IBM and the Holocaust (21 page)

Dehomag didn't own the entire German market for punch cards—only 95 percent of it. Since the first days of Herman Hollerith's census contracts at the start of the twentieth century, IBM and its predecessor companies had been dog-fighting the Powers Accounting Machine Company in the United States and indeed anywhere in the world Powers tried to do business.

James Powers was a Russian immigrant to America who had helped the U.S. Census Bureau break free of Hollerith's monopoly in 1905 by developing a similar card sorter. As such, Powers and the Hollerith companies constantly jousted and litigated on patent rights. In 1914, while Watson's criminal conviction for anti-trust was in appeal, a financially battered Powers, anxious to avoid further confrontations, simply asked Watson's CTR to license its punch card technology. Without that license, Powers declared it would go out of business. Under the specter of federal charges, Watson ostentatiously agreed to license his competitor, Powers, but at an exorbitant 25 percent royalty. This would ensure that Powers would survive as a miniscule player in the punch card field, thus obviating federal charges of total monopoly. But the 25 percent royalty also meant that Powers' machines were more expensive for customers and therefore profoundly less competitive. Besides, IBM would receive a good share of all of Powers' revenues.
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After the government dropped its anti-trust case against Watson, he was less inclined to let Powers survive. Recalling a tactic from his NCR days, Watson litigated against Powers extensively for various forms of patent infringement, raided its key managers in America and abroad, and systematically pressured clients to switch to Hollerith systems.
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In Germany, Powers did enjoy some minor installations dating back to the 1920s primarily because it sold rather than leased its machines and had developed some highly specialized models. What's more, some machines, even though old, were simply still functioning.
Some
was too many for Watson. Dehomag continued the IBM legacy of litigation by suing Powers in Germany. But this time, it was not for patent infringement. It was for not being sufficiently Aryan.

In the highly charged Nazi business environment, where certain words possessed special meaning, Powers was one of many firms that rushed to declare themselves "under German management." But in reality, charged Heidinger in the court complaint, two Americans were managing the Powers firm. Even after the Powers board of directors ousted its two American managers, Heidinger claimed that the foreigners were nonetheless secretly controlling the company. All this, he argued, was designed by Powers "to facilitate marketing for its products" within the Third Reich, thereby competing unfairly with Dehomag through false advertising. Dehomag, on the other hand, was pure German and free from foreign influence, the complaint attested.
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In late April 1934, the court agreed and permanently enjoined Powers from representing that it was "German." Punishment for infractions, the court ruled, would be an unlimited fine or imprisonment up to six months for each infraction.
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Watson had specifically authorized the Powers suit and been kept up to date on its developments. What's more, Watson wanted to identify Powers' clients and convert them to IBM equipment. Dehomag salesmen kept detailed intelligence on all Powers customers. Upon request of the New York office, Lichterfelde was able to produce a list of every Powers customer, in perfect columnar fashion, listing the year the client purchased Powers equipment, which units were rented or purchased, the machine's application, and which Dehomag sales office was nearby. That list was regurgitated alphabetically, chronologically, and geographically.
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The uses for a finely tuned Hollerith surveillance system were unlimited. Germany never lost sight of its most important objective: the war against the Jewish people and other undesirables. In that war, Germany would undertake a steep, years-long technologic climb as IBM systems improved, Nazi registration campaigns multiplied, and the net tightened. The Third Reich was just beginning to apply Dehomag solutions.

By the end of 1934, medical, welfare, and insurance offices were joined in their punch card registrations by nursing homes and sanitariums as well as an ever-increasing number of German healthcare practitioners. A Registry of anti-social persons was launched. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, inaugurated the
SS Statistical Yearbook.
And "continuing education" courses in racial hygiene conducted by noted statisticians became widely advertised.
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In addition, preparations were finalizing for a national
Work Book.
Employers were to fill out a booklet for each employee and then submit it to the appropriate Labor Office. Eventually, 354 such Labor Offices would be opened across Germany. While the
Work Book
was overtly a means of identifying and regimenting every worker in the Third Reich, a data field near the top right asked whether, under the current Nazified definitions, the worker was a "foreigner or stateless."
Work Books,
tabulated by punch card, would become the basis for ever-increasing population scrutiny. Jews, of course, were not permitted to work. When they were discovered, they were terminated. He who did not work would starve. Eventually, without a
Work Book,
Jews could not obtain ration cards to purchase food.
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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."
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Statistical sweeps with the help of Hollerith technology were already canvassing baptism records, birth and death registries, and other church records, not only to certify Aryanism, but also to isolate Judaism. Dehomag's customers included such bodies as the Catholic Burial Society in Munich and the Church Council in Eisenach. Some church groups processed information on their own equipment, some merely reported their data to other monitoring agencies. Eventually, the Non-Germanic Family Baptismal Registry, compiled by evangelical bodies, would list thousands of names of Jews and others who had converted to Christianity during the previous century.
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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."
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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.

