Nazi theorists continued to bicker over what amount of Judaic parentage constituted an excludable Jew, and how far to trace bloodline. Determining Aryan pedigree was complicated by endless demographic and geographic variables that simply slipped through the punch cards. Cagey replies to questionnaires from individuals or companies nervous about their answers, as well as changing residential and business addresses, undermined the process. Moreover, suspect citizens rushed to baptismal fonts and church pews to assume new or more pronounced Christian personas. In consequence, tens of thousands of racial purity examinations had been convened since 1933.5
Laxity and ambiguity helped. About a third of Germany’s nearly 450,000 remaining registered Jews dwelled in Germany’s smaller cities and towns where in many instances they continued to exist unmolested. Many local and national government agencies often found it easier to continue trading with reliable Jewish firms than locate an untested alternative. Hausfraus managing a tight budget commonly sneaked away to Jewish retailers seeking discounts after their dogmatic husbands went off to work.6
Doctrinaire Nazis fought back. Night classes for housewives instructed women how and why to avoid Jewish shops. A court ruled that husbands were not legally bound to pay for purchases their wives made at Jewish stores. The mayor of Baden was fired when his dealings with Jews were discovered. Jew-baiters such as Julius Streicher published rabid, pornographic newspaper accounts of ritual murder and rampant sexual perversion by Jews, and then cajoled and humiliated all loyal Germans into boycotting Jewish enterprises. Brown Shirts blocked the doors of Jewish establishments and graffittied their exteriors. But too many Germans simply would not or could not comply with the complex confusing strictures to not buy from Jews. Most importantly, too many simply did not know where all the Jews were.7
In the absence of an explicit law defining exactly who in Germany was a Jew, Nazi persecution was far from hermetic. For years, such a definition would have been a cloudy exercise. Even if Nazis could agree on such an exegesis, no one could back up the definition with hard data. Since the advent of the Third Reich, thousands of Jews nervously assumed they could hide from the Aryan clause.
But Jews could not hide from millions of punch cards thudding through Hollerith machines, comparing names across generations, address changes across regions, family trees and personal data across unending registries. It did not matter that the required forms or questionnaires were filled in by leaking pens and barely sharpened pencils, only that they were later tabulated and sorted by IBM’s precision technology.
Even as Hitler’s fanatic followers thunder-marched through Nuremberg, Hollerith machines in Berlin were dispassionately clicking and rattling through stacks of punch cards slapping into hoppers to identify the enemy for the next drastic measures.
Throughout 1935, race specialists, bolstered by population computations and endless tabular printouts, proffered their favorite definitions of Jewishness. Some theorems were so sweeping as to include even the faintest Jewish ancestry. But most tried to create pseudo-scientific castes limited in scope. These latter efforts would encompass not only full Jews who professed the religion or possessed four Jewish grandparents, but also the so-called three-quarter, half, and one-quarter Jews of lesser Jewish lineage.8
Adolf Hitler was personally aware of preliminary Hollerith findings that while only about a half million Germans registered as Jews in the census, the veins of many more coursed with traces of Jewish blood. About a million more.9 He wanted something done about the continuing Jewish presence. The Jews Hitler feared most were the ones not apparent. Der Fuhrer had been working on the long-awaited racial definition for some weeks, but the enforceable formulae and calculations were still inconclusive.10
On September 10, 1935, he flew from Berlin to Nuremberg to open the Party Day celebrations. Church bells sounded and flowers were thrown adoringly as his automobile wended through the streets paced by newsreel cars. But belying the flourish was a Hitler impatient to intensify Jewish obliteration.11
Suddenly, on September 13, 1935, Hitler demanded that a decree be hammered out—now—within forty-eight hours, in time for his appearance before the Reichstag as the culmination of Party Day festivities. Top racial experts of the Interior Ministry flew in for the assignment. Working with drafts shuttled between Hitler’s abode and police headquarters, twin decrees of disenfranchisement were finally patched together. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and a companion decree entitled the Reich Citizenship Law deprived Jews of their German citizenship and now used the term explicitly—Jew, not non-Aryan. Moreover, Jews were proscribed from marrying or having sexual relations with any Aryan. Jewish employers could not even hire an Aryan woman under the age of 45—a concession to Streicher’s hysteria regarding sexual perversion. The laws would apply not only to full Jews, but also to half and quarter Jews as well, all according to complex racial mathematics.12
Despite the decree language, the precise arithmetic of Jewish ancestry had still not been finalized. How could one differentiate a quarter Jew from a so-called Mischling, or person of some mixed Aryan and Jewish blood? Indeed, it would be months of drafting and redrafting before those fractions were finally settled.13
Laborious and protracted paper searches of individual genealogical records were possible. But each case could take months of intensive research. That wasn’t fast enough for the Nazis. Hitler wanted the Jews identified en masse. Once drafted, the Nuremberg regulations would be completely dependent upon Hollerith technology for the fast, wholesale tracing of Jewish family trees that the Reich demanded. Hollerith systems offered the Reich the speed and scope that only an automated system could to identify not only half and quarter Jews, but even eighth and sixteenth Jews.14
With the denouement of September 15 approaching, Germany’s own sense of Jewish numbers was changing dynamically. As Security Police Chief Heydrich had concluded, “it has become apparent that a great number of Jews in Germany have become baptized in the Evangelical and Catholic faiths with the idea that once they changed their residence, they would no longer appear as Jews in the registries.”15
Earlier in 1935, the Party’s Race Political Office had estimated the total number of “race Jews.” Thanks to Dehomag’s people-counting methods, the Nazis believed that the 1933 census, which recorded a half million observant Jews, was now obsolete. Moreover, Nazis were convinced that the often-quoted total of some 600,000 Jews, which was closer to Germany’s 1925 census, was a mere irrelevance. In mid-June 1935, Dr. Leonardo Conti, a key Interior Ministry raceologist, declared 600,000 represented just the “practicing Jews.” The true number of racial Jews in the Reich, he insisted, exceeded 1.5 million. Conti, who would soon become the Ministry’s State Secretary for Health overseeing most race questions, was a key assistant to the officials rushing to compose the Nuremberg Jewish laws for Hitler.16