IBM and the Holocaust (73 page)
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.
When Jews were worked to death, they were tracked with Inmate Cards, Hollerith Transfer Lists, punch cards, and endless sorters. It was expensive, but, in the Nazi view, a necessary cost allowing the Reich to track and regiment a Jew's every move. When enslaved Jews in work camps were about to be killed, their cards were taken—they no longer needed one.
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When ghettoized Jews were selected for deportation, and dispatched by Hollerith-scheduled trains to killing stations in Poland, they received no cards. Their names were not printed on any Hollerith Transfer List. When they arrived at the mass murder centers in Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, or any of the others sites reserved for eradication, a doctor briefly glanced at victims hurriedly filing past. A wave to the left meant reporting to the camp entrance for the prospect of laboring for a few days, perhaps a month. But most were never registered in any
Arbeitseinsatz.
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They had outlived the potential for usefulness. They were expeditiously directed to their final destiny: the showers.
The synchrony was exquisite. From the moment a Jew stepped onto the train platform in the ghetto, to the moment he was violently thrashed out of the boxcar at the final stop and led to his death, there were never any delays. Precision timing and scheduling was indispensable to the process. No longer worth the expense of a bullet, victims were gassed in large groups. At Auschwitz—2,000 at a time. Prussic acid pellets,
Zyklon B
, were dropped into water buckets to accomplish the mass asphyxiation. The screaming, clanging on the steel doors, and shrieks of ancient Jewish incantation,
Sh'ma Yisra'el,
stopped after fifteen minutes. Generally within an hour of stepping off the train, the Jews in a transport were successfully exterminated.
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Nor were any death records transmitted. It was enough to inform
Zentral Institut
that the people had boarded a train. Hence, the machines only tabulated the evacuations. No more was necessary. From these trains, there was no escape, no need for tracking, no further utility, and no further cost would be expended. At this point, the Jews were no longer worth a bullet, nor the price of a single punch card.
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Only at the moment of extermination did the Jews of Europe finally break free from Hitler's Holleriths.
GERMANY HAD
forced Jews to help organize their own annihilation by establishing
Judenrate,
that is, Jewish councils. These councils were generally comprised not of communal leaders, but of arbitrarily selected Jewish personalities, frequently engineers. Engineers were chosen because they could relate to the mechanics of the numerical process underway.
Judenrat
leaders Ephraim Barash of Bialystok and Adam Czerniakow of Warsaw, for example, were both engineers. Eichmann considered himself an engineer by trade.
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Those council members who did not cooperate, or who even hesitated, were quickly murdered—often on the spot. Amid accusations of collaboration that would reverberate forever, the
Judenrate
were faced with the impossible choice of functioning—literally at gunpoint—as best they could, as long as they could. With their dismal ghetto communities starving, and rotting corpses piled high in the streets for lack of mortuary facilities, the councils hoped to somehow survive the brutalities of ghetto life, hour to hour.
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Stories about gas chambers at the end of the railway track were circulating. So by their cooperation with constant census and registration projects, as well as organized evacuation, and, in many instances, the virtual self-selection of names to fill the trains, the enormity of Nazi intent took shape.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
XIV THE SPOILS OF GENOCIDE, I
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.
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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.
In fact, a pattern emerged throughout war-ravaged Europe. Before America entered the war, IBM NY and its subsidiaries worked directly with Germany or Italy, or its occupying forces. As part of the strategic alliance, it also worked with German sympathizers and allies in countries such as Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.
2
Watson would even order new subsidiaries established in conquered territories in cadence with Nazi invasions.
3
Even after America declared war, IBM offices worldwide would openly transact with these clients, or with other subsidiaries, until the moment General Ruling 11 was triggered for that particular territory. As the war in Europe expanded, General Ruling 11 jurisdiction was extended as well until all of Nazi-dominated Europe was proscribed.
4
Once U.S. law prohibited transactions, IBM NY's apparent direct management of its European operations seemed to end. But, in truth, executives in New York could still monitor events and exercise authority in Europe through neutral country subsidiaries. These overseas units always remained under the parent company's control. Moreover, special bureaucratic exemptions were regularly sought by IBM NY, or its subsidiaries, to continue or expand business dealings throughout occupied Europe.
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Official American demands that business be curtailed were often ignored.
6
Once the United States entered the war, Axis custodians would be appointed as titular directors of subsidiaries in occupied territory. But these enemy custodians never looted the IBM divisions. Rather, they zealously protected the assets, extended productivity, and increased profits. Existing IBM executives were kept in place as day-to-day managers and, in some instances, even appointed deputy enemy custodians. In France, for example, although SS Officer Heinz Westerholt was appointed enemy custodian of CEC, he, in turn, appointed Dehomag's Oskar Hoermann as deputy custodian. CEC's Roger Virgile continued as managing director to keep the company profitable and productive. In Belgium, Nazi custodian H. Garbrecht remained aloof, allowing IBM managers Louis Bosman and G. Walter Galland to remain in place and virtually in command. In Germany, Dehomag's board of directors was superseded by custodian Hermann Fellinger. Fellinger replaced Heidinger, and then insisted that Rottke, Hummel, and all the other managers in Dehomag's twenty offices continue producing record profits.
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Whether overseen by Nazi executives or Watson's own, IBM Europe thrived.
In the later war years, as the Allies moved across the western and eastern fronts, various liberated or about-to-be liberated territories emerged as exempt from prohibited trading under General Ruling 11. Sometimes the applicable regulations changed on an almost daily basis. IBM NY or IBM Geneva would tenaciously check with American authorities for permission to communicate or transact with previously proscribed subsidiaries. When direct contact was not possible, American legations passed the messages as a courtesy.
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During IBM's continuing wartime commerce, the world was always aware that the machinery of Nazi occupation was being wielded to exterminate as many Jews as possible as quickly as possible. After endless newspaper and newsreel reports, and once the Allies confirmed their own intelligence revelations in summer 1942, the conclusion became inescapable: Germany's goal was nothing short of complete physical extermination of all European Jewry. On December 17, 1942, the Allies finally declared there would be "war crime" trials and punishment. The Allies warned that all who cooperated with Hitler's genocide would be held responsible before the bar of international justice. In Parliament, members rose in awed silence as one MP rang out, "There are many today who . . . but for the grace of God . . . might have been in those ghettos, those concentration camps, those slaughterhouses." The Allies' joint declaration of war crimes for genocide was broadcast and published as the top news in more than twenty-three languages the world over.
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