IBM and the Holocaust Read online

  Changing perspective was perhaps the dominant reason why the relationship between IBM and the Holocaust has never been explored. When I first wrote The Transfer Agreement in 1984, no one wanted to focus on assets. Now everyone talks about the assets. The formative years for most Holocaust scholarship was before the computer age, and well before the Age of Information. Everyone now possesses an understanding of how technology can be utilized in the affairs of war and peace. We can now go back and look at the same documentation in a new light.

  Many of us have become enraptured by the Age of Computerization and the Age of Information. I know I have. But now I am consumed with a new awareness that, for me, as the son of Holocaust survivors, brings me to a whole new consciousness. I call it the Age of Realization, as we look back and examine technology’s wake. Unless we understand how the Nazis acquired the names, more lists will be compiled against more people.

  The story of IBM and the Holocaust is just a beginning. I could have written twenty books with the documents I uncovered, one for every country in Europe. I estimate there are 100,000 more documents scattered in basements and corporate archives around the United States and Europe. Corporate archivists should take note: these documents are related to a crime and must not be moved, tampered with, or destroyed. They must be transferred to those appropriate archival institutions that can assure immediate and undelayed access to scholars and war crimes prosecutors so the accountability process can continue (see Major Sources).

  Only through exposing and examining what really occurred can the world of technology finally adopt the well-worn motto: Never Again.

  EDWIN BLACK

  Washington, D.C.

  PART ONE

  I. NUMBERED PEOPLE

  VEILS OF SMOKE HUNG ABOVE. MANY OF THE EXHAUSTED prisoners, insensate from torture and starvation, slumped lifelessly, waiting to fade into death. But most of the 60,000 human beings squeezed into this unimaginable clearing amongst the ever-greens were still running from place to place, performing assigned chores quickly, proving their strength and viability for yet an other day of existence. Surviving the moment was their quest.1 This night mare was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a special Hell on Earth created by Nazi Germany.

  At the rear of the camp, just meters from its back fence, stood a solitary guard tower. Its cross-barred wooden frame rose some 25 feet in the air. Looking down from this commanding perch, one saw three orderly rows of wooden barracks down to the right. Along the left lay kitchens, workshops, storage areas, and latrines hap hazardly arrayed between curved, muddy lanes. This length of incarceration all terminated several hundred meters away at the gate leading to the camp commandant’s office and the SS encampment. A barbed-wire perimeter gave the camp definition even as a series of internal fences straddling patrol aisles segmented the cruel confines into six sub-camps.2

  Just below the rear watchtower, a round-topped furnace squatted atop the mud. Black and elongated, the furnace resembled a locomotive engine, but with two weighty kiln doors at the front. Its single, tall, sooty smokestack rose several meters into the air. A hand-made metal stretcher of sorts, used to slide emaciated corpses into the flames, was always nearby. Here was the crematorium. Not hidden out of sight, nor obscured by structures or berms, the crematorium was close enough to burn the eyes of any SS guard stationed in the watchtower. The ominous structure and its message were visible to all as the final way station should fate falter—or deliver.3

  Situated between two rivers and the towns Bergen and Belsen, the site was originally established in spring 1943 as a prisoner transit camp for 10,000 Jews who might be ransomed or traded. But in the last months of 1944 and early 1945, as Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz, were liberated by the Allies, Belsen became a nightmare of human consolidation, receiving transports from other sites. By spring 1945, more than 40,000 were imprisoned under indescribable conditions. Starved, worked to death, and randomly tortured, the death toll rose to nearly 20,000 just for the month of March 1945. After liberation, horrified British medical teams were unable to save some 14,000 dying souls. Eventually bulldozers were deployed to gruesomely shovel bodies into trenches of twisted rigor mortis.4

  Just meters from the Belsen crematorium, off to the left, near the kitchens and the cisterns, down a muddy path, stood the block leader’s house. Inmates sometimes called this place “the lion’s den.” Within “the lion’s den” was a room for the Arbeitsdienstfuhrer, the Labor Service Leader. That is where the Hollerith punch cards were processed. At first glance, they seemed like simple rectangular cards, five and a quarter inches long, three and a quarter inches tall, divided into numbered columns with holes punched in various rows.5 But they were much more than simple cards.

