IBM and the Holocaust

by Edwin Black

  “In the course of the practical execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east…. The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East.” Jews in Poland were specified as “epidemic carriers” and “of approximately 2.5 million Jews, the majority is unfit for work.”74 In the parlance of Wannsee, those “unfit for work” were to be put to death as soon as possible.

  As daunting as the deportation campaign would be, the Nazis insisted it be subordinated to their own Nuremberg racial theories. A complicated list of mandatory or potential exceptions was laid out. For example, “persons of mixed blood of the first degree married to persons of German blood” would be “treated essentially as Germans.”75

  The Wannsee Conference and its Protocol were considered by many to be the next major step in the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in Europe. Although most of the bizarre formulaic exceptions would be eventually discarded, and although the true number of Jews existing in Europe was vastly overstated in the meeting, this much was apparent: the Final Solution would require an enormous amount of statistical information. Korherr, assisted by Plate, was ready to provide it.

  Plate was an experienced Hollerith expert. After a stint as administrative assistant with the Reich Statistical Office, he joined the Race Political Office of the NSDAP in 1935. Soon thereafter, he assisted noted raceologist Friedrich Burgdorfer in compiling an estimate of all racial Jews in Germany. Later, he helped produce a second estimate, this one of World Jewry. In succeeding years, Plate functioned as the Reich Statistical Office’s liaison to Eichmann’s Referat II 112, also known as the Jewish Division. Plate was described by colleagues as an expert “in all important questions regarding the census, religious and race statistics, special counts of Jews, special counts of foreigners, and minority statistics.” Plate, a civilian when Wannsee convened, was required to sign an oath of secrecy three days before the conference and was drafted into the military five days later.76

  Korherr was the most important statistics man in the Nazi hierarchy. Irritable, defensive, and almost possessive about his Hollerith machines, Korherr had been developing race-oriented punch card programs for years. Always a rabid raceologist and statistical adventurer, his early writings denounced the “niggerization” of France and urged the defense of the “white race.”77

  His career included work with the Reich Statistical Office, and later, service as the Director of Population Politics and Statistics for Deputy Fuhrer Hess. But Korherr did not become the undisputed syndic of all Nazi statistics until December 9, 1940. On that day, Himmler issued and personally signed two explicit orders. The first appointed Korherr Inspector of Statistics for the SS as well as for the Chief of the German Police. The second outlined Korherr’s broad portfolio. By any reading, it was an extraordinary entitlement and cachet for one who might be viewed as a mere statistical technician. But Korherr was more than just a number cruncher.78 He would become the keeper of the state’s most incriminating genocidal secrets.

  “The Inspector reports directly to me and receives his instructions from me personally,” ordered SS Chief Himmler in Korherr’s bona fides. “The Inspector is solely responsible for the totality of statistics of all units and offices in my area. The work of the Inspector is to be supported in every way possible in light of the necessity and significance [of]… practical statistics…. The Inspector is the sole point of contact between the Reich and provincial and Party statistics.”79

  Korherr was more than willing to jealously guard his domain of Hollerith expertise, even if it meant tangling with Nazidom’s top generals. For example, one general at the Wannsee Conference was Gruppenfuhrer Otto Hofmann, the general in charge of the politically well-connected SS Race and Settlement Department. The Race and Settlement Office was a marginal agency that functioned as a marriage-assistance bureau for SS officers, and therefore had to wait two years to secure its own Hollerith. When it finally arrived, Gruppenfuhrer Hofmann was excited about his new Hollerith installation, and had already suggested expansive changes in statistical campaigns and the creation of new racial registration offices across Greater Germany. Korherr openly denigrated Hofmann’s ideas as unnecessary and duplicative.80

  Shortly after the Wannsee Conference, Korherr wrote to a colleague, “I would like to mention that the understandable lack of statistical expertise at the Race and Settlement Office, coupled with their urgent wish for a large statistics office with a Hollerith system and for an SS population card file, made [recent] negotiations extraordinarily difficult. For the statistician, the best proof of an amateur is when someone wants to begin—and end—his statistical work with a card file… Since Reichsfuhrer [Himmler] appointed me the sole liaison for Reich statistics… I see Gruppenfuhrer Hofmann’s behavior as deliberately… undermining my position.”81

