Generally, handwritten status notations were penned in German under the entries. One bears the note “all changes in assignments of numbers below reported in the Hollerith cards.” Another shows the notation Karten im Lochsaal to indicate “cards in punching hall.”14 A Lochsaal, or “punching hall” was a large Hollerith operation generally involving more than a dozen punchers and often as many as four hundred, as well as the sorters, tabulators, verifiers, multipliers, and printing tabulators to process the output. Thousands of Change Forms from concentration camps across Europe were received and processed each week by the Hollerith unit at Oranienburg, allowing the SS to efficiently execute its “Extermination by Labor” program.
More information also surfaced about IBM president Thomas J. Watson’s involvement in Germany. A former IBM employee, now in New York State, discovered a pamphlet in his basement and sent me a copy. It was the commemorative program of a luncheon held in Watson’s honor just before Watson received Hitler’s medal during the 1937 Berlin International Chamber of Commerce festivities. The program includes a picture of Watson surrounded by grateful Hitler Youth, and the text of toasts by Nazi finance wizard Hjalmar Schacht appealing to Watson to help stop the anti-Nazi boycott.15
Perhaps the most astonishing moment of my postbook travels was in Munich, after a historians’ symposium. A long line formed at my book-signing table. Two distinguished-looking men finally presented their books for autographing. One said, “Make mine out to Willy Heidinger, Jr.” He was the Dehomag chairman’s grandson. He and his cousin both congratulated the book for honestly retelling the story of their grandfather’s involvement with IBM. The next morning, the Heidingers and I enjoyed a long, delightful breakfast at my hotel. They declared their view that Watson engineered the outright theft of their family’s 10 percent of Dehomag, now known as IBM Germany. Immediately after the war, they recalled, Watson’s representatives, accompanied by American army officials, drove out to their home near Munich and then pressured the family into signing away their stock. Pressuring Nazi businessmen was not difficult in devastated and occupied Germany. Today, the IBM shares the Heidinger family once controlled are worth many millions of dollars. The Heidingers also insisted my book conservatively understated Watson’s true sympathies for Hitler and his true knowledge of the events in Germany.16
In addition, smoking-gun information was found upon re-examining internal IBM correspondence. On July 4, 1945, just weeks after the war ended, the manager of IBM’s Czech subsidiary, Dr. Georg Schneider, wrote a letter to Thomas J. Watson in New York, summarizing his loyal efforts on behalf of the New York office. “I beg to give you my report about the IBM office in Prague, Czechoslovakia…. All the interests of the IBM were in good hands. The $-rentals were transferred to the account of IBM in Geneva, after begin [sic] of war with U.S. All $-rentals must be converted at the rate of exchange of K25.02 Crowns = $1 and stored on the blocked account of IBM in Prague.”17
Schneider added that he met Watson’s emissary Harrison K. Chauncey in Berlin, after the U.S. entered the war, to obtain IBM NY’s permission to disguise German machines as Czech. “I made in 1942,” Schneider reminded Watson, “with Mr. Chauncey, visiting Berlin, an agreement and so we were authorized to buy machines from the Dehomag and to sell or lend [lease] in our name. From each machine we had to pay a license-tax [royalty] to the IBM.”18
FRANCE
In Paris, I was contacted by Robert Carmille, the son of Rene Carmille. He met with my French publisher and I. Robert Carmille revealed an engaging story of his father’s long, patriotic service to France as a counterintelligence agent specializing in statistics and punch card technology. His father went to Germany twice before the war—in 1935 and again in 1938—to study IBM technology and German war preparations. During these visits, the elder Carmille met with Dehomag managers, and visited insurance companies for Hollerith demonstrations. While in Nazi Berlin, he wrote home with sadness about the deplorable conditions Jews were subjected to under the Third Reich, according to the written record of colleagues. Robert Carmille recalled that his father witnessed Jews being paraded around the city, wearing humiliating signs.19
The most gripping moment during the hotel-suite meeting came when Robert Carmille, himself now an elderly although still an eminently lucid man, emotionally declared that the French statistical service did indeed sabotage the Jewish tabulations. We asked him how he could be so certain? Carmille trembled with tears in his eyes and admitted that when he was twenty-two-years old he had been asked by his father to manage the Lyons regional office and that he had personally operated the machines in Toulouse. “We never punched column eleven!” Carmille emotionally declared. “Never.”20 Column eleven contained racial information.
The Vichy demographic service’s main office was at 10 Rue Archer in Lyons, but the machines themselves were installed at Cours de Verdun, near the train station, recalled the younger Carmille. Seventeen regional punch card offices were established. A typical installation might include three tabulators, five sorters, one calculator, seven or eight verifiers, and twenty or more punchers. In many offices, recalls Carmille, this equipment was generally 70 percent Bull and 30 percent IBM. However, Lyons, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Claremont-Ferrand relied more heavily on Bull, while Marseilles and some other offices relied more heavily on Hollerith.21
For three weeks in 1943, Robert Carmille actually worked at the CEC agency in Lyons. Of the several dozen CEC staffers he remembers seeing, at least ten were assigned to marketing because IBM continually tried to increase its share of France’s Nazi-era punch card business.22
Carmille then displayed posthumous commendations for valor and bravery bestowed on his father by both the Allies and the French government. And he showed us an IBM newsletter published during Nazi occupation for employees of the French subsidiary. The strictly business publication featured a photo of an IBM commemorative medal depicting Thomas J. Watson’s face set against a regal laurel wreath.23
Later, a contemporary of the younger Carmille’s sent my French publisher a CD-ROM filled with photographs of heretofore unknown documents. They indicate that the elder Carmille was in direct contact with officials of the Maschinelles Berichtwesen (MB), the Nazi government punch card agency in Berlin. Lieutenant von Passow of the MB exhorted the elder Carmille to replace the French demographic service’s Bull machines with Dehomag equipment, even as Passow lamented that the German machines were dependent upon “American money and technology.” The documents also support Robert Carmille’s chronology that his father’s service took pains not to extend the professional census to the occupied zone, thereby denying the Reich information it needed to complete its plan to organize slave labor in France. This instruction was reversed once the elder Carmille was discovered and taken to Dachau. But by then, it was too late to materially undo Carmille’s sabotage.24