leading businessmen… with respect to national needs… [and therefore] give all countries of the world a fair opportunity to share in the resources of the world.”27
Even as Watson angled for Germany to be ceded more raw materials, Germany was openly raping invaded territories. Just days before, on June 2, the New York Times carried a prominent story headlined “Terrors of Nazis Related by Benes,” based on an international radio broadcast pleading for anti-Nazi resistance. In the article, purged Czechoslovakian President Eduard Benes detailed the Reich’s methodical theft of Czech resources since the March 15, 1939, invasion. “Dr. Benes told of a nation of 10 million persons,” the New York Times related, “until a few months ago proud and free, being systematically enslaved, degraded and robbed of its material and cultural possessions.” The article indicated that Germany “has robbed and transported to Germany more than 35 billion crowns… [$1.22 billion] of Czecho-Slovak property.”28
Benes declared, “You all must have heard how the German dictatorship is devastating the beauty that was Czecho-Slovakia, how splendid forests are being destroyed and the lumber carted away to Germany, how public buildings… are being divested of their window frames, of their glass windows, of all materials… all supplies have been taken and transported to Germany…. Factories are being ruined and industry crippled as machinery is carried away for war purposes.”29
He added, “Czech families spend nights in the woods, not daring to sleep in their own beds for fear of Nazi pogroms. And German peasants, excited by the Nazis who have come from Germany for that purpose, bran-dish scythes and cry, ‘The bloody night is coming.’”30
No wonder the German delegate to the ICC enthusiastically lauded Watson’s proposal, which only sought to legitimize by private consultation what the Third Reich was undertaking by force. In his final speech of the Congress, Watson himself summed up the misery and devastation in the world as a mere “difference of opinion.” His solution of businessmen conferring to divvy up other nations’ resources to avoid further aggression was offered with these words: “We regret that there are unsatisfactory economic and political conditions in the world today, with a great difference of opinion existing among many countries. But differences of opinion, freely discussed and fairly disposed of, result in mutual benefit and increased happiness to all concerned.”31
But so enthusiastic was Watson that he quickly wrote to President Roosevelt, attaching transcripts from the conference and explaining that the concept of a private survey by businessmen to resolve and rewrite trade barriers was his invention. “You will note that this resolution does not suggest a political conference,” Watson pointed out to the President, stressing the non-governmental procedure. But, he added, once the private recommendations were tendered, the six nations might then call for an international meeting to ratify the suggestions. Watson concluded his letter indicating that he had a “great deal of background” on the topic “which I prefer to present to you in person.” He added a tantalizing triviality: “I also have a very interesting personal message to deliver to you from [the Danish monarch] His Majesty, King Christian X.”32
Watson’s embarrassing correspondence as
king to brief Roosevelt began bouncing around the State Department, Division of European Affairs, Advisor on Political Relations, Division of Trade Agreements, Department of Protocol, Division of International Conferences, Office of the Advisor on International Economic Affairs, and Cordell Hull personally. One protocol chief wrote, “it is not a matter for us… Mr. Watson being an American, we would have nothing to do with making an appointment for him to see the President.” Another offered a hairsplitting technicality: Watson was the outgoing president of the ICC. His July 5 letter to Roosevelt was written a few days after being succeeded at the ICC. Therefore, “It does not appear that it is necessary to comment… inasmuch as Mr. Watson is no longer President of the International Chamber and the resolution does not come to us officially from that body.”33
Finally, an innocuous three-sentence say-nothing reply was cobbled together for the President’s review after being initialed by no fewer than ten Department officials. It read: “My Dear Mr. Watson: I have received and read with interest your letter of July 5, 1939, in regard to the meeting of the Tenth Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce. I note that you desire to discuss some of the background of this meeting with me in person and to deliver to me a personal message from His Majesty King Christian X. I shall look forward to seeing you after you return to this country.”34
