IBM and the Holocaust (28 page)

Yet for the Hitler regime, the pace of Jewish destruction was still not swift enough nor sufficiently complete. Although Germany's professing Jews had been identified, thousands of so-called "racial Jews" with Jewish ancestors dating back to the prior century had yet to be marked. In 1937, the Reich ordered another nationwide census that would prepare the country for military mobilization, and for the Jews would be the final and decisive identification step. Dehomag eagerly agreed to organize the project.
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The racial portion of the census was designed to pinpoint ancestral Jews as defined by the Nuremberg Laws, ensuring no escape from the Reich's anti-Semitic campaign. In addition to the usual census questions, a special card asked whether any of the individual's grandparents was Jewish. When completely filled out, the card would be isolated in a separate envelope for processing by both the census authorities and security offices.
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The project, originally scheduled for May 1938, would be an enormous undertaking for IBM, requiring a huge expansion of manpower, machinery, and processing space. Seventy sorters, some sixty tabulators, seventy-six multipliers, and 90 million punch cards would be needed for the RM 3.5 million contract. IBM supervisors in Geneva, Stockholm, and New York understood how difficult the challenge would be. A memo from IBM's European Factory Manager J.G. Johnston to IBM NY supervisors in Sweden specified, "we also have to raise considerable funds for the financing of the RM 3.5 million census order" even though the Reich's payments would be distributed over a fifteen-month period. Other IBM executives seemed to sense that the forthcoming racial census would represent a project so far-reaching, it would be the last of its kind, and therefore IBM's investment would have to plan for a temporary surge. "You should take into consideration . . . the fact that the German census order is a peak load which may not reoccur."
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The Nazi establishment was ecstatic about the implications for German Jewry. "In May of next year," bragged the leading NSDAP newspaper,
Volkischer Beobachter,
"the largest and most comprehensive census will take place. It will be larger and more comprehensive than Germany, and even the rest of the world, has ever known. . . . it is the duty of every Volks-comrade to answer every single question completely and truthfully . . . [thus] giving the Fuhrer and his colleagues the basis for the future legislation of the next five to ten years."
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One Nazi bureaucrat enthused, "The general census of 1938 is intended to also determine the blood-wise configuration of the German population. . . . the results could also be recorded on the police department's technical registration cards. The police would thus gain an insight into the racial composition of the persons living in their jurisdictions. And this would also accomplish the goals set by the Main Office of the Security Police."
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But the much-anticipated May 1938 census was delayed. 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. First came the violence. Jewish merchants were rounded up and publicly beaten, their stores looted. Viennese crowds cheered when Jewish men and women were forced to their knees to scrub streets as rifle butts flailed them.
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Page one headlines in the
New York Times
immediately decried an "Orgy of Jew-baiting." The article described sadistic cruelties calculated to coerce Jews into immediately emigrating penniless to anywhere. "In Vienna and Austria," the
New York Times
declared, "no vestige of decency or humanity has checked the will to destroy, and there has been an unbroken orgy of Jew-baiting such as Europe has not known since the darkest days of the Middle Ages."
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Then came the arrests. Thousands of Jews were extracted from their homes and offices, loaded onto wagons, and shipped to concentration camps, such as Dachau, where they suffered bestial tortures, starvation, and back-breaking labor. The camps, too, were designed to convince Austrian Jews to leave the country—should they ever be released from incarceration. And only those who promised to emigrate at once were even considered for release.
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When the pace of emigration was not quick enough, Jews in the Austrian provinces were simply expelled from their homes with no notice. More than 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children in the Burgenland region of Austria, many with roots dating back centuries, were loaded onto trucks, driven to the Jewish quarter of Vienna, and summarily dumped. The Vienna Jewish community housed them in synagogues and other buildings as best they could, but the weather was unusually cold and many of the children suffered extreme exposure and near starvation from the ordeal.
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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. The mass media described "heart-breaking scenes" across Vienna as trusted Jewish employees—many of ten- and twenty-year tenure—were suddenly ousted without warning or severance.
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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.
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Once Jews were identified, their lives in Austria were over.

Suicide became a frequent alternative. In the first 10 days of German annexation, ninety-six persons committed suicide. As more Jews found themselves dispossessed or facing the prospect of Dachau, they entered into suicide pacts and even suicide clubs.
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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."
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IBM was in Austria. Before Hitler came to power, the company was represented only by an agency called Furth & Company, operated in part by Stephan Furth. But in 1933, after Hitler declared the Third Reich, Watson established a wholly-owned IBM subsidiary in Austria. Furth then went to the United States to undergo sales training with IBM in New York. Shortly thereafter, Furth returned to Vienna as co-manager of the new wholly-owned IBM subsidiary. That subsidiary had the benefit of one of IBM's most talented punch card engineers, Gustav Tauschek, and Manager Victor Furth. Another Dehomag-trained manager named Berthold later joined Furth. In 1934, IBM undertook the Austrian census, and two years later, Watson approved a card printing plant for the country.
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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.
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"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."
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The German racial census scheduled for May 1938 was postponed a year to allow Dehomag to draw up new plans to count the population of Austria as well. Dehomag opened several additional branches throughout the greater Reich to accommodate the extra load. More than twenty-five offices would tackle the task of profiling the expanded base of some 70 million Germans and Austrians.
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Hitler's reign of terror against the Jews continued throughout 1938 to the continuing astonishment of the world. The final stage of confiscation was launched on April 27 as the Reich ordered Jews to register virtually all possessions.
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Hollerith machines were kept busy tabulating assets.

