IBM and the Holocaust (61 page)

The system was soon ready. In early June 1941, anti-Nazi Dutch resistance groups detonated two bombs in Amsterdam. In reprisal, the Germans took action against 300 Dutch Jews, as well as a number of German refugees between the ages of 18 and 30. The Nazis relied upon Jewish organizational lists to round up Jewish youth workers. British intelligence reports asserted that when the number of Jews the Germans wanted fell short, additional hostages were taken. A British intelligence officer, citing a Dutch Jewish refugee, reported the additional action this way: "The Gestapo came with lists, from
Standesamt
[the Registry Office], carrying out searches in houses and looking for Jews in certain alphabetical groups. On one occasion, they took all the Jews whose names came within the alphabetical register S to V." The British report added that all seized Jews seized were eventually shipped to Mauthausen concentration camp, "and most of them also died" within several weeks."
⁷⁴

By June 16, 1941, Lentz reported that his office had almost completed the total registration of Jewish persons commanded by decree V06/41, except for a few "stragglers." He added that his Inspectorate "will now begin the registration of different groups via Hollerith method." Lentz wondered whether the Germans wanted any specific Jewish population segments sorted first. "I can process and pass on information," he wrote, "in case police services or German services urgently are looking for special groups, for example, artists or dentists."
⁷⁵

A few weeks later, on July 26, 1941, Lentz notified Calmeyer that the Inspectorate had established his own priorities. Processing by age was already underway. Next, he would tackle those of Jewish blood who had served in the Dutch military. "It is my intention," assured Lentz, "after these duties, to start with the control on the punching of Hollerith cards to improve the coding of professions." He would need a few weeks to finish these tasks if approved in that order. "I hope to hear from your side soon if you accept this proposal."
⁷⁶

Within a month, virtually all "stragglers" had been found out or had come forward. By September 5, Wimmer was about to review summaries that identified the exact number of Jews, broken down by specific categories.

Lentz had registered, sorted, and tabulated 118,455 Dutch Jews; 14,495 German Jews; and 7,295 others, as well as 19,561 mixed breed
Mischlinge,
for a total of 159,806. This included 700 so-called racial Jews who were practicing Roman Catholicism; 1,245 belonging to Protestant churches; and 12,643 with no religious affiliation.
⁷⁷

Lentz reflected on his mammoth accomplishment while jotting notes in his personal handwritten journal, entitled
Memoires I, Registration of Jews
(Source and Development)
: "I rented a Hollerith installation," he penned, "with which the professional statistical survey has been composed, which satisfied the Germans very much, and gave them the convictions that my opinions had been correct."
⁷⁸

He also thanked his Nazi overseers for their recognition for all his technical achievements. "I would like to express appreciation," Lentz wrote to Wimmer's office, "of the confidence you repose in myself and my staff. Thanks to this and to your cooperation, the Census Office was able to contrive ways and means of carrying out its often-difficult task. May I express the hope that we shall continue to enjoy your confidence." He also wrote, "This encourages us to strive with utter devotion to do justice to our slogan, 'to record is to serve.' "
⁷⁹

IBM's hastily established subsidiary in Holland, Watson Bedrijfsmachine Maatschappij, at 34 Frederiksplein in Amsterdam, listed impressive numbers for the first eight months of 1940.
⁸⁰

Cash: $180,088.
⁸¹

Accounts receivable: $495,692.
⁸²

Plant, office equipment, rental machines, and parts investment: $965,803.00.
⁸³

The subsidiary reported a gross profit of $116,651.90 for its eight months of operation in 1940.
⁸⁴

Ironically, by the time the subsidiary's profits were merged into charges added on the New York books, including $522,709.03 described only as "Other," as well as Eliminations and Adjustments, IBM reported a net loss for its Dutch subsidiary of $122,668.70.
⁸⁵

During 1941, IBM sent Holland 132 million punch cards from America; the subsidiary was by that time operating near its capacity of 150 million cards annually. Those cards were sold for $106,920.
⁸⁶

Ten days after the census ordered by decree VO6/41 was fully compiled, punched, and sorted, Nazi authorities demanded all Jews wear the Jewish star. Again a number of Dutch people reacted with outrage and protest. British diplomats reported that in one town, when the burgomaster ordered Jews to affix the star, many non-Jews wore one as well.
⁸⁷

But it was not the outward visage of six gold points worn on the chest for all to see on the street, it was the 80 columns punched and sorted in a Hollerith facility that marked the Jews of Holland for deportation to concentration camps. The Germans understood this all too well. On October 2, 1941, H. Bohmcker, a key Nazi official in Amsterdam, gleefully wrote to Arthur Seyss-Inquart, German
Kommissar
for Holland: "Thanks to decree 6/41, all Dutch Jews are now in the bag."
⁸⁸

FRANCE EXCELLED
at many things. Punch card automation was not one of them. Although IBM had been able to install several hundred Hollerith devices, mainly for high-volume military, railway, and banking users, Reich forces had in large part confiscated those machines. The rest of France simply did not possess the punch card orientation of many other European countries, such as Holland and Germany. IBM learned early that its brand of technologic change came slowly to some markets. France was a prime example.