  Beginning in December 1944, a Dutch Jew, Rudolf Cheim, was assigned to work in the Labor Service Office. Hungry and desperate to stay warm, Cheim tried every cold morning to locate a bit of extra food and some matches to make a fire. Kindling was stacked in the office. But no matches. For those, Cheim needed to venture into the other room where the SS officers slouched on chairs. Invariably, they viciously punched him in the face as the price for walking near to obtain a match. But it was worth it for Cheim. He could survive.6

  Working in the Arbeitsdienst was good. The Labor Service Office held the power of life or death over prisoners, including him. If an inmate could work, he could live. Cheim was happy for an office assignment working with the Hollerith punch cards and their coded numbers. But as he did, he silently observed through the corner of his eye the SS men administering the card sorting procedure. For five weeks he took mental notes.7

  Quickly, Cheim learned the method. Every day, transports of slave laborers were received. Prisoners were identified by descriptive Hollerith cards, each with columns and punched holes detailing nationality, date of birth, marital status, number of children, reason for incarceration, physical characteristics, and work skills. Sixteen coded categories of prisoners were listed in columns 3 and 4, depending upon the hole position: hole 3 signified homosexual, hole 9 for anti-social, hole 12 for Gypsy. Hole 8 designated a Jew. Printouts based on the cards listed the prisoners by personal code number as well.8

  Column 34 was labeled “Reason for Departure.” Code 2 simply meant transferred to another camp for continuing labor. Natural death was coded 3. Execution was coded 4. Suicide coded 5. The ominous code 6 designated “special handling,” the term commonly understood as extermination, either in a gas chamber, by hanging, or by gunshot.9

  For some two years as the trains and trucks rolled in from Belgium, France, and Holland, thousands of punch cards were examined, processed, and the information fed back to the Department of Statistics at the SS Economics Office in Oranien burg. The numbered men and women were compared to a list of work needs at Bergen-Belsen and other camps. “Never a name,” Cheim remembers, “only the assigned numbers.” How many died was just a statistic to note, a detail for the machines to digest. That December 1944, some 20,000 prisoners were registered; 50 deaths per day, on average, were recorded on punch cards.10

  Cheim learned that to discover the occupational make-up of a prisoner group, each inmate’s individual punch card was fed into the mechanical sorter. Then the dials were adjusted to isolate certain professions, labor skills, age groups, or language abilities needed for work battalions. If prisoners were selected for work, their names appeared on a Hollerith printout for transport to nearby sub-camps, factories, and even local farms.11

  Labor requirements were reported and then matched by Office D II of the SS Economics Office, which administered all the camps under Gen. Oswald Pohl. Pohl, creator of the “Extermination by Labor” program, ardently argued that expeditiously gassing Jews deprived the Reich of an important resource. His idea, “Extermination by Labor,” quite simply meant working Jews to death. Only after outliving their usefulness would they be deported to death camps for gassing. Office D II embraced SS Chief Heinrich Himmler’s declaration: “If 10,000 Russian females collapse from e
xhaustion while digging a tank ditch, it interests me only so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.”12

  Cheim took special notice one day when five women escaped from Bergen-Belsen. Angry SS guards vowed to recapture them. They resented reporting the prisoner departures in column 34 of the punch card forms as code 7—escaped.13

  He became fascinated with a young Dutch seamstress. Who was she? Her journey began in the Westerbork camp. Went to Auschwitz. She was born May 10, 1924. No name. Just a number. 53752. But who was 53752, Cheim wondered? Did she not have a name, only a number?14

