Gleichschaltung, that is, total central coordination, demanded that endless accountings be submitted regularly to government bureaus, Nazified trade associations, and statistical agencies. Kommissars and government regulations required companies to install Hollerith machines to ensure prompt, uniform, up-to-the-minute reports that could be reprocessed and further tabulated. The Reich Statistical Office’s Department I was officially charged with the responsibility of helping companies transition to the elaborate Hollerith methodology. Statistical bureaus hired thousands of new staffers just to keep up with the data flow.57
Hitler’s Germany began achieving undreamed of efficiencies. The Reichsbahn was a vital customer for Dehomag, deploying full or partial systems in Essen, Cologne, Nuremberg, Mainz, Frankfurt, Hannover, and nearly every other major connection point. Some 140 million passengers annually were booked through Dehomag card sorting systems. Punch cards made the trains run on time and even evaluated engine efficiency when pulling certain types of freight. Records in some railway operations that previously required 300 people six months to organize could now be computed by a staff of fifteen working for just a week.58
Customers such as Krupp, Siemens, and the Deutsche Bank were able to reduce their operating costs and clerical staffs by as much as half, and plow those human and financial resources into sellable goods and services. Manpower could be shifted as needed from plant to plant by companies and deployed from city to city by the German Labor Front.59
To meet fast-expanding demand, Dehomag hired more than 1,000 new employees to staff the new factory at Lichterfelde. Everywhere throughout the plant, newly installed machine tools were fabricating Hollerith devices. Workshops buzzed, cranked, and whirred with Beling & Lubke precision lathes, Jung surface grinders, Boley milling machines, Hille high-speed drills, Auerbach & Scheibe 3-spindle drill presses, Thiel metal saws, Karger thread-cutting lathes, and Universal grinding machines.60 Metal shavings, oil cans, iron rods, tin coils, ball bearings, alloy sheets, and rubber rollers combined with bent elbows, squinting eyes, wedging hands and brows wiped by the sleeves of work smocks to create a manufacturing miracle. IBM zeal and Nazi devotion coalesced to help the Reich recover and strengthen.
Lichterfelde was overwhelmed with orders. It established a “shock department” for the speedy manufacture of spare parts, retrofitted an old disused IBM plant from pre-merger days, and converted it to a workshop. Outside storage, some 1,200 square meters costing more than RM 12,000 annually, was rented. Workmen shuttled materials back and forth from the storage site to the overcrowded Lichterfelde site where even corridor space was at a premium. “Our own workshops (technical) grew to such an extent,” complained Heidinger in a report to IBM NY, “that every square meter of space was overfilling with machines and persons, and the acute shortage of space became more and more critical.”61
Dehomag’s explosive growth arose not only from a dictatorial mar-shalling of all commerce, but also because of a completely new industry within Nazi Germany: race science. Identifying who was a Jew—either by certifying Aryan lineage or exposing Jewish ancestry became big business overnight. Hollerith alone possessed the technology to efficiently provide the answers Nazi raceologists craved.
RACE SCIENCE, rooted in the international Eugenics movement, had long been a pseudo-scientific discipline within the Nazi culture. In Germany, the field transformed from vague debates into a lucrative reality when two factors converged. It began when a multiplicity of anti- Jewish decrees and private provisos demanded Jewish ousters and pure Aryan descent. But these racist requirements clashed with what Dehomag had exposed when it compiled the 1933 census: not all the Jews could be identified by a mere census.
Census tabulations isolated nearly a half million Jews, less than 1 percent of the overall German population, and 65,000 less than the previous national census in 1925. Reich statisticians saw this drop as validation that “the new political order had induced a strong emigration trend.” But in the Nazi mindset, the half million identified were merely the most obvious Jewish layer, the so-called “practicing Jews.”62
Nazi ideology defined Jewishness not as a function of religious practice, but bloodline. How far back? Nazi theoreticians debated tracing parentage. Some looked at grandparents. Some suggested searching back four generations. Still others focused on the year 1800, before Jewish emancipation, that is, before assimilation into German society.63
Reich statisticians concluded from the occupational yields of the Dehomag census that “there are quite a number of Jews in these ‘independent occupations’ who have left the community of the Jewish faith. Those ‘Jews’ could not be recorded as Jews in the 1933 Census. That means that Jewish infiltration into our cultural life is probably much greater than the numbers for practicing Jews would otherwise indicate.”64
Estimates of how many ancestral Jews, baptized or not, really dwelled within the Reich ranged far above the traditional 600,000. But no one knew just how many. Nazi raceologists devised a bizarre pseudo-mathematical formula that grouped ancestral Jews into a series of grades, such as fully Jewish, half-Jewish, and quarter-Jewish, depending upon how many Jewish parents and grandparents could be calculated from their past. All of it defied logic once one added other generation-to-generation dynamics such as remarriages and divorces.65
Logical or not, everywhere Germany was buzzing with the need to trace ancestry by cross-indexing births, deaths, baptisms, and other data going back generations. Since racial decrees mandated that only Aryans could participate in many walks of life, German individuals, companies, schools, associations of every size and caliber, and even churches, were gripped by the necessity to prove their Aryan purity and to exclude everyone else. Moreover, physical characteristics such as height, stature, and blond, blue-eyed features, were all thought to be coefficients of racial descent.
Linguistics played a dynamic role. Words such as public health and medicine, nationality, foreigners, family and family genealogy, hereditary, and even the word German, took on special anti-Semitic implications. Jews were foreigners, and in many cases thought to be disease carriers. Racial impurity was a public health issue. Only Aryans could be Germans. The word German became exclusionary.
A competitive, confusing, and often overlapping network of governmental, private, and pseudo-academic agencies with constantly evolving names, jurisdictions, and sponsors sprang up into existence. Many of them directly or indirectly benefited from Hollerith’s high-speed technology to sort through the voluminous handwritten or manually typed genealogical records needed to construct definitive family trees. These machines were often housed elsewhere, such as the Reich Statistical Office departments, which processed pen and paper forms into race statistics. No one shall ever know how many race tracking agencies accessed which machines in which locations during those first chaotic years. But this much is known—the Third Reich possessed only one method of cross-tabulating personal information: Dehomag’s Hollerith system.