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.95
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.’96
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.97
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.”98 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 1949.99
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