  Korherr snidely added, “The person in charge at the Reich Statistical Office was astonished at Gruppenfuhrer Hofmann’s plans and asked: then why did Reichsfuhrer [Himmler] hire me and Dr. Plate. We were both amused at the idea of a Hollerith survey of the entire popular [German] movement… I suggested the numerical continuation of the [existing] inventory instead of a [new] Hollerith system… I should just float above it all.”82

  Korherr’s expertise was so valued, Himmler sided with him even over a prominent SS general. Eventually, Himmler issued Korherr an additional directive: “in order to avoid jurisdictional conflicts and streamline work procedures, you are to be given responsibility for processing all statistical matters for [ Gruppenfuhrer Hofmann’s] Race and Settlement Office.”83

  As Himmler’s plenipotentiary for all statistical matters, Korherr was able to coordinate the data activities of numerous Reich agencies, and call upon many Hollerith experts who had been either trained by Dehomag, or were employees transferred or loaned to government offices for the war period. One example was Albert Bartels, head of the SS machine record agency and in charge of Waffen-SS Holleriths at Dachau. Bartels also worked at the complex at 129 Friedrichstrasse. In one typical packet, Bartels sent Korherr “work progress forms and punch cards used in my office. I ask you… for the necessary evaluations.” Bartels’ assistant was Busch, the former Hollerith dealer who ran the Waffen-SS machines at the Storkow camp. Herbert Blaettel, a veteran of Dehomag’s training department, worked at Dachau’s Hollerith Department. Dehomag’s Munich dealer, Herr Asmis, sold the Nazi Party office its original leases; he only left the subsidiary in August 1944 to work with government projects. The Maschinelles Berichtwesen was the clearing-house for all punch card technology, and their resources could be continuously tapped.84

  In January 1943, Korherr was required to provide Himmler with a status report on the Final Solution. To do so, Korherr worked frantically to determine exactly how many Jews had been killed, country by country. He demanded a stream of data from all the ghettos and other territories where Eichmann had been working. Eichmann remembered that he provided Korherr “all our top-secret stuff. That was the order. All the shipments [of Jews] insofar as they had been reported to us.” Eichmann added, “The statistician [Korherr] was with me, a week or maybe two, in my office, day after day, making his inquiries, he sent telegrams etc. all over the place.”85

  Korherr eventually produced a sixteen-page draft report, but was required to condense the tabulated data to just seven pages so Hitler could review it. When Korherr completed the summary, the perfectionist in him was still frustrated. “Despite the expended sweat, an accurate number for this time period cannot be given,” he asserted, but he assured the report nonetheless did offer “useful clues.” Korherr’s progress report was submitted to Hitler on March 23, 1943.86

  This time, the numbers were precise, enumerating Jewish communities throughout Europe, by ghetto and territory. The word “evacuation” was used to designate gassing in killing centers such as Treblinka and Sobibor. To eastern Russia: 1,449,692 Jews; to camps in occupied Poland: 1,274,166; thro
ugh camps in the Warthe region: 145,301. Occupied France: 41,911; Netherlands: 38,571; Belgium: 16,886; Norway: 532; Slovakia: 56,691; Croatia: 4,927. Total evacuations including Special Treatment: 1,873,519. The total was written as more than 2.5 million to date.87

  Himmler was so pleased with the report and Korherr’s subsequent performance, he eventually appointed the statistician to a specially created agency known as the Statistical Scientific Institute of the Reichsfuhrer SS. It, too, was located at Block F, 129 Friedrichstrasse. Korherr’s new office now had the most up-to-the-minute access to all concentration camp information streaming into the Zentral Institut. By early 1944, Korherr was able to report to Eichmann a total of 5 million Jews eliminated by “natural decrease, concentration camp inmates, ghetto inmates, and those who were [simply] put to death.”88

  The offices at Block F, 129 Friedrichstrasse, undoubtedly processed more information than any other single office in Germany about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. More than a statistical bureau, by its very nature, the Hollerith complex at Friedrichstrasse helped Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann prioritize, schedule, and manage the seemingly impossible logistics of genocide across dozens of cities in more than twenty countries and territories. It was not just people who were counted and marshaled for deportation. Boxcars, locomotives, and intricate train timetables were scheduled across battle-scarred borders—all while a war was being fought on two fronts. The technology had enabled Nazi Germany to orchestrate the death of millions without skipping a note.

