By fall 1946, the Allies had selected 658 German plants to be liquidated for reparations: 157 in the American zone, 444 in the British zone, and 57 in the French zone. Only half of the firms were from the war industry. Russia had already received 15,500 tons of commercial deliveries as part of its reparations levy.82
In Belgium, prosecutors tried industrialists for commercial cooperation with the Reich. Defendants included a textile company executive, as well as financiers. All revenues received from Nazi Germany were confiscated; prison sentences ranged from four to eight years. Newspapers reported the Belgian court’s declaration that the executives had embarked upon a “two-way gamble designed to pay rich dividends either way—if Hitler won the war or lost it.”83
Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief Nuremberg prosecutor, told Armed Forces Radio that he feared that while German industrialists were “one of the chief causes of the war,” most would never be brought to justice. Jackson’s fellow prosecutors felt the number of defendants would simply be too large to pragmatically try in the first wave of Nuremberg Trials. The other Allied prosecutors suggested that perhaps businessmen could be indicted later. “I feared failure to include them,” said Jackson, “would mean they never would be tried. Time only will tell which was right.”84
Indeed, the trial process was slowed by the necessity of translating all documents, exhibits, and testimony into several languages of the war crime tribunaclass="underline" French, Russian, German, and English. Justice Jackson turned to a newly invented process called “simultaneous translation.” One company reviewed all the evidence and translated it not only for real time usage at the trial proceedings, but for posterity. That company was International Business Machines. It made the final translated record of all evidence back and forth from French, Russian, German, Polish, and English. Watson offered to undertake the massive evidence handling free of charge.85
Many wealthy men stood in the dock at Nuremberg. Publishers, financiers, bankers, and industrialists were summoned to account for their commerce. Hjalmar Schacht himself, former president of the Reichsbank and out of power for years, although ultimately acquitted, was forced to explain his involvement at the bar of justice.86
But it was a far different story for IBM. It seemed to be immune from the debate itself. Every bloodstain and barracks blueprint in the camps was examined, catalogued, and probed. Machines such as Dachau’s D11-A, inspected by Chauncey, and those at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Westerbork, and at the Warsaw Ghetto, were simply recovered and resorbed into the IBM asset list. They would be deployed another day, another way, for another client. No answers or explanations would be provided. Questions about Hitler’s Holleriths were never even raised.
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.87
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.88
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.89
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.90
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.91
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.92
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.93
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.94 There was no need for the American and British to have anything less.