  Cheim soon began to understand the truth. Hundreds of thousands of human beings were being identified, sorted, assigned, and transported by means of the Hollerith system. Numbers and punch cards had dehumanized them all, he thought. Numbers and punch cards would probably kill them all. But Cheim never understood where the Hollerith system came from.15

  One December morning, even as the numbered man Cheim, in his tattered uniform, stepped quickly toward the Bergen-Belsen Hollerith office to stay warm and to stay alive, another man, this one dressed elegantly in a fine suit and warm overcoat, stepped out of a new chauffeured car at 590 Madison Avenue in New York. He was Thomas J. Watson. His company, IBM—one of the biggest in the world—custom-designed and leased the Hollerith card sorting system to the Third Reich for use at Bergen-Belsen and most of the other concentration camps. International Business Machines also serviced its machines almost monthly, and trained Nazi personnel to use the intricate systems. Duplicate copies of code books were kept in IBM’s offices in case field books were lost. What’s more, his company was the exclusive source for up to 1.5 billion punch cards the Reich required each year to run its machines.16

  Indeed, the systems were not only used in the concentration camps, but hundreds of them had been installed for years throughout the entire commercial, industrial, war-making, and anti-Jewish infrastructure of Nazi Germany and Nazi-dominated Europe.

  On this cold December day, Watson was unyielding. His German subsidiary, Dehomag, was out of control. More lawyers would be called, more telegrams would be sent, more clever maneuvering with the State Department would be undertaken—not to stop Dehomag from its genocidal partnership with the Third Reich, but to ensure that all the proceeds and profits remained with IBM NY. No matter who won, IBM would prosper. Business was its middle name.

  II. THE IBM – HITLER INTERSECTION

  ON JANUARY 30, 1933, THE WORLD AWOKE TO A FRIGHTENING new reality: Adolf Hitler had suddenly become leader of Ger many. Hitlerites dressed in a spectrum of uniforms from gauche to ominous, paraded, motored, and bicycled through Berlin in defiant celebration. Hanging from trucks and stomping through the squares, arms outstretched and often swaggering in song, the Nazis were jubilant. Their historic moment—fraught with emotional expectations of revenge and victory against all adversaries—their long awaited decisive moment had arrived. From this instant, the world would never be the same.

  Quickly, Hitler’s Nazis moved to take over the entire government and virtually all aspects of German commerce, society, and culture. Der Fuhrer wanted an Aryan Germany to dominate all of Europe with a master race subjugating all non-Aryans. For Jews, Hitler had a special plan: total destruction. There were no secrets in Hitler’s vision. He broadcast them loudly to the world. They exploded as front-page headlines in every major city, on every radio network, and in weekly cinema newsreels. Ironically, Hitler’s fascism resonated with certain men of great vision, such as Henry Ford. Another who found Hitlerism compelling was Thomas J. Watson, president of one of America’s most prestigious companies: Inter national Business Machines.1

  The roads traveled by Hitler and Watson began in different parts of the world in completely different circumstances with completely different intentions. How did these two men—one an extreme capitalist, the other an extreme fascist—form a technologic and commercial alliance that would ultimately facilitate the murder of six million Jews and an equal number of other Europeans? These men and their philosophies could not have been more dissimilar. Yet as history proved, they could have hardly been more compatible.

  It all began decades before in New York during the last gasp of the nineteenth century, at a time when America’s rapid industrial growth spurred inventions to automate virtually every manual task. Swells of immigrants came to American shores to labor long days. But some dreamed of a better way to be industrious—or at least a faster and cheaper way. Contraptions, mechanizations, and patented gadgets were everywhere turning wheels, cranking cogs, and saving steps in workshops and factories. The so-called Second Industrial Revolution, powered by electricity, was in full swing. Turn-of-the-century America—a confluence of massive commerce and clickety-clack industrial ingenuity—was a perfect moment for the birthplace of the most powerful corporation the world has ever seen: IBM.2

  IBM’s technology was originally created for only one reason: to count people as they had never been counted before, with a magical ability to identify and quantify. Before long, IBM technology demonstrated it could do more than just count people or things. It could compute, that is, the technology could record data, process it, retrieve it, analyze it, and automatically answer pointed questions. Moments of mechanized bustle could now accomplish what would be an impossibility of paper and pencil calculation for any mortal man.

