IBM and the Holocaust (83 page)
IBM WAS MORE
than important to the Allies. It was vital.
The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was the Allied high command in Europe under General Eisenhower. SHAEF had established a classified statistical analysis office in Bad Nauheim, which in summer 1945 was serving the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). Roosevelt had established the Bombing Survey in November 1944 to evaluate the devastating effects of Allied bombing on Germany. This was to include the effects of civilian morale and whether bombs hardened the national will to fight, or collapsed it.
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The Bad Nauheim site was completely dependent upon Hollerith machines and Dehomag operators for its numerous calculations of bomb destruction and predictions of the resulting social disruption. The so-called Morale Division, staffed with a platoon of social scientists, psychologists, and economists relied upon the machines to quantify public reaction to severe bombing. Regular debriefing of civilians and experienced Gestapo agents regarding the dimensions of political dissension, as well as survey questionnaires, were all reduced to researchable punch card data.
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The USSBS was denied nothing. When its officers asked for one Hollerith, eight sets were flown overnight from the United States to London, along with the staff needed to operate them; from London, the units were rushed to Bad Nauheim. When another USSBS statistical office at Jena needed to be evacuated before being absorbed into the Russian zone, a convoy of trucks was immediately provided to transfer all the punch cards, machines, and German technicians in a single move.
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The man who made the Holleriths run at Bad Nauheim was Sergeant Hendricks. Hendricks was the same man who transferred the D-11A from Dachau to Dehomag's Sindelfingen plant. He was also the man who drove Hummel from his prison release to Stuttgart. In Bad Nauheim, Hendricks had the knowledge and expertise to convert the prior Hollerith installation of a former Reich industry association into a pure USSBS operation. Hendricks made sure a continuous stream of army questionnaires on economic capacity were methodically processed by a range of industries in occupied Germany. In this way, the Allies could assess the ability of German industry to recover from the massive bombing it had endured. The system was identical to that employed by the
MB
when it monitored industrial output during the Nazi era. Hendricks even used the same forms.
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On July 30, 1945, a group from the Planning and Intelligence Branch of SHAEF's Economic Division, led by a Brigadier General, visited the Bad Nauheim facility. Three days later, the Brigadier General reported on his visit and Hendricks' indispensable value. "[T]he party was shown round by Sgt. Hendricks," the General wrote, "in civilian life an employee of the International Business Machines Company, who are the patentees of the Hollerith system. Sgt. Hendricks has supervised a number of installations on behalf of his firm, and is obviously a competent technician in this particular field." At Bad Nauheim, the General wrote, Sergeant Hendricks was supervising about sixty "carefully screened German personnel" operating fourteen sorters, two tabulators, and a host of punchers and verifiers. Hendricks told the tour group, the report noted, "There was practically no limit to the information obtainable through the Hollerith system,
provided the right questions were asked at
the outset.
" In the General's original report, the words were underlined.
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The August 2, 1945, tour report noted that Hendricks was scheduled to complete the USSBS's last economic surveys on August 4. Then the unit's job in Germany would be finished. The USSBS was scheduled to leave the facility on August 15, the note explained.
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From its inception, a stated mission of the USSBS was to apply all bombing impact information compiled in Germany to America's air war against Japan. On August 6, a U.S. bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed. USSBS statistical analyses and predictions of economic and social ruination had been part of the decision-making process. On August 15, President Harry Truman instructed the USSBS to begin evaluating the effects of America's atomic bombing of Japan. Anticipating the order, the statistic team had already departed Bad Nauheim. They left all their Hollerith equipment behind.
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As the best-equipped punch card center in occupied Germany, Sergeant Hendricks assured that with the USSBS gone, the Bad Nauheim location could serve all industrial data needs in the American zone. Sergeant Hendricks added that a similar data facility could be erected for the British zone. For their part, the Russians in their zone were already utilizing the experienced staff and IBM machinery of the Reich Statistical Office in Berlin.
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There was no need for the American and British to have anything less.
But industrial statistics were only the beginning. When occupying authorities needed a census of all Germans in the territories, they knew whom to call. Dehomag stepped forward. The company's census experts simply took its existing census tabulation regimens and made certain adjustments for Allied requirements. Some of the column headings were adjusted slightly, but little else. Columns 1-6: unchanged. Column 7: Family Status. Column 8: Religion. Column 9: Mother Tongue. Column 10: National Descent (or Ethnicity). Column 11: Nationality. At one point in the preparations an American officer complained that some of the German column headings requesting ethnicity were "of Nazi memory and implying a racial idea which was most undesirable." Eventually, however, American objections subsided.
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The Russians permitted the Reich Statistical Office, controlled in their zone, to help Dehomag implement the project. The four powers agreed that completed census forms would be destroyed after two years—but only after the individual information was transferred to punch cards. For Dehomag, the 1946 census of occupation was a project organized quickly and economically. People counting was what they did best. The questions remained the same. Only the client name changed.
By 1947, it was time to change the subsidiary's name as well. On July 4, 1947, IBM's Foreign Trade Vice President J. T. Wilson wrote to Watson, "Apparently now is a good time to change the name of the company and to discontinue the name 'Hollerith.' I have, therefore, given instructions to start the necessary proceedings to call it 'IBM Germany.'