Holland's census and registration projects were masterminded by a fanatical population registrar commanding hundreds of advanced machines still intact in a well-entrenched Hollerith infrastructure supplied with decamillions of punch cards flowing from IBM NY and other European subsidiaries. Decades of Dutch registration that had innocently recorded religion and personal details could, under Lentz, be centralized into a clenching social dragnet.
⁸⁹

But France lacked a tradition of census taking that identified religion. Henri Bunle, chief of the General Statistics Office of France, explained to Vichy collaborators on March 4, 1941: "The General Statistics Office of France is not in a position to rectify published numbers as the last religious census in our country was undertaken in 1872. Since that date, the individual questionnaires used for counting have never touched upon questions of the religion of those counted." Later, on April 12, 1941, he informed the newly established General Commission for Jewish Questions (GCJQ): "France is actually the only country in Europe, or almost, where the number of Jews in its population is unknown, not to mention their age statistics, nationalities, professional affiliations, etc."
⁹⁰
It was common to proclaim that no one really knew how many Jews lived in either France or even Paris.
⁹¹

Inexorably complicating identification was a confusing patchwork of geopolitical social realities. Since the rise of Hitler in 1933, masses of refugees had been streaming in and out of France. In some cases, some members of refugee families remained while others in the group relocated. Most estimated that there were hundreds of thousands of undocumented refugees and other foreign-born Jews in France when Germany invaded in 1940. After France was bifurcated into an Occupied Zone in the north, including Paris, and the Unoccupied Zone in the south, which became the Vichy collaborationist regime, thousands of Jewish families in the north flocked to Vichy for safety. In some cases, German forces in the north actually expelled Jews to Vichy as a preliminary measure, much as Jews were expelled to Poland before the Reich invaded. During spring and summer 1940, when things settled down in the north, thousands of families cautiously ventured back to look after their businesses, possessions, or family members left behind. Jews routinely returned to Paris as late as November 1940. During May 1941, special trains transported 8,000 Jews from Vichy back to the north. Undeniably, Jews were constantly on the move between the two French zones. Addresses changed constantly. No one knew how many of the migrating Jews were foreign or native born.
⁹²

In either French territory, many of the Jews, whether stationary or migrating, did not identify with Judaism, or hid their religious background. Many genuinely doubted their lineage would qualify under the Reich's rule about Jewish grandparents. Who could even trace or identify one's ancestry, especially if earlier generations hailed from outside France? Ambiguities about the dimensions of Jewish existence in France persisted even as many Jews reacted to looming anti-Jewish measures by openly attending synagogues. There was no way to quantify the number of Jews in France or generalize about their character.
⁹³

The problems of ancestral tracking, shifting addresses, and other population uncertainties were only multiplied by the twin French jurisdictions. Sometimes anti-Jewish measures were executed in one zone and not the other. Sometimes such measures were enacted months apart, or with vastly differing tenets. Aryanization of Jewish business, for example, was decreed on October 24, 1940, in Occupied France; the similar decree in Vichy France was not issued until ten months later, August 27, 1941. Adding in Jewish commercial and social existence in French colonies such as Morocco and Algeria, and making special provisions for the uniqueness of Paris itself, only further muddied the ability to promulgate and enforce actions.
⁹⁴

Berlin could overcome much of the geographical and ethnic confusion in France if it had enjoyed the regimented cooperation of its collaborators, whether reluctant or eager. However, for many leaders in Vichy France, willful collaboration with the Reich was strained through a French rightist mindset, which in many ways mimicked the early days of the Hitler movement. In the beginning phases of Nazism, foreign Jews in Germany, so-called Eastern Jews, were targeted first and foremost. In Nazi Germany, German Jews who fought for the Reich in WWI were initially afforded special status. So too, the French right wing conceptualized foreign Jews, especially refugees, as France's scourge. By this ultra-patriotic French thinking, the Jews chiefly deserving of brutal persecution were not the established Jews of France, and especially not those who had distinguished themselves with great national service. War veterans and even those contributing to France's cultural and scientific realms were worthy of special consideration. To do otherwise could be seen by French rightists as an encroachment on certain French prerogatives.
⁹⁵

No less a Vichy commander than Admiral Francois Darlan, vice prime minister of Vichy with direct oversight of the anti-Jewish bureaus, was quoted as telling his Cabinet: "The stateless Jews who, for the past 15 years have invaded our country do not interest me. But the others, the good old French Jews, are entitled to all the protection that we can give them: I even have some of them in my family." Hence, a long list of special exemptions crept into the official French enforcement of anti-Semitic statutes, on either side of the Vichy line.
⁹⁶

Those in both zones quickly learned that their anti-Jewish collaboration would be dealt with when France was liberated. As early as November 11, 1940, the leader of Free French forces, Charles DeGaulle, issued Nazi surrogates in Vichy a warning: "Be assured . . . the cruel decrees directed against French Jews can and will have no validity in Free France. These blows are no less a blow against the honor of France than they are an injustice against her Jewish citizens. . . . the wrongs done in France itself [will] be righted." DeGaulle broadcast his remarks from recaptured French Equatorial Africa, and then asked that they be proclaimed to a meeting of the American Jewish Congress at Carnegie Hall.
⁹⁷

Oppressive Nazi rule could have dictated its iron will to all reluctant French authorities, and conquered the demographic uncertainties of a French Jewry in two zones if only the Holleriths could be deployed. That is precisely what Holleriths brought to any problem—organization where there was disorder and tabular certainty where there was confusion. The Nazis could have punch-carded the Jews of France into the same genocidal scenario in force elsewhere, including Holland. But in the aftermath of the
MB
's technologic ravages, France's punch card infrastructure was simply incapable of supporting the massive series of programs Berlin required. Even if the machines could have been gathered, transferred, or built—CEC just didn't have the punch cards.