V A NAZI MEDAL FOR WATSON

THOUSANDS OF SWASTIKA FLAGS FLAPPED TEN-ABREAST
across long marching columns of
Sturm Abteilung,
goose-stepping under a warm Nuremberg sun. Chevroned glockenspielers and drummers festively tapped martial rhythms beneath tasseled regimental standards that wagged astride 100,000 rippling shoulders of National Socialism. Dressed in paramilitary garb, a legion of stern-eyed conscripted laborers, each bearing a long shovel slung across their collarbone like a rifle, tramped along boulevards bannered with fifty-foot swastika bunting. A throng of 56,000 jackbooted disciples sprawled the length of a vast field until their image vanished into the distance. September 15, 1935, was Party Day, a momentous climax to a week of choreographed Nazi demonstrations. It was epic.
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Over cobble-stoned streets, paved market squares, tar-topped avenues, and embedded trolley tracks, the stage-managed multitudes flowed in testament to
Fuhrer
worship. As rectangular human masses passed reviewing points, officials of the NSDAP and German government stood at attention and pumped their arms stiff, palms outstretched. Everywhere the rallying call trumpeted:
"Sieg."
Everywhere the crowd answered:
"Heil! Sieg . . . Heil! Sieg . . . Heil!"
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Nuremberg was kinetic with cordons of artillery and air defense guns, light tanks, and horse cavalry brigades lumbering beside armies of uniformed men. Warplanes roared above in acrobatic fly-bys. Then they theatrically bombed and burned a sham village constructed on a field. Hundreds of miles away, German U-boats suddenly emerged from beneath the waves to conduct naval maneuvers coordinated with the other land-air shows of military might.
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The Third Reich was at war—even if the invasions had not yet begun. Those would come. For now, Germany wanted the world to know that it was ready for territorial defense and conquest. The world understood and recoiled. All of Germany's illicit rearmament was in flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which after the Great War guaranteed a demilitarized German republic. Front-page headlines and worried diplomatic dispatches openly wondered when a hot new conflict would erupt. International anti-Nazi agitation—boycotts and energetic protest gatherings—demanded civilized nations break Germany's economic back to deter her from aggression and Jewish persecution.

But even if Germany's territorial war had not yet begun, its battle against Jewish existence was raging. So despite the military marching and ostentatious weaponry, this day, September 15, 1935, would be dominated not by border threats, but by Nazism's anti-Semitic frenzy.

Since 1933, the Reich had legislated Jewish dislocation from virtually every facet of German professional, commercial, and social life. Many Jews were so thoroughly excluded by Aryan mandates, they were reduced to buying and selling mainly to each other just to survive. Pauperization of German Jewry was a real threat and malnutrition of Jewish children was already attracting the attention of international aid agencies. Yet many Jews still clung to their relative anonymity. In businesses owned or controlled by Jews, or where their participation was essential, Jews felt they could continue unidentified, unnoticed, unmolested.
⁴
If they could just stand in, they would not stand out.

Nazi theorists continued to bicker over what amount of Judaic parentage constituted an excludable Jew, and how far to trace bloodline. Determining Aryan pedigree was complicated by endless demographic and geographic variables that simply slipped through the punch cards. Cagey replies to questionnaires from individuals or companies nervous about their answers, as well as changing residential and business addresses, undermined the process. Moreover, suspect citizens rushed to baptismal fonts and church pews to assume new or more pronounced Christian personas. In consequence, tens of thousands of racial purity examinations had been convened since 1933.
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Laxity and ambiguity helped. About a third of Germany's nearly 450,000 remaining registered Jews dwelled in Germany's smaller cities and towns where in many instances they continued to exist unmolested. Many local and national government agencies often found it easier to continue trading with reliable Jewish firms than locate an untested alternative.
Hausfraus
managing a tight budget commonly sneaked away to Jewish retailers seeking discounts after their dogmatic husbands went off to work.
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Doctrinaire Nazis fought back. Night classes for housewives instructed women how and why to avoid Jewish shops. A court ruled that husbands were not legally bound to pay for purchases their wives made at Jewish stores. The mayor of Baden was fired when his dealings with Jews were discovered. Jew-baiters such as Julius Streicher published rabid, pornographic newspaper accounts of ritual murder and rampant sexual perversion by Jews, and then cajoled and humiliated all loyal Germans into boycotting Jewish enterprises. Brown Shirts blocked the doors of Jewish establishments and graffittied their exteriors. But too many Germans simply would not or could not comply with the complex confusing strictures to not buy from Jews. Most importantly, too many simply did not know where all the Jews were.
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In the absence of an explicit law defining exactly who in Germany was a Jew, Nazi persecution was far from hermetic. For years, such a definition would have been a cloudy exercise. Even if Nazis could agree on such an exegesis, no one could back up the definition with hard data. Since the advent of the Third Reich, thousands of Jews nervously assumed they could hide from the Aryan clause.

But Jews could not hide from millions of punch cards thudding through Hollerith machines, comparing names across generations, address changes across regions, family trees and personal data across unending registries. It did not matter that the required forms or questionnaires were filled in by leaking pens and barely sharpened pencils, only that they were later tabulated and sorted by IBM's precision technology.