Much more research has yet to be undertaken in France. Several French men involved in the statistical service have kept their stories quiet for decades but are now ready to offer the documents and testimony—long kept secret—to chronicle exactly what was and was not done with punch cards during the war.
POLAND
The largest cache of discoveries involved Poland. In 1939, after the German invasion, IBM divided up occupied Poland into two commercial territories. The first centered in Upper Silesia, in land annexed by Germany and serviced by Dehomag. The second was conducted in the remainder of occupied Poland, the so-called General Government that encompassed cities such as Krakow and Warsaw. The General Government territory was to be serviced by a newly incorporated IBM Polish subsidiary, known as Watson Buromaschinen GmbH, directly controlled by IBM NY. Polish survivors and new documents have shed great light on the Hollerith presence there.
Historical journalist Christian Habbe of Der Spiegel first sent me information regarding the Abteilung Hollerith at the Stutthof concentration camp. The information has been quietly residing on the Polish government memorial’s recently established Polish-language website at www.kki.net.pl/~museum. Stutthof was Hollerith-coded 13. In recent years, Stutthof archivist and historian Marek Orski has documented more information about Hollerith than any other camp historian, including those at Auschwitz.
Stutthof’s Abteilung Hollerith was organized in early August 1944 as deportations intensified and the camp’s population suddenly grew to 50,000. SS Rottenfuhrer Werner Reiss was ordered to undergo training at a Zentral Institut seminar at the Storkow concentration camp, which maintained some two dozen IBM machines. On August 4, 1944, Reiss took the 6:20 p.m. train to Danzig where he connected to the Berlin express at 11:20 p.m., and then shuttled to Storkow. The next day, his training began. After Storkow, he attended additional seminars for “Hollerith file experts” at the Zentral Institut main office at Block F, 129 Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Thereafter, Reiss re ported to the SS Economics Administration, Office D II in Oranienburg, the agency overseeing slave workers and the Extermination by Labor campaign.25
When Reiss returned to Stutthof, he established the camp’s Abteilung Hollerith, assigning a group of Polish prisoners, including Leszek Zdrojewski, Bronis / law Pep / lonski, Julian Krawczyk, and Krzysztof Dunin-Wa“Hollerith Kartei” (even though they were paper, not punch cards) are preserved in Stutthof’s Hollerith archival files. The highest number belonged to Prisoner 99044, who entered the camp on October 27, 1944. The punch cards identified nameless prisoners by their Hollerith codes for scores of needed job skills. Duplicates of the professional file were maintained in Berlin.26
An extraordinary eyewitness is Leszek Zdrojewski, who headed up Stutthof’s Arbeitseinsatz and interfaced with the camp’s Abteilung Hollerith. In Fall 1944, he was sent to Zentral Institut in Berlin for Hollerith training. Accompanied by Reiss, Zdrojewski spent two to three days at Zentral Institut, where he saw some twenty sorters and tabulators served by a staff of more than 100 clerks, frantically feeding machines and searching for specific professions among the camps’ populations.
During my presentation at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, I unexpectedly encountered Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz, one of the prisoners forced to work in Stutthof ’s Abteilung Hollerith. Dunin-Wasowicz is now a retired historian, who for some time was associated with the Polish Academy of Science and understands the uses of Hollerith. During a twenty-minute presentation, he outlined the history of IBM’s technology at Stutthof. An electrifying moment came when I held up an enlargement of the secret Hollerith Camp Codes. I pointed to code 6, Sonderbehandlung, that is “extermination.” Dunin-Wasowicz acknowledged the codes were the exact ones the Nazis used at Stutthof, including code 6 for extermination in the camp’s small but active gas chamber, which murdered some one thousand people.27
Other Polish eyewitnesses also came forward. The newspaper Slowo Polskie located Leon Krzemieniecki, probably the only man still living who worked in the Hollerith Department of the railroad office that kept tabs on all trains in the General Government, including those that sent Jews to their death in Treblinka and Auschwitz. It must be emphasized that Krzemieniecki did not understand any of the details of the genocidal train destinations. Indeed his duties required tabulating information on all trains, from ordinary passenger to freight trains. Krzemieniecki’s interview in the newspaper, and subsequent extensive oral history with me, revealed that the railway’s Hollerith Department in Krakow required a five-room office on Pawia Street equipped with fifteen punchers, two sorters, and a tabulator that he recalls was “bigger than a sofa.” The high-security office was guarded by armed railway police.28
Fifteen Polish women were employed just to punch the cards and load the sorters. Three German nationals supervised the railway office, undertaking the final tabulations and summary statistics in great secrecy. Handfuls of printouts were reduced to a small envelope of summary data, which was then delivered to a secret destination. Truckloads of the preliminary printouts, which created the secret summaries, were then regularly burned, along with the spent cards, Krzemieniecki recalls.
As a forced laborer, Krzemieniecki was compelled to work as a “sorter and tabulator” ten hours per day for two years. He never realized in any way that his work involved the transporation of Jews to gas chambers. “I only know that this very modern equipment made possible the control of all the railway traffic in the General Government,” he told the newspaper. Only after IBM and the Holocaust was released did he begin to recall the significance of his work.29
In 1944, as the Russians advanced, his group loaded the machines onto trucks, which moved the equipment to Dresden. “I think they vanished without a trace,” he added.30
Krzemieniecki’s relatively small group punched in only a limited amount of information on the ten-column cards, mainly the number of the train, whether it was a cargo train, whether express or regular, and the distance traveled. For example, a cargo designation was coded 8. Five-digit kilometer records were punched in as well. No alphabetical machines were used, hence all codes had to be memorized. An “outside technician,” who spoke German and Polish and did not work for the railroad, was almost constantly on site to keep the machines running. The technician generally undertook major maintenance on the machines approximately once each month.31
The Pawia Street operation undoubtedly interfaced with a much larger and robust Hollerith operation at the Group IV Transportation Office elsewhere in Krakow. This office continuously tabulated details about the length of train lines, number and availability of locomotives and freight cars, as well as the amount and type of cargo, and “the number of persons transported.”32
Railway management was among IBM’s most diverse and highly developed applications. Typically, destinations were specifically preprinted on the IBM cards in order to locate and route boxcars and engines. Accounting cards organized and itemized the freight billing. Locomotive efficiency studies constantly sought to maximize fuel use and typically tabulated the exact amount of coal used to haul specific types of freight in the boxcars. The tailored railroad management programs, the custom-designed punch cards printed at IBM’s Rymarska Street print shop across from the Warsaw Ghetto, and the leased machines utilized by railways in Poland were not under the German subsidiary, but the New York-controlled subsidiary in Warsaw, Watson Buromaschinen GmbH.