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As Germany was emerging from its occupation, Dehomag was edging back to IBM NY's dominion. The company had received permission to undertake various contractual agreements with Dehomag. But only upon formal decontrol would IBM NY regain genuine custody of its German operation. In the meantime, Dehomag's financial success was impressive. By the end of 1946, it had emerged from a bombed and dissected Germany with a valuation of more than RM 56.6 million and a gross profit of RM 7.5 million.
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A key toward regaining total control was fortifying the argument that Dehomag was not a German company, but an American-owned enterprise. On November 14, 1947, custodian Karl Hummel filed papers with OMGUS and German financial authorities averring that the token German shares in Dehomag that he, Rottke and Heidinger owned were not genuine stock ownership. "We cannot understand how our relationship with our parent can be subject to Law No. 56. . . . While a minority interest exists in Germany, such minority interest was granted as an inducement to the managers of the company; but they are not shareholders in the general sense of the term, because they are not free to sell their shares, but can sell them only to the company and only for their book value. They were retaining the share only during their holding a leading position in the company. Only one remains today. Mr. Heidinger died in 1944 and Mr. Rottke is reported to have died in a Russian camp."
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Ironically, the one remaining shareholder was Hummel himself.
Before the end of 1947, IBM would finally receive a Treasury License to re purchase the stock of Rottke, Heidinger, and Hummel, thus regaining 100 per cent ownership of its German unit. Ownership still did not convey control. It took two years of additional bureaucratic wrangling before IBM could legally change Dehomag's name to IBM Deutschland. That happened in April 1949.
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In the years that followed, IBM's worldwide stature became even more of a beacon to the cause of progress. It adopted a corporate motto: "The Solutions Company." Whatever the impossible task, IBM technology could find a solution. The men who headed up the IBM enterprise in Nazi Europe and America became revered giants within the corporation's global community. Chauncey became chairman of the IBM World Trade Corporation, and the European subsidiary managers were rewarded for their loyalty with top jobs. Their exploits during the Nazi era were lionized with amazing specificity in a promotional book entitled
The History of Computing in Europe,
published in 1967 by IBM itself. However, an internal IBM review decided to immediately withdraw the book from the market. It is no longer available in any publicly accessible library anywhere in the world.
Eventually, after ceaseless efforts, IBM NY regained control of its German subsidiary. The name had been changed, the money regained, the machines recovered, the record clear. For IBM the war was over.
But for the descendants of 6 million Jews and millions of other Europeans, the war would never be over. It would haunt them and people of conscience forever. After decades of documentation by the best minds, the most studied among them would confess that they never really understood the Holocaust process. Why did it happen? How could it happen? How were they selected? How did the Nazis get the names? They always had the names.
What seemingly magical scheduling process could have allowed millions of Nazi victims to step onto train platforms in Germany or nineteen other Nazi-occupied countries, travel for two and three days by rail, and then step onto a ramp at Auschwitz or Treblinka—and within an hour be marched into gas chambers. Hour after hour. Day after day. Timetable after timetable. Like clockwork, and always with
blitzkrieg
efficiency.
The survivors would never know. The liberators who fought would never know. The politicians who made speeches would never know. The prosecutors who prosecuted would never know. The debaters who debated would never know.
The question was barely even raised.
AFTERWORD: THE NEXT CHAPTER
FROM THE MOMENT
IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST
APPEARED
worldwide on February 12, 2001, new information began to appear, especially during my travels. Former IBM employees, the families of principal players, and survivors of World War II emerged to offer eyewitness testimony, personal documents from the period, and memoirs. What's more, archivists and historians began assembling previously overlooked documents and materials. None of it contradicted, diminished, or mitigated the information that launched the book. All of it deepened the documentation chronicling IBM's twelve-year relationship with the Third Reich. Much of it reinforced the need to encourage research throughout the world, to persist in connecting the dots.
GERMANY
Information about numerous German concentration camps came to light.
In Berlin, during a historians' panel at the Jewish Community Center, I was approached by an enthusiastic Georgia Peet-Tanover, a Bulgarian imprisoned for years during the Nazi regime. I had actually spoken to her by telephone several times during my re search, but at last we were able to meet. Peet, who speaks perfect English and maintains an impressive vitality, recalled her days as a young girl in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. When she became quite ill, the camp doctor re-assigned her to "easy work." That work involved manual "sorting of cards with holes punched in them." There was no Hollerith machine in her unit, just cards filed in wooden boxes. Peet, as she calls her-self, had no idea what the cards were called or what their purpose was other than "something to do with prisoner assignments."
1
"Nor did I care," she told me. "I was just trying to stay alive." Not until Peet and I first spoke at the onset of my research did she understand that the punch cards were Hollerith cards produced by IBM. Only then did she make the connection to the prisoner designations she was instructed to sort.
2
The Ravensbruck cards Peet and others sorted were regularly couriered to a central processing bank for concentration camp labor, the
Zentral
Institut,
on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Ironically, after the war, Peet settled in a quiet Berlin residential neighborhood on Friedrichstrasse. It was only after this book's research revealed the location of the processing center that Peet realized her pleasant apartment was in the very same building complex that housed the
Zentral Institut.