Hundreds of disenfranchised middle-class German Jews from the provinces tried to reestablish themselves in Berlin with small retail businesses. Former boot manufacturers reappeared in shoe shops. Liquidated apparel makers set up shop as haberdashers. Evicted professors opened bookstores. As soon as the Nazis discovered these shoestring enterprises, customers were frightened away and the assets targeted for confiscation. Jewish shops were defaced with painted epithets exclaiming “Jewish Swine” or “Out with the Jews.” Not infrequently, armed Storm Troopers blockaded the doorways. One day, the world awoke to headlines reporting a massive racist display as several miles of Berlin’s main shopping streets were obstructed with crude, three-foot-high signs identifying exactly which stores were owned by Jews.4 Nazi agitators always seemed to know if owners were Jewish, no matter how new the stores.
Yet for the Hitler regime, the pace of Jewish destruction was still not swift enough nor sufficiently complete. Although Germany’s professing Jews had been identified, thousands of so-called “racial Jews” with Jewish ancestors dating back to the prior century had yet to be marked. In 1937, the Reich ordered another nationwide census that would prepare the country for military mobilization, and for the Jews would be the final and decisive identification step. Dehomag eagerly agreed to organize the project.5
The racial portion of the census was designed to pinpoint ancestral Jews as defined by the Nuremberg Laws, ensuring no escape from the Reich’s anti-Semitic campaign. In addition to the usual census questions, a special card asked whether any of the individual’s grandparents was Jewish. When completely filled out, the card would be isolated in a separate envelope for processing by both the census authorities and security offices.6
The project, originally scheduled for May 1938, would be an enormous undertaking for IBM, requiring a huge expansion of manpower, machinery, and processing space. Seventy sorters, some sixty tabulators, seventy-six multipliers, and 90 million punch cards would be needed for the RM 3.5 million contract. IBM supervisors in Geneva, Stockholm, and New York understood how difficult the challenge would be. A memo from IBM’s European Factory Manager J.G. Johnston to IBM NY supervisors in Sweden specified, “we also have to raise considerable funds for the financing of the RM 3.5 million census order” even though the Reich’s payments would be distributed over a fifteen-month period. Other IBM executives seemed to sense that the forthcoming racial census would represent a project so far-reaching, it would be the last of its kind, and therefore IBM’s investment would have to plan for a temporary surge. “You should take into consideration… the fact that the German census order is a peak load which may not reoccur.”7
The Nazi establishment was ecstatic about the implications for German Jewry. “In May of next year,” bragged the leading NSDAP newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, “the largest and most comprehensive census will take place. It will be larger and more comprehensive than Germany, and even the rest of the world, has ever known…. it is the duty of every Volks-comrade to answer every single question completely and truthfully… [thus] giving the Fuhrer and his colleagues the basis for the future legislation of the next five to ten years.”8
One Nazi bureaucrat enthused, “The general census of 1938 is intended to also determine the blood-wise configuration of the German population…. the results could also be recorded on the police department’s technical registration cards. The police would thus gain an insight into the racial composition of the persons living in their jurisdictions. And this would also accomplish the goals set by the Main Office of the Security Police.”9
But the much-anticipated May 1938 census was delayed. On March 13, 1938, the Third Reich absorbed Austria, creating a Greater Germany of 73 million people. Hitler called it the Anschluss, or “Annexation.” The anti-Semitic program that had evolved over the years in Germany now rapidly took hold in the Austrian provinces—virtually overnight. First came the violence. Jewish merchants were rounded up and publicly beaten, their stores looted. Viennese crowds cheered when Jewish men and women were forced to their knees to scrub streets as rifle butts flailed them.10
Page one headlines in the New York Times immediately decried an “Orgy of Jew-baiting.” The article described sadistic cruelties calculated to coerce Jews into immediately emigrating penniless to anywhere. “In Vienna and Austria,” the New York Times declared, “no vestige of decency or humanity has checked the will to destroy, and there has been an unbroken orgy of Jew-baiting such as Europe has not known since the darkest days of the Middle Ages.”11
Then came the arrests. Thousands of Jews were extracted from their homes and offices, loaded onto wagons, and shipped to concentration camps, such as Dachau, where they suffered bestial tortures, starvation, and back-breaking labor. The camps, too, were designed to convince Austrian Jews to leave the country—should they ever be released from incarceration. And only those who promised to emigrate at once were even considered for release.12
When the pace of emigration was not quick enough, Jews in the Austrian provinces were simply expelled from their homes with no notice. More than 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children in the Burgenland region of Austria, many with roots dating back centuries, were loaded onto trucks, driven to the Jewish quarter of Vienna, and summarily dumped. The Vienna Jewish community housed them in synagogues and other buildings as best they could, but the weather was unusually cold and many of the children suffered extreme exposure and near starvation from the ordeal.13
On June 30, 1938, nearly 10,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Austria were ordered to immediately fire all Jewish employees—30,000 men and women—and replace them with Aryans. The mass media described “heart-breaking scenes” across Vienna as trusted Jewish employees—many of ten- and twenty-year tenure—were suddenly ousted without warning or severance.14
Expulsions, exclusions, and confiscations raged across Vienna, stripping Jewish citizens of their dignity, possessions, and legal status. No one was spared. Middle-class Jews from Sigmund Freud to nameless victims were forced to board any ship, train, or bus out of Austria with no possessions other than what they could carry.15 Once Jews were identified, their lives in Austria were over.
Suicide became a frequent alternative. In the first 10 days of German annexation, ninety-six persons committed suicide. As more Jews found themselves dispossessed or facing the prospect of Dachau, they entered into suicide pacts and even suicide clubs.16
With stunning precision, the Nazis knew exactly who in Austria was Jewish. Indeed, the New York Times, in its initial coverage of the round-ups, could not help but comment, “Many of these patrols are engaged in rounding up the thousands on lists of those due for imprisonment and ‘correction.’ These lists were compiled quietly year after year in preparation for the day of Germany’s seizure of power.”17
IBM was in Austria. Before Hitler came to power, the company was represented only by an agency called Furth & Company, operated in part by Stephan Furth. But in 1933, after Hitler declared the Third Reich, Watson established a wholly-owned IBM subsidiary in Austria. Furth then went to the United States to undergo sales training with IBM in New York. Shortly thereafter, Furth returned to Vienna as co-manager of the new wholly-owned IBM subsidiary. That subsidiary had the benefit of one of IBM’s most talented punch card engineers, Gustav Tauschek, and Manager Victor Furth. Another Dehomag-trained manager named Berthold later joined Furth. In 1934, IBM undertook the Austrian census, and two years later, Watson approved a card printing plant for the country.18