Understandably, Dehomag’s 1939 undertaking dwarfed anything it had attempted before, including the 1933 Prussian census. Months of intensive training, conducted in thousands of sessions, prepared legions of volunteers for the critical mission. Police and their auxiliaries were mandated to support the count “with all their powers” and “to function as census-takers in difficult and confusing residential areas,” according to official regulations.4
The additional Hollerith machinery assembled was massive: 400 electrical key punches, 10 gang punches, 20 summary punches, 300 key punch verifiers, 70 sorters, 50 tabulators, 25 duplicators, and 50 D-11 VZ tabulators. The Reich had imposed seemingly impossible target delivery dates for November 1939. So to increase speed, Dehomag’s engineers converted their versatile D-11 calculating tabulator into a pure counting machine dubbed the D-11 VZ. The improvised device could process 12,000 60-column punched cards per hour in sixteen counters and then precision-punch its own summaries onto 80-column cards. Eighty million cards were actually used.5
A special envelope containing a so-called Supplemental Card was created. This all-important card recorded the individual’s bloodline data and functioned as the racial linchpin of the operation. Each head of household was to fill out his name and address and then document his family’s ancestral lines. Jews understandably feared the newest identification. Census takers were cautioned to overcome any distrust by assuring families that the information would not be released to the financial authorities.6
But it was not German taxing agencies that were the most eager for the new data. It was the Nazi Party structure and Reich security forces seeking to locate additional Jews and other undesirