Key ideas: Published in 2001. "I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists?" Somebody had to collect and organize all those lists. Who and how? IBM and Holocaust not only answers these questions but also shows how ... the concept of massively organized information quietly emerged to become a means of social control, a weapon of war, and a roadmap for group destruction." ((E. Black))
In our time, KYC, AML, blue checkmarks, eye scans, palm scans, and all kinds of never ending verifications and registrations are all examples of massively organized information that could be used in ways most people cannot even imagine. Next time you are asked to "verify your identity", think of what might happen if your private data gets in the wrong hands.
When Hitler came to power, a central Nazi goal was to identify and destroy Germany's 600,000-member Jewish community... Only after Jews were identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and ultimately extermination...
[T]he task [of identification and classification] was so prodigious it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.
However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system—a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success...
I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists? For decades, no one has known. Few have asked.
The answer: IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies....
IBM Germany invented the racial census—listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust.
Nazi genetic experts worried about not only those individuals exhibiting undesired traits, but the parents and/or children who might carry those traits and therefore contaminate the gene pool. One census theoretician postulated that the potential for contamination could be set at a 25 percent chance per diseased parent. Hence, once an undesirable person was identified, the parents and offspring, including newborn children, required sterilization as well.
Quickly, the notion of sterilizing the physically undesirable expanded to include the socially undesirable. So-called anti-socials, that is, misfits who seemed to be unsuited for labor, became special targets. A leading raceologist described anti-socials as "those who, based on their personality, are not capable of meeting the minimum requirements of society, i.e., personal, social, and volkisch behavior."
One official definition cited: "human beings with a hereditary and irreversible mental attitude, who . . . have repeatedly come into conflict with government agencies and the courts, and thus appear . . . a threat to humanity." Included were traitors, race violators, sexual perverts, and "secret Jews." But, "the numerically largest group consists of 'the work-shy and habitual parasites.'"
Compulsory sterilization was aimed principally at those adjudged physically and mentally inferior regardless of their race or nationality. However, the criteria applied not only to general groups exhibiting the proscribed characteristics, but, in the new lexicon of anti-Semitism, to virtually all Jews within Germany...
"The solution is that every interesting feature of a statistical nature . . . can be summarized . . . by one basic factor. This basic factor is the Hollerith punch card." (From an article entitled "The Hollerith Punch Card Process in Welfare and Social Security")
Questionnaires, although to be filled out by hand, were jointly de signed by Dehomag engineers and Nazi disability or welfare experts for compatibility, since ultimately all information would be punched into Hollerith cards...
People seated in a doctor's office or a welfare line never comprehended the destiny of routine information about their personal traits and conditions.
Question 11 required a handwritten checkmark if the individual was a foreigner. Later, this information was punched into the correlating punch card in columns 29-30 under nationality...
Diseases were also coded: influenza was 3, lupus was 7, syphilis was 9, diabetes was 15; they were entered into field 9...
Raceology was enabled as never before. Statistician Zahn extolled the fact that "registered persons can be observed continually, [through] the cooperation of statistical central offices . . . [so] other statistical population matters can be settled and regulated." Zahn proposed "a single file for [the] entire population to make possible an ethnic biological diagnosis [to] turn today's theory into tomorrow's practice..."
Ultimately, card by card, sort by sort, those of any Jewish blood would be weeded out from every corner of German society no matter how they tried to hide.
In 1934, statistician Karl Keller expostulated the popular expectation that genealogical tracing technology would eventually discover all the Jews. Writing in Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv, Keller assured, "The determination of Jewish descent will not be difficult because membership in the Jewish faith and membership in the Jewish culture were nearly identical before the emancipation of the Jews. It is therefore sufficient to check the change of de-nominations in church registers and registry offices for the last 130 years."
Understanding it possessed the technology to scrutinize an entire nation, Dehomag proudly advertised its systems with a certain unmistakable flair. The company created two surrealistic promotional posters.
One was a giant punch card hovering over a factory beaming its X-ray-like searchlights into every room of every floor. The caption read: "Hollerith illuminates your company, provides surveillance and helps organize."
A second poster depicted a giant odious eye floating in the sky projecting a punch card over everything below. The caption read: "See everything with Hollerith punch cards."
No one would escape. This was something new for mankind. Never before had so many people been identified so precisely, so silently, so quickly, and with such far-reaching consequences.
The dawn of the Information Age began at the sunset of human decency.
IBM was guided by one precept: know your customer [KYC], anticipate their needs. Watson stayed close to his customer with frequent visits to Germany and continuous daily micro-managed oversight of the business.
Everywhere one turned in America or Germany in 1935, it was clear that identification and exclusion of the Jews was only the beginning. The next step was confiscation and Aryanization.
GERMAN JEWRY did not understand how, but the Reich seemed to be all-knowing as it identified and encircled them, and then systematically wrung the dignity from their lives. Indeed, it was clear to the world that somehow the Reich always knew the names even if no one quite understood how it knew the names.
On March 13, 1938, the Third Reich absorbed Austria, creating a Greater Germany of 73 million people. Hitler called it the Anschluss, or "Annexation." The anti-Semitic program that had evolved over the years in Germany now rapidly took hold in the Austrian provinces—virtually overnight...
On June 30, 1938, nearly 10,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Austria were ordered to immediately fire all Jewish employees—30,000 men and women—and replace them with Aryans
Expulsions, exclusions, and confiscations raged across Vienna, stripping Jewish citizens of their dignity, possessions, and legal status. No one was spared. Middle-class Jews from Sigmund Freud to nameless victims were forced to board any ship, train, or bus out of Austria with no possessions other than what they could carry. Once Jews were identified, their lives in Austria were over.
With stunning precision, the Nazis knew exactly who in Austria was Jewish.
Indeed, the New York Times, in its initial coverage of the round-ups, could not help but comment,
"Many of these patrols are engaged in rounding up the thousands on lists of those due for imprisonment and 'correction.' These lists were compiled quietly year after year in preparation for the day of Germany's seizure of power."
In early 1938, in the weeks leading up to the March Anschluss, Adolf Eichmann was dispatched to Vienna as a specialist on Jewish affairs to organize forced Jewish emigration. Once in Vienna, he found an enormous punch card operation working around the clock. The Hollerith program superseded every other aspect of German preparations.
"For weeks in advance [of the Anschluss]," remembered Eichmann, "every able-bodied man they could find was put to work in three shifts: writing file cards for an enormous circular card file, several yards in diameter, which a man sitting on a piano stool could operate and find any card he wanted thanks to a system of punch holes. All information important for Austria was entered on these cards. The data was taken from annual reports, handbooks, the newspapers of all the political parties, membership files; in short, everything imaginable . . . Each card carried name, address, party membership, whether Jew, Freemason or practicing Catholic or Protestant; whether politically active, whether this or whether that. During that period, our regular work was put on ice."
There was little question to the world that the May 1939 national census was racial in nature. New York Times coverage of the mammoth project made clear that this census would
"provide detailed information on the ancestry, religious faith and material possessions of all residents. Special blanks will be provided on which each person must state whether he is of pure 'Aryan' blood. The status of each of his grandparents must be given and substantiated by evidence in case of inquiry."
The purpose of the 1939 census was to identify the so-called "racial Jews" in Germany proper, add Jews of any definition in the new territories of the expanded Reich.
In addition, Germany was preparing for all-out war and without the census, it could not identify exactly where all its draftable men were, and which women would step into their economic shoes once mobilized.
A special envelope containing a so-called Supplemental Card was created. This all-important card recorded the individual's bloodline data and functioned as the racial linchpin of the operation. Each head of household was to fill out his name and address and then document his family's ancestral lines. Jews understandably feared the newest identification. Census takers were cautioned to overcome any distrust by assuring families that the information would not be released to the financial authorities.
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.
HOLLAND SURRENDERED to Germany on May 15, 1940, after just five days of fierce attack. The Reich immediately began planning the complete destruction of the Dutch Jewish community.... But in significant measure, at times citizens of Holland demonstrated open solidarity with persecuted Jews and displayed an unwillingness to deliver their neighbors...
The Reich needed a very special expert to help to engineer the roundups [of Jews].
They found their man in Jacobus Lambertus Lentz. He was not a Nazi... Lentz was a population expert, cocooned in his own stacked and tabulated world of ratios, registration programs, and rattling Hollerith machines. Perfection in human cataloging was for Lentz more than a matter of pride, it was a crusade.
Step one, on July 3, 1941, was the identification of Jewish refugees living in Amsterdam...
Then, on August 17, Lentz devised a unique tamper-proof personal identification card that could not be forged. Translucent inks were employed to print key words that disappeared under a quartz lamp. The stamp franking was acetone-soluble. Photos of the individual were affixed front and back through a window transparently sealed and adhered with permanent glue. A fingerprint of the person's right index finger was then impressed upon the back of one of the photos so it always displayed through the small window. The individual's signature on watermarked paper completed the document, which included numerous personal details. Lentz' card was a masterpiece of human documentation.
When Lentz offered his specimen to the Criminal Technology Institute of the Reich Criminal Police Office, it was eagerly approved... Within weeks, German civil administrators began requiring all Dutch citizens over the age of fourteen to sign up. It took about a year before everyone was registered.
But Lentz' personal card was more than just an advanced domestic identification. A second portion detached at issuance created a card-like receipt. Those card receipts were retained and organized into massive files cataloging the personal details of all who lived in the Netherlands.
Every Dutch adult was required to carry Lentz' personal identification card. But a feature was added that only affected Jews. Eventually the letter J was stamped on every identification card carried by those defined as Jewish...
On October 22, all Jewish enterprises were compelled to register. Jews were defined, as in the Nuremberg Laws, according to their grandparents, not their current religious affiliation...
Although nearly all of Holland angrily condemned the Nazi registration, the Jews did as instructed. With few exceptions, every Dutch Jewish family dutifully picked up its questionnaires, filled them out completely, and filed with the nearest registration office. The uncanny compliance was based on traditional Dutch respect for laws and regulations, as well as the stated penalty for not registering—five years in prison and the confiscation of property.