IBM and the Holocaust

by Edwin Black

  War had always been good to IBM. In America, war income was without equal. Within ninety days of Pearl Harbor, Watson was able to inform the media that IBM had secured more than $150 million in munitions and other defense contracts. Total wartime sales and rentals tripled from approximately $46 million annually in 1940 to approximately $140 million annually by 1945.44

  IBM machines were not just used to wage war. They were also used to track people. Holleriths organized millions for the draft. Allied soldiers missing in action, as well as captured Axis prisoners, were cataloged by IBM systems. The location of every serviceman anywhere in the world, from George S. Patton to the most anonymous buck private, could be determined by punching a request into a Hollerith. All military payments were automated and continuously distributed by IBM tabulators. A National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel was assembled to aid in the war effort.45

  A central reason IBM machines could yield such extraordinary people tracking capabilities in America arose from its extensive use in the 1940 census. This census asked a number of detailed, personal questions. A national campaign of gentle persuasion was launched to convince people to provide the answers. In one radio address, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt promoted the 1940 census as “the greatest assemblage of facts ever collected by any people about the things that affect their welfare.” She acknowledged, “Much doubt has been raised as to the propriety of some of the questions.” But, she added, they were designed to yield “facts which will provide illuminating data on problems which have become particularly pressing.”46

  On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Within forty-eight hours, the Bureau of the Census published its first report on Japanese Americans entitled Japanese Population of the United States, Its Territories and Possessions. The next day it published Japanese Population by Nativity and Citizenship in Selected Cities of the United States. On December 10, it released a third re port, Japanese Population in the Pacific Coast States by Sex, Nativity and Citizenship, by Counties. Using IBM applications, the Census Bureau had tracked the racial ancestry of Japanese Americans based on their responses to the 1940 census.47

  Census Director J. C. Capt confirmed, “we didn’t wait for the [American] declaration of war [which was proclaimed Monday afternoon, December 8]. On Monday morning, we put our people to work on the Japanese thing.” Since only 135,430 Japanese Americans lived in the United States, the results were tabulated quickly. A single sort was necessary: race.48

  Divulging specific addresses was illegal. So the Census Bureau provided information that located Japanese-American concentration within specific census tracts. Census tracts were geographic areas generally yielding 4,000 to 8,000 citizens. When necessary, the Census Bureau could provide even finer detail: so-called “enumeration districts,” and in some cities “census blocks.” With this information, the American government could focus its search in select communities along the West Coast—even if it did not have the exact names and addresses.49

  A Census Bureau official explained to a federal commission that he was happy to provide “a detailed cross-tabulation for even the most minute areas… for which data were collected. In other words, enumeration districts and in some instances cities by blocks…. Sheets of paper from the tabulation machines were sent out to WCCA [Wartime Civil Control Administration, which was responsible for the internment]… and became the basis for the WCCA statistical activities.”50

  The maps displaying Japanese population density were marked with dots, one for each ten persons. American and Dutch census bureaus simultaneously used Hollerith systems in 1943 to create racial “dot maps” as a means of organizing transfers to concentration camps. Hollerith experts dedicated to such projects seemed to work according to an established protocol on either side of the Atlantic, almost as though they had the same consultant. Lentz and his colleagues published highly detailed articles describing their registration programs. These articles appeared not only in Dutch statistical journals, but were translated into German for the journal of the German Statistical Society, and then translated into English for the journal of the American Statistical Association. The Journal of the American Statistical Association was regularly read by everyone in the American statistical community as well as the engineers and consultants at IBM.51

  If locating the Japanese by census block was insufficient, the Census Bureau was willing to take the next step to deliver actual names and addresses. “We’re by law required to keep confidential information by individuals,” Census Director Capt declared at the time. He added, “But in the end, [i]f the defense authorities found 200 Japs missing and they wanted the names of the Japs in that area, I would give them further means of checking individuals.”52

  By February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt could confidently sign Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. On March 22, 1942, the evacuations began in Los Angles. The U.S. Supreme Court later upheld the legality of such a measure based on ancestral grounds alone.53

  Ironically, on April 29, 1945, an all-Japanese-American regiment helped free Dachau.54

  Thomas Watson was more than the leader of one of America’s most valued wartime corporations. He seized the opportunity to become the nation’s chief industrial patriot. Just as he had sermonized for peace during the thirties and early years of war before America’s entry, Watson now epitomized the loyal warrior capitalist. As early as January 1941, Watson had assured reporters, “The leaders of government, business and industry to whom the execution of our defense program has been entrusted will have the loyal cooperation of every businessman in the United States. We are willing to make sacrifices to achieve this, because we appreciate our privileges as American citizens and will always stand together in defense of our form of government and our American ideals, while also endeavoring to assist and cooperate with all right-thinking people throughout the world.”55

  On Independence Day, 1941, Watson reported that during the previous six weeks he had helped stage theatrical performances for more than 650,000 American soldiers and sailors stationed at sixty posts. As chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Army and Navy, Watson raised funds among major industrialists to entertain the troops. This included a substantial donation of his own.56

  On July 15, 1941, Watson declared, “We are a peace-loving people and we love peace to such an extent that we are willing to fight for it. We cherish our civilization in this country above everything else and we are going to be adequately prepared to protect it and to continue to develop it.”57

  In October 1941, Watson’s Citizens Committee helped Eleanor Roosevelt organize a “Knit for Defense” tea at the Waldorf-Astoria. At the event, he introduced the First Lady as “the first knitter.”58

  Throughout 1941, even as Watson was broadcasting jingoistic statements and organizing patriotic services, he was also waging his own private war against the Dehomag revolt. However, his struggle to remain in the Axis war machine did not deter him from continuing to mobilize America.

  In 1942, Watson purchased full-page display ads in leading newspapers proclaiming his great “WE-ALL.” The few lines of large type beneath the headline “WE-ALL” exhorted: “Our slogan now is WE-ALL, which means every loyal individual in the United States. We are facing a long, hard job, but when the United States decides to fight for a cause, it is in terms of WE-ALL, and nothing can or will stop us. President Roosevelt, our Commander-in-Chief, can be certain that WE-ALL are back of him, determined to protect our country, our form of government, and the freedoms which we cherish.” The advertisements bore the thick, swashing signature of Thomas J. Watson as “President, International Business Machines Corporation.”59

  Watson’s patriotic crusade never diminished in fervor. It wasn’t just corporate. It was personal.

  In 1943, as Harold J. Carter sat in IBM’s offices at 590 Madison Avenue, he was investigating more than a powerful business. Carter never had a chance. He was going against a corpo
ration that was intensely vital to almost every aspect of the U.S. war effort, including its most secret operations, and against executives who occupied the glittering apex of America’s rally for defense. In fact, Watson had even declined a recent Democratic suggestion to run for Governor of New York.60 No wonder Schotte could decide what documents Carter would and would not receive. IBM and Watson were untouchable. Carter learned the immutable truth in the very words he had written months earlier:

  This [World War] is a conflict of warlike nationalistic states, each having certain interests. Yet we frequently find these interests clashing diametrically with the opposing interests of international corporate structures, more huge and powerful than nations.

  IBM was in some ways bigger than the war. Both sides could not afford to proceed without the company’s all-important technology. Hitler needed IBM. So did the Allies.

  By late 1943, Carter learned that whether he concurred or not, IBM was not to be treated as a suspect corporation trading with the enemy, but as a precious war asset in the Allied struggle for liberty. IBM now entered a wholly new phase. Since all of Nazi Europe administratively functioned with Holleriths, IBM’s help would be crucial to the post-war control of Europe’s administrative and economic infrastructure. Simply put: IBM had the keys to Europe—or rather the cards. Now, all its expertise in punch card technology would be utilized to create an orderly conquest and liberation of the Continent.

  Carter’s Economic Warfare Section now regularly turned to IBM to learn the many intricacies of German and Italian Hollerith use—not for the purposes of criminal prosecution or documenting culpability, but for the purposes of military intelligence and sustaining Allied victory.

  In December 1943, Carter prepared a memo entitled “Use of Mechanized Accounting Systems in Axis and Axis Occupied Territory” based completely on information gleaned from Schotte and other IBM executives. Carter’s focus had now shifted, recording the details of Hollerith deployment in Nazi Holland, Germany, and Italy, including the street addresses of major punch card processing agencies and repositories. For example, his memo pinpointed the Ministry of Corporations at Via Vittorio Veneto in Rome as maintaining “complete records in punch card form of all Italian industrial commercial, transportation, and agricultural enterprises, together with the employment and vocational records of all personnel engaged in these enterprises. By putting the punched cards and business machines at this location to use, it would be possible to secure quickly and accurately” a long list of operational information needed to control a post-war occupied Italy.61

  The memo similarly listed key data bureaus in Holland and Germany. Carter stressed that IBM subsidiaries supplied and helped organize all the enemy installations. He closed with the observation: “In order to utilize the data located in the governmental agencies described above, it is suggested that special measures be instituted in conjunction with the military authorities to seize and safeguard the punch cards and business machines in these offices. These measures might include the constituting of a special unit with detailed knowledge of the applications of business machines and punch cards… and a prearranged plan of action.”62

  One of Carter’s colleagues, Harold Ungar, prepared another confidential memo further outlining the new approach. “The German Government,” wrote Ungar, “through the intensive use of standardized accounting practices and business machines, has achieved a highly centralized control of the financial and industrial activities of Germany and of the occupied countries. This control is so centralized that a sudden collapse of the German Government may produce such chaos in the functioning of the German economy as to make extremely difficult whatever administration the Allied authorities may seek to impose [after the war]. Whatever system the occupation authorities intend to adopt, therefore, one action with high priority is to prepare in advance to seize and utilize the existing German economic control apparatus.”63

  IBM had come full circle. The firm had now become a strategic partner in the war against the Third Reich—even as it continuously supplied the enemy, as before, through its overseas subsidiaries. Carter’s investigation was finished. The crusade to save the machines was on.

  Carter now produced memo after memo—hundreds of pages— detailing the inner workings of Dehomag, Watson Italiana, and the way the Third Reich ran railroads and organized military operations across Europe using punch cards. The complete blueprint of Nazi Germany Holleriths was documented. His investigative reports were converted into operational manuals for both invasion forces and the civilian administrators who would follow. As late as June 1944, Carter’s section was even able to learn from an IBM executive that critical economic policy files of the Nazi Party had been reduced to punch cards which could be reconstructed if recovered. IBM knew where they were: in Veesenmayer’s office.64

  For the Allies, IBM assistance came at a crucial point. But for the Jews of Europe it was too late. Hitler’s Holleriths had been deployed against them for almost a decade and were continuing without abatement. Millions of Jews would now suffer the consequences of being identified and processed by IBM technologies.

  After nearly a decade of incremental solutions the Third Reich was ready to launch the last stage. In January 1942, a conference was held in Wannsee outside Berlin. This conference, supported by Reich statisticians and Hollerith experts, would outline the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in Europe. Once more, Holleriths would be used, but this time the Jews would not be sent away from their offices or congregated into ghettos. Germany was now ready for mass shooting pits, gas chambers, crematoria, and an ambitious Hollerith-driven program known as “extermination by labor” where Jews were systematically worked to death like spent matches.

  For the Jews of Europe, it was their final encounter with German automation.

  XIII. EXTERMINATION

  NEARLY EVERY NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP OPERATED A Hollerith Department known as the Hollerith Abteilung. The three-part Hollerith system of paper forms, punch cards, and tabulators varied from camp to camp and from year to year, depending upon conditions.

  In some camps, such as Dachau and Storkow, as many as two dozen IBM sorters, tabulators, and printers were installed.1 Other facilities operated punches only and submitted their cards to central locations such as Mauthausen or Berlin; in some camps, the plain paper forms were coded and processed elsewhere.2 Hollerith activity—whether paper, punching, or processing, was frequently located within the camp itself, consigned to a special bureau called the Labor Assignment Office, known in German as the Arbeitseinsatz.3 The Arbeitseinsatz issued the all-important daily work assignments, and processed all inmate cards and labor transfer rosters. This necessitated a constant traffic of lists, punch cards, and encodeable documents as every step of the prisoner’s existence was regimented and tracked.4

  Hitler’s Reich established camps all over Europe, but they were not all alike. Some, such as Flossenburg in Germany, were labor camps where inmates were worked to death. Several, such as Westerbork in Holland, were transit camps, that is, staging sites en route to other destinations. A number of camps, such as Treblinka in Poland, were operated for the sole purpose of immediate extermination by gas chamber. Some camps, such as Auschwitz, combined elements of all three.5

  Without IBM’s machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, whether located on-site or off-site, Hitler’s camps could have never managed the numbers they did.

  The major camps were assigned Hollerith code numbers for their paperwork: Auschwitz … 001; Buchenwald … 002; Dachau … 003; Flossenburg … 004; Gross-Rosen … 005; Herzogenbusch … 006; Mauthausen … 007; Natzweiler … 008; Neuengamme … 009; Ravensbruck … 010; Sachsenhausen … 011; Stutthof … 012.6

  Auschwitz, coded 001, was not a single camp, but a sprawling complex, comprised of transit facilities, slave factories and farms, gas chambers, and crematoria. In most camps, the Arbeitseinsatz tabulated not only work assignments, but also the camp hospital index and the
general death and inmate statistics for the Political Section. But at Auschwitz, paper data was probably shipped off-site, perhaps to another camp, such as Mathausen, for processing.7

  In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews. First, a doctor examined him briefly to determine his fitness for work. His physical information was noted on a medical record for the “camp hospital index.” Second, his full prisoner registration was completed with all personal details. Third, his name was checked against the indices of the Political Section to see if he would be subjected to special cruelty. Finally, he was registered by Hollerith method in the labor index for the Arbeitseinsatz and assigned a characteristic five-digit Hollerith number, 44673.8 This five-digit number would follow the Polish merchant from labor assignment to assignment as Hollerith systems tracked him and his availability for work, and reported it to the central inmate file kept at Department DII. Department DII of the SS Economics Administration in Oranienburg over saw all camp slave labor assignments.9

  Later in the summer of 1943, the timber merchant’s same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.10

  Tattoos, however, quickly evolved at Auschwitz. Soon, they bore no further relation to Hollerith compatibility for one reason: the Hollerith number was designed to track a working inmate—not a dead one. Once the daily death rate at Auschwitz climbed, Hollerith-based numbering simply became outmoded. Clothes would be quickly removed from any cadaver, making identification for the Hollerith-maintained death lists difficult. So camp numbers were inked onto a prisoner’s chest. But as the chest became obscured amidst growing mounds of dead bodies, the forearm was preferred as a more visible appendage. Soon, ad hoc numbering systems were inaugurated at Auschwitz. Various number ranges, often with letters attached, were assigned to prisoners in ascending sequence. Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed bizarre experiments, tattooed his own distinct number series on patients. Tattoo numbering ultimately took on a chaotic incongruity all its own as an internal Auschwitz-specific identification system.11