Many succumbed to the German pressure to convert to Christianity. German Jewry lost to apostasy many of its best commercial, political, and intellectual leaders. A far greater number were convinced that Jewish ethnic identity should be denied, but nonetheless saw quintessential value in the tenets of Moses. These German Jews developed a religious movement that was the forerunner of Reform Judaism. Yet, even many of this group ultimately converted to Christianity.4
Between 1869 and 1871, Germany granted Jews emancipation from many, but not all, civic, commercial, and political restrictions. Germany’s Jews seized the chance to become equals. They changed their surnames, adopted greater religious laxity through Reform Judaism, and frequently married non-Jews, raising their children as Christians. Outright conversion became common. Many of Jewish ancestry did not even know it—or care.5
In fact, of approximately 550,000 Jews in Germany who were emancipated in 1871, roughly 60,000 were by 1930 either apostates, children raised without Jewish identity by a mixed marriage, or Jews who had simply drifted away. Even those consciously remaining within organized Jewish “communities” neglected their remnant Jewish identity. The Jews of twentieth-century Germany, like their Christian neighbors, embraced national identity far more than religious identity. In the minds of German Jews, they were “101 percent” German, first and foremost.6
But the Reich believed otherwise. The Jewish nemesis was not one of religious practice, but of bloodline. Nazis were determined to somehow identify those of Jewish descent, and destroy them.
IDENTIFYING THE Jews in Germany would be an uphill technologic challenge that would take years of increasingly honed counting programs and registration campaigns. From the moment Hitler was appointed Chancellor, fear gripped the entire Jewish community. No Jew wanted to step forward and identify himself as Jewish, and therefore become targeted for persecution. Many doubted they even possessed enough Jewish parentage to be included in the despised group. Indeed, not a few frightened Jews tried to join the denunciations of the Jewish community to emphasize their loyal German national character.7 But that did not help them.
The identification process began in the first weeks of the Third Reich on April 12, 1933, when the Hitler regime announced that a long delayed census of all Germans would take place immediately. Friedrich Burgdorfer, director of the Reich Statistical Office, expressed the agency’s official gratitude that the “government of our national uprising had ordered the census.” Burgdorfer, a virulent Nazi, also headed up the Nazi Party’s Race Political Office and became a leading figure in the German Society for Racial Hygiene. He was jubilant because he understood that Germany could not be cleansed of Jews until it identified them—however long that would take.8
The Nazis wanted fast answers about their society and who among them was Jewish. Censuses in Germany had long asked typical and innocent questions of religious affiliation. But since the Great War, European population shifts and dislocations had brought many more Jews to Germany, especially from Poland. No one knew how many, where they lived, or what jobs they held. Most of all, no one knew their names. The Nazis knew prior censuses were plagued by three to five years of hand sorting, rendering the results virtually useless for enacting swift social policies. If only the Nazis could at least obtain information on the 41 million Germans living in Prussia, Germany’s largest state, comprising three-fifths of the German populace. How fast? Nazi planners wanted all 41 million Prussians processed and preliminary results produced within a record four months. The Prussian government itself was completely incapable of launching such a massive undertaking.9
But IBM’s Dehomag was. The company offered a solution: it would handle almost the entire project as a contract. Dehomag would design a census package counting and classifying every citizen. Moreover, it would recruit, train, and even feed the hundreds of temporary workers needed to process the census and perform the work on Dehomag’s own premises. If the government would gather the information, Dehomag would handle everything else. To secure the deal, Dehomag turned to its special consultant for governmental contracts, attorney Karl Koch.10
Koch enjoyed good Nazi Party as well as government connections. With Watson’s help, Koch had recently traveled to IBM offices in New York to learn more about the company’s technical capabilities and pick up tips on negotiating tough government contracts. By late May 1933, Koch was able to joyously report to Watson that he had secured a RM 1.35 million contract to conduct the Prussian census. This was a test case for Dehomag’s relationship with the Nazi Reich. “We now have a chance to demonstrate what we are capable to do,” Koch wrote to Watson.11
Koch was careful to credit his recent training in the United States. “Equipped with increased knowledge,” Koch wrote Watson, “and strengthened by the experience collected during my highly inspiring trip to the States, I was able to conduct the lengthy negotiations and to accomplish the difficult work.”12
Watson wrote back a letter of appreciation to Koch and hoped he would “have the pleasure of visiting your country next year.”13
Organizing the census was a prodigious task. Dehomag hired some 900 temporary staffers, mainly supplied by the Berlin employment office, which had become dominated by the venomous German Labor Front. Dehomag enjoyed good relations with the German Labor Front, which ranked at the vanguard of radical Nazism. Coordinating with the Berlin employment office christened the enterprise as a patriotic duty, since relieving joblessness was a major buzzword objective of Hitler’s promise to Germany. Dehomag’s two-week immersion data processing courses instructed seventy to seventy-five people at a time in daily four-hour sessions.14
Statistical battalions were emerging. The Berlin employment office allocated large, well-lit halls for their training. Looking from the rear of the training hall, one saw a sea of backs, each a matronly dressed woman sporting a no-nonsense bun hairdo, tilted over census forms and punching machines. Packed along rows of wooden study benches, even behind view-blocking pillars, trainees diligently took notes on small pads and scrutinized their oversized census forms. Methodically, they learned to extract and record the vital personal details. Large “Smoking Prohibited” signs pasted above the front wall reinforced the regimented nature of the setting. At the front, next to a blackboard, an instructor wearing a white lab coat explained the complicated tasks of accurately punching in data from handwritten census questionnaires, operating the sorting, tabulating, and verifying machines, and other data processing chores.15
On June 16, 1933, one-half million census takers, recruited from the ranks of the “nationalistically minded,” went door-to-door gathering information. Cadres of Storm Troopers and SS officers were added to create a virtual census army. In some localities, when recruitment flagged, individuals were coerced into service. The interviews included pointed questions about the head of the household’s religion and whether the person was in a mixed marriage.16
In essence, the amount of data that could be stored on a card was a function of the number of holes and columns. A spectrum of data could be extracted by simply recording different combinations of hole punches. For that reason, Dehomag abandoned its standard 45-column cards and moved to a 60-column format. Sixty columns, each with ten horizontal positions, created 600 punch hole possibilities per card. Each column, depending upon how it was punched, represented a biographical characteristic. These 600 punch holes, arrayed in their endless combinations, yielded thousands of demographic permutations. Even still, Dehomag officials wondered whether all the data the Reich needed could be accommodated on the 60-column cards they were using. Dehomag declared in a company newsletter that it was willing to move to an 80-column format for the census, if required “for political reasons.”17 Soon the Reich could begin the identification process—who was Aryan and who was a Jew.