  Herman Hollerith invented IBM. Born in 1860, Hollerith was the son of intellectual German parents who brought their proud and austere German heritage with them when they settled in Buffalo, New York. Herman was only seven when his father, a language teacher, died in an accident while riding a horse. His mother was left to raise five children alone. Proud and independent, she declined to ask her financially comfortable parents for assistance, choosing instead a life of tough, principled self-reliance.3

  Young Hollerith moved to New York City when, at age fifteen, he enrolled in the College of the City of New York. Except for spelling difficulties, he immediately showed a creative aptitude, and at age nineteen graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with a degree in engineering, boasting perfect 10.0 grades. In 1879, Hollerith accepted the invitation of his Columbia professor to become an assistant in the U.S. Census Bureau. In those days, the decennial census was little more than a basic head-count, devoid of information about an individual’s occupation, education, or other traits because the computational challenge of counting millions of Americans was simply too prodigious. As it was, the manual counting and cross-tabulation process required several years before final results could be tallied. Because the post-Civil War populace had grown so swiftly, perhaps doubling since the last census, experts predicted spending more than a decade to count the 1890 census; in other words, the next census in 1900 would be underway before the previous one was complete.4

  Just nineteen years old, Hollerith moved to Washington, D.C., to join the Census Bureau. Over dinner one night at the posh Potomac Boat Club, Director of Vital Statistics, John Billings, quipped to Hollerith, “There ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating population and similar statistics.” Inventive Hollerith began to think about a solution. French looms, simple music boxes, and player pianos used punched holes on rolls or cards to automate rote activity. About a year later, Hollerith was struck with his idea. He saw a train conductor punch tickets in a special pattern to record physical characteristics such as height, hair color, size of nose, and clothing—a sort of “punched photograph.” Other conductors could read the code and then catch anyone re-using the ticket of the original passenger.5

  Hollerith’s idea was a card with standardized holes, each representing a different trait: gender, nationality, occupation, and so forth. The card would then be fed into a “reader.” By virtue of easily adjustable spring mechanisms and brief electrical brush contacts sensing for the holes, the cards could be “read” as they raced through a mechanical feeder. The processed cards could then be sorted into stacks based on a specified series of punched holes.6
/>   Millions of cards could be sorted and resorted. Any desired trait could be isolated—general or specific—by simply sorting and resorting for data-specific holes. The machines could render the portrait of an entire population—or could pick out any group within that population. Indeed, one man could be identified from among millions if enough holes could be punched into a card and sorted enough times. Every punch card would become an informational storehouse limited only by the number of holes. It was nothing less than a nineteenth-century bar code for human beings.7

  By 1884, a prototype was constructed. After borrowing a few thousand dollars from a German friend, Hollerith patented and built a production machine. Ironically, the initial test was not a count of the living, but of the dead for local health departments in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey.8

  Soon, Hollerith found his system could do more than count people. It could rapidly perform the most tedious accounting functions for any enterprise: from freight bills for the New York Central Railroad to actuarial and financial records for Prudential Insurance. Most importantly, the Hollerith system not only counted, it produced analysis. The clanging contraption could calculate in a few weeks the results that a man previously spent years correlating. Buoyed by success, Hollerith organized a trip overseas to show his electromechanical tabulator to European governments, including Germany and Italy. Everywhere Hollerith was met with acclaim from bureaucrats, engineers, and statisticians.9 His card sorter was more than just a clever gadget. It was a steel, spindle, and rubber-wheeled key to the Pandora’s Box of unlimited information.