Quickly, Cheim learned the method. Every day, transports of slave laborers were received. Prisoners were identified by descriptive Hollerith cards, each with columns and punched holes detailing nationality, date of birth, marital status, number of children, reason for incarceration, physical characteristics, and work skills. Sixteen coded categories of prisoners were listed in columns 3 and 4, depending upon the hole position: hole 3 signified homosexual, hole 9 for anti-social, hole 12 for Gypsy. Hole 8 designated a Jew. Printouts based on the cards listed the prisoners by personal code number as well.8 Column 34 was labeled "Reason for Departure." Code 2 simply meant transferred to another camp for continuing labor. Natural death was coded 3. Execution was coded 4. Suicide coded 5. The ominous code 6 designated "special handling," the term commonly understood as extermination, either in a gas chamber, by hanging, or by gunshot.
One December morning, even as the numbered man Cheim, in his tattered uniform, stepped quickly toward the Bergen-Belsen Hollerith office to stay warm and to stay alive, another man, this one dressed elegantly in a fine suit and warm overcoat, stepped out of a new chauffeured car at 590 Madison Avenue in New York. He was Thomas J. Watson. His company, IBM“”one of the biggest in the world“”custom-designed and leased the Hollerith card sorting system to the Third Reich for use at Bergen-Belsen and most of the other concentration camps. International Business Machines also serviced its machines almost monthly, and trained Nazi personnel to use the intricate systems. Duplicate copies of code books were kept in IBM's offices in case field books were lost. What's more, his company was the exclusive source for up to 1.5 billion punch cards the Reich required each year to run its machines.
Other than his inventions, Hollerith was said to cherish three things: his German heritage, his privacy, and his cat Bismarck.
The guy had a cat named Bismarck.
Other than his inventions, Hollerith was said to cherish three things: his German heritage, his privacy, and his cat Bismarck. His link to everything German was obvious to all around him. Hollerith went out of his way to sail to Europe on German vessels. He once justified his friendship with a colleague's wife, explaining, "[She] is a German so I got along very well with her."
For privacy, Hollerith built a tall fence around his home to keep out neighbors and their pets. When too many cats scaled the top to jump into the yard, the ever-inventive Hollerith strung electrical wire along the fence, connected it to a battery, and then perched at his window puffing on a cigar. When a neighbor cat would appear threatening Bismarck's privacy, Hollerith would depress a switch, sending an electrical jolt into the animal.
What a fucker! Despite having a cat himself, he tortured others. Hm. This might just be the ultimate psychopatological example.
Watson became more than a good manager, more than just an impressive executive, more than merely a concerned employer, he became central to the company itself. His ubiquitous lectures and pep talks were delivered with such uplifting passion, they soon transcended to liturgical inspiration. Watson embodied more than the boss. He was the Leader. He even had a song. Clad in their uniforms of dark blue suits and glistening white shirts, the inspirited sales warriors of CTR would sing: Mister Watson is the man we're working for, He's the Leader of the C-T-R, He's the fairest, squarest man we know; Sincere and true. He has shown us how to play the game. And how to make the dough. 70 Watson was elevating to a higher plane. Newspaper articles began to focus on him personally as much as the company. His pervasive presence and dazzling capitalistic imperatives became a virtual religion to CTR employees.
Hitler's plans for a new Fascist order with a "Greater Germany" dominating all Europe were not unacceptable to Watson. In fact, Watson admired the whole concept of Fascism. He hoped he could participate as the American capitalistic counterpart of the great Fascist wave sweeping the Continent. Most of all, Fascism was good for business.
Speaking of psychopathology.
From the very first moments and continuing throughout the twelve-year existence of the Third Reich, IBM placed its technology at the disposal of Hitler's program of Jewish destruction and territorial domination. IBM did not invent Germany's anti-Semitism, but when it volunteered solutions, the company virtually braided with Nazism. Like any technologic evolution, each new solution powered a new level of sinister expectation and cruel capability. When Germany wanted to identify the Jews by name, IBM showed them how. When Germany wanted to use that information to launch programs of social expulsion and expropriation, IBM provided the technologic wherewithal. When the trains needed to run on time, from city to city or between concentration camps, IBM offered that solution as well. Ultimately, there was no solution IBM would not devise for a Reich willing to pay for services rendered. One solution led to another. No solution was out of the question. As the clock ticked, as the punch cards clicked, as Jews in Germany saw their existence vaporizing, others saw their corporate fortunes rise. Even as German Jewry hid in their homes and wept in despair, even as the world quietly trembled in fear, there was singing. Exhilarated, mesmerized, the faithful would sing, and sing loudly to their Leaders“”on both sides of the Atlantic. Some uniforms were brown. Some were blue.
Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann declared the world was divided between places where Jews could not stay, and places where Jews could not go.
The final numbers: Of an estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 107,000 were deported, and of those 102,000 were murdered“”a death ratio of approximately 73 percent.170 Of an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Jews living in France, both zones, about 85,000 were deported“”of these barely 3,000 survived. The death ratio in France was approximately 25 percent.1
It was an irony of the war that IBM equipment was used to encode and decode for both sides of the conflict.
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 corporation 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. 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.
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.
Buchenwald, coded 002, was established in July 1937, long before the war started. From its inception, Buchenwald was a cruel destiny for Germany's social undesirables, including politicals, hardened criminals, so-called work-shy misfits, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and Jews. Hollerith machines were needed from the outset to code and segregate each type of inmate, and then ensure the prisoner was subjected to a regimen of maltreatment and deprivation prescribed for his category. Ironically, when many Jews, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses registered at Buchenwald, they were required to write "career criminal" on the front of their Personal Inmate Card as a welcoming humiliation ritual. Their real occupation was noted on the back. Those who balked at listing themselves as criminals were severely beaten.
Once the murder decision had been made, all sixteen Jews in the shelf were immediately marched to a small door adjacent to Buchenwald's incinerator building. The door opened inwards creating a short, three-foot-long corridor. Jews were pushed and herded until they reached the corridor end. There, a hole dropped thirteen feet down a concrete shaft and into the Strangling Room. A camp worker recalled, "As they hit the floor they were garroted . . . by big SS guards and hung on hooks along the side wall, about 61/2 feet above the floor . . . any who were still struggling were stunned with a wooden mallet . . . An electric elevator . . . ran [the corpses] up to the incinerator room." In another camp, Jews were once singled out on Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that features the lighting of small candles. Guards ordered Jews to gather round. Eight were selected and strung upside down. The Jews were then forced to douse the hanging men with oil, and ignite them one by one. As the immolating Jews shrieked in pain, the unfortunate audience was compelled to joyously sing the Christmas carol "Silent Night." For the smallest of infractions, including not standing completely erect or speaking out of line, Jews were regularly flogged in an official method prescribed by Berlin administrators. For example, Jews were tied to a board for twenty-five lashes on the buttocks delivered by exuberant guards who often jumped into the air to increase momentum. If the Jew screamed out, the beating was increased ten more strokes. Because they were Jews“”and only because they were Jews“”if the guard was in the mood he could increase the number to sixty lashes. Many random cruelties such as floggings, kicking, testicle beatings, and other sadistic acts were inflicted against Jews, especially by those of higher rank among the prisoners, such as Poles or German criminals. Other prisoners often attempted to curry favor with their guards by brutalizing Jews. Guards often demanded it as sport. Jews, no matter how broken or bloody, could not be admitted to the infirmary at some camps; one inmate recalls Jews were classed as "well or dead."
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.
Only at the moment of extermination did the Jews of Europe finally break free from Hitler's Holleriths.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
IBM's business was never about Nazism. It was never about anti-Semitism. It was always about the money. Before even one Jew was encased in a hard-coded Hollerith identity, it was only the money that mattered. And the money did accrue.
But local conditions, no matter how atrocious, were always put aside. On January 3, 1942, for instance, the New York Times prominently described the horrible bloodlust underway in Croatia. The article reported what it termed " 'only a pale picture' of the ghastly reign of terror . . . [where] hundreds of persons were killed, but before they died many of them had their ears and noses cut off and then were compelled to graze on grass. The tortures most usually applied were beating, severing of limbs, gouging of eyes and breaking of bones. Cases are related of men being forced to hold red-hot bricks, dance on barbed wire with naked feet, and wear wreaths of thorns. Needles were stuck in fingers under the nails and lighted matches were held under noses." The area's most savage concentration camp was at Jasenovac where unspeakable crimes were committed by Ustashi guards. Jasenovac was situated on the Belgrade-Zagreb railroad line. Despite any horrors, IBM continued its thriving enterprise in Yugoslavia, known as Yugoslav Watson AG. Before America entered the war, IBM NY had been shipping Belgrade as many as 3 million punch cards annually.
From 1942 to 1945, IBM NY would wire uncharacteristically verbose and belabored instructions to its managers in neutral Europe to repossess machines, stop trading with subsidiaries in enemy countries, and terminate contracts with blacklisted firms. Each such instruction stood out as a veritable disquisition of deniability laced with highly patriotic rationales for obeying the law against trading with the enemy. But when blacklists arrived, Watson's most trusted managers in Sweden and Switzerland would "get strangely busy," as one IBM internal probe termed it. Or managers would ignore New York's lengthy tractates to stop direct trading with Axis nations“”sometimes delaying more than a year. In the case of IBM in Sweden, a Department of Justice investigator recorded that it was not until April 1943, more than one year after Swedish manager Tag Lundberg first received instructions to "cease trading with the enemy," that the wholly-owned subsidiary complied with an explicit order from New York. In many instances, elaborate document trails in Europe were fabricated to demonstrate compliance when the opposite was true. Nonetheless, the true record would be permanently obscured. During the war years, IBM's own internal reviews conceded that correspondence about its European business primarily through its Geneva office was often faked. Dates were falsified. Revised contract provisions were proffered to hide the true facts. Misleading logs and chronologies were kept.
Dehomag machines were located throughout what had been known as the Greater Reich and adjacent occupied territories. In Poland: 444 punches and verifiers, 144 sorters, 124 tabulators, and 74 auxiliary machines. In Austria: 447 punches and verifiers, 117 sorters, 91 tabulators, and 53 auxiliary machines. In Czechoslovakia: 108 punches and verifiers, 37 sorters, 26 tabulators, and 17 auxiliary machines. All tolled, some 2,348 Holleriths were identified for recovery.
IBM's view held that even if their machinery and corporate acumen had helped organize and optimize the Third Reich's aggression, they should be held exempt“”ipso facto“”by virtue of its American ownership. The company contended that its Nazi payments were protected revenues. However, the prevailing thought among the Allies and those who demanded justice was that all in government and the private sector who helped Hitler destroy Europe and commit genocide should be held accountable in war crimes. Their war gains and economic wherewithal were not sacrosanct. Rather, they should be sacrificed as reparations to the victims“”nations and individuals both. Whether dressed in jackboots and swastikas, or suit and tie, accountability was demanded. Indeed, the world understood that corporate collusion was the keystone to Hitler's terror. Businessmen who cooperated with Hitler were considered to be war criminals or "accessories to war crimes."
When occupying authorities needed a census of all Germans in the territories, they knew whom to call. Dehomag stepped forward. The company's census experts simply took its existing census tabulation regimens and made certain adjustments for Allied requirements. Some of the column headings were adjusted slightly, but little else. Columns 1-6: unchanged. Column 7: Family Status. Column 8: Religion. Column 9: Mother Tongue. Column 10: National Descent (or Ethnicity). Column 11: Nationality. At one point in the preparations an American officer complained that some of the German column headings requesting ethnicity were "of Nazi memory and implying a racial idea which was most undesirable." Eventually, however, American objections subsided.
In the years that followed, IBM's worldwide stature became even more of a beacon to the cause of progress. It adopted a corporate motto: "The Solutions Company." Whatever the impossible task, IBM technology could find a solution. The men who headed up the IBM enterprise in Nazi Europe and America became revered giants within the corporation's global community. Chauncey became chairman of the IBM World Trade Corporation, and the European subsidiary managers were rewarded for their loyalty with top jobs. Their exploits during the Nazi era were lionized with amazing specificity in a promotional book entitled The History of Computing in Europe, published in 1967 by IBM itself. However, an internal IBM review decided to immediately withdraw the book from the market. It is no longer available in any publicly accessible library anywhere in the world.
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.