Conditions in Nazi Germany became ever more nightmarish. Beheading was adopted as the dreaded new punishment of the unappealable Peoples' Court, which adjudicated in secret but announced its executions to the world media as a warning to all those the Reich considered special enemies. Scores of ghastly concentration camps were opened throughout the Greater Reich, each spawning its own infamy of cruel torture and degradation depicted in the newsreels and magazines of the day. Mob violence during the day, a dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night, humiliating public campaigns, and endless decrees forcing Jews further into starvation and impoverishment rained terror on Jewish existence in the Greater Reich.
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World revulsion against Germany was inspired not just by its anti-Semitic outrages, but by a continuous assault of highly publicized oppression against Catholics, Protestant church groups, intellectuals, and others the Nazis did not agree with.
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Hitler's war menacing clearly identified Czechoslovakia for imminent takeover. Poland and France seemed next. Many thought it was just a matter of time before Europe re-ignited into a total war that America would be compelled to enter. It became increasingly hard for anyone to argue Germany's case, even euphemistically in code. Then came the turning point for Americans and indeed the world:
Kristallnacht
—The Night of the Broken Glass.

November 10, 1938, on the twentieth anniversary of Germany's surrender in the Great War, all Germany exploded into a national pogrom of depravity and violence against Jews heretofore not seen. The Reich's pretext was the assassination of a German consular official in Paris by a despondent Jewish refugee. Within hours of the news, disciplined cadres of shock troops driving in open cars, directed by uniformed SA leaders, with merciless synchrony, deployed in virtually every town and city of the Third Reich during the early hours. Almost on cue, Hitler's Germany erupted into a tempest of shattered glass. Store panes, display cases, fixtures, office doors, and ordinary windows—if it was glass, the Nazis smashed it. Synagogues, cafes, schools, offices, homes—wherever there was unexcised Jewish presence, the Brown Shirts struck.
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Then Jewish possessions were systematically ripped, splattered, and looted. Brown Shirts spread Torahs across the ground and danced upon the scrolls. Furniture was thrown into the street. Valuables were carted away as trophies. Pictures, books, and curtains were torn.
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Kerosene came next. Floors and drapes were methodically doused. An enthusiastic drenching was reserved for Torahs, prayer shawls, holy books, and devotional
bimahs
in synagogues. Tossed matches. Rolled incendiary bombs. Lobbed petrol bombs. Nearly everything Jewish was set aflame. Not just in Berlin. Not just in Vienna. In every town and city of the Third Reich.
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More than 15,000 Jews dragged from their homes were brutalized before the cheering onlookers, herded into trucks, dispatched to jails, and in many cases, directly to concentration camps. Firemen watched the flames with laughter, taking care that neighboring Aryan structures were unaffected. Policemen studiously directed traffic, allowing the marauders complete freedom of operation.
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Here among the ruins was the final overnight summary of Jewish existence in Germany and a prophecy for their bleak fate in Europe. Jewish life would ultimately be incinerated everywhere. The consequences of identification had been irrevocably unmasked. Whatever doubt the world had about the intentions of the Hitler regime, that doubt vaporized with the curls of smoke rising from hundreds of synagogues and Jewish offices in Germany.

Newspapers, newsreels, and radio broadcasts across the globe burned with headlines condemning Hitler's Reich as savage and barbarous. The
New
York Times
printed a tall page one banner headline: "Nazis Smash, Loot and Burn Jewish Shops and Temples." The newspaper tellingly noted that the only Vienna synagogue not torched was one "that the authorities have protected . . . because it contains records of the Jewish community of Vienna that could not be replaced."
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Washington recalled its ambassador from Berlin. Western diplomats called for concerted action to stem the anti-Semitic outrages. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a sharply worded denunciation in which he personally penned the words, "I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization." Gallup Polls asked whether Hitler could be believed when he said he had no more territorial ambitions in Europe beyond Czechoslovakia; 92 percent of American respondents and 93 percent of British respondents declared Hitler could not be believed. Hitler's followers in America had already been prosecuted in high-profile cases under various civil rights statutes. Now, the term "Nazi sympathizer" became widely used. And Nazi collaboration and propagandizing was deemed sufficiently subversive and "un-American" that eventually a special Congressional committee investigated.
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