  Amidst the whirlwind of the Final Solution, the Third Reich’s transition from the blind persecution of a general population to the destruction of individuals had come full circle. In genocide, the Jews lost their identity. They had been reduced to mere nameless data bits. Now each murdered Jew no longer even represented an individual death. Now every corpse comprised a mere component in a far larger statistical set adding up to total annihilation.

  When Jews were worked to death, they were tracked with Inmate Cards, Hollerith Transfer Lists, punch cards, and endless sorters. It was expensive, but, in the Nazi view, a necessary cost allowing the Reich to track and regiment a Jew’s every move. When enslaved Jews in work camps were about to be killed, their cards were taken—they no longer needed one.89

  When ghettoized Jews were selected for deportation, and dispatched by Hollerith-scheduled trains to killing stations in Poland, they received no cards. Their names were not printed on any Hollerith Transfer List. When they arrived at the mass murder centers in Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, or any of the others sites reserved for eradication, a doctor briefly glanced at victims hurriedly filing past. A wave to the left meant reporting to the camp entrance for the prospect of laboring for a few days, perhaps a month. But most were never registered in any Arbeitseinsatz.90 They had outlived the potential for usefulness. They were expeditiously directed to their final destiny: the showers.

  The synchrony was exquisite. From the moment a Jew stepped onto the train platform in the ghetto, to the moment he was violently thrashed out of the boxcar at the final stop and led to his death, there were never any delays. Precision timing and scheduling was indispensable to the process. No longer worth the expense of a bullet, victims were gassed in large groups. At Auschwitz—2,000 at a time. Prussic acid pellets, Zyklon B, were dropped into water buckets to accomplish the mass asphyxiation. The screaming, clanging on the steel doors, and shrieks of ancient Jewish incantation, Sh’ma Yisra’el, stopped after fifteen minutes. Generally within an hour of stepping off the train, the Jews in a transport were successfully exterminated.91

  Nor were any death records transmitted. It was enough to inform Zentral Institut that the people had boarded a train. Hence, the machines only tabulated the evacuations. No more was necessary. From these trains, there was no escape, no need for tracking, no further utility, and no further cost would be expended. At this point, the Jews were no longer worth a bullet, nor the price of a single punch card.92

  Only at the moment of extermination did the Jews of Europe finally break free from Hitler’s Holleriths.

  * * *

  GERMANY HAD forced Jews to help organize their own annihilation by establishing Judenrate, that is, Jewish councils. These councils were generally comprised not of communal leaders, but of arbitrarily selected Jewish personalities, frequently engineers. Engineers were chosen because they could relate to the mechanics of the numerical process underway. Judenrat leaders Ephraim Barash of Bialystok and Adam Czerniakow of Warsaw, for example, were both engineers. Eichmann considered himself an engineer by trade.93

  Those council members who did not cooperate, or who even hesitated, were quickly murdered—often on the spot. Amid accusations of collaboration that would reverberate forever, the Judenrate were faced with the impossible choice of functioning—literally at gunpoint—as best they could, as long as they could. With their dismal ghetto communities starving, and rotting corpses piled high in the streets for lack of mortuary facilities, the councils hoped to somehow survive the brutalities of ghetto life, hour to hour.94 Stories about gas chambers at the end of the railway track were circulating. So by their cooperation with constant census and registration projects, as well as organized evacuation, and, in many instances, the virtual self-selection of names to fill the trains, the enormity of Nazi intent took shape.

  Quickly it became apparent to the men of the Judenrate that they were not conducting census and other statistical duties for the purposes of survival under a brutish occupation, or evacuation to less crowded settlements—but for organized extermination. In essence, these men were metering their own deaths in cadence to the overall Nazi timetable. Some were able to withstand the awesome personal nightmare, and functioned as demanded until the end. However, many reached a point of personal defiance. When that point came, their sole means of briefly slowing down the Nazi machine was suicide or suicidal refusal.

  Arye Marder, head of Grodno ghetto’s statistical department, submitted his resignation in November 1942, when German plans became inescapable. His name was placed on the next transport. He committed suicide. So his family was sent in his place.95

  Moshe Kramarz refused to sign a document claiming the Minsk ghetto was “deporting” its Jews by choice. He tore the document into little pieces in front of people and loudly warned all within earshot that whether called “resettlement” or “evacuation,” the process was really extermination. Gestapo officers immediately pummeled him and his colleagues, dragged the group away, and executed them all.96

  In Lukow ghetto, Judenrat member David Liberman collected donations from residents thinking it was a ransom to save lives. When he learned the money would only be used to pay their own freight to the Treblinka death camp, he shouted at a German supervisor, “Here is your payment for our trip, you bloody tyrant!” He tore the bills into bits and slapped the German’s face. Ukrainian guards killed Liberman where he stood.97

  The Bereza Kartuska ghetto Judenrat was ordered to produce a list of Jews to assemble at the marketplace on October 15, 1942, “for work in Russia.” The men of the council understood the people would be traveling to their doom. Unwilling to issue the lists, the council members assembled and collectively hanged themselves in the council offices. Two physicians and their families joined the protest by committing suicide as well.98

  At Pruzana ghetto, forty-one members of the Judenrat staged a Masada action. Rather than submit to a Nazi-imposed death, they and their families gathered. Poison was distributed. The children swallowed first. Then the women. Finally the men. One man held back to make sure all had died. Then he gulped his. But the impoverished Judenrat simply did not have enough poison to formulate lethal doses. Some people emerged from mere drowsiness. So one man closed the chimney flu, sealed the windows, and turned on the oven. When the bodies were found the next morning, all but one was revived, and eventually deported to the camps.99

  Adam Czerniakow, the head of Warsaw’s ghetto Judenrat, the man who so tirelessly organized the
census, began to see the process as wholesale murder. One day, when the Nazis demanded he increase the deportation lists from 6,000 to 10,000, he drew a line. Czerniakow also ended his duties by ending his life.100

  Judenrat resistance never effectively delayed any German action in the ghettos. With scores of Jews dying of starvation or disease each week, a collection of suicides and executions simply became part of the hellscape. But their sacrifice made one thing clear. Even though they never comprehended the technologic intricacies of the process underway, and although most had never seen a punch card, they did sense that all the registrations and endless lists added up to a single odious destiny. They fought back with their only remaining weapon: the power to control their own extinction.

  XIV. THE SPOILS OF GENOCIDE, I

  NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW EXACTLY HOW MANY IBM MACHINES clattered in which ghetto zone, train depot, or concentration camp. Nor will anyone prove exactly what IBM officials in Europe or New York understood about their location or use. Machines were often moved—with or without IBM’s knowledge—from the officially listed commercial or governmental client to a deadly Nazi installation in another country, and then eventually transferred back again.1

  Most importantly, it did not matter whether IBM did or did not know exactly which machine was used at which death camp. All that mattered was that the money would be waiting—once the smoke cleared.

  In fact, a pattern emerged throughout war-ravaged Europe. Before America entered the war, IBM NY and its subsidiaries worked directly with Germany or Italy, or its occupying forces. As part of the strategic alliance, it also worked with German sympathizers and allies in countries such as Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.2 Watson would even order new subsidiaries established in conquered territories in cadence with Nazi invasions.3 Even after America declared war, IBM offices worldwide would openly transact with these clients, or with other subsidiaries, until the moment General Ruling 11 was triggered for that particular territory. As the war in Europe expanded, General Ruling 11 jurisdiction was extended as well until all of Nazi-dominated Europe was proscribed.4 Once U.S. law prohibited transactions, IBM NY’s apparent direct management of its European operations seemed to end. But, in truth, executives in New York could still monitor events and exercise authority in Europe through neutral country subsidiaries. These overseas units always remained under the parent company’s control. Moreover, special bureaucratic exemptions were regularly sought by IBM NY, or its subsidiaries, to continue or expand business dealings throughout occupied Europe.5 Official American demands that business be curtailed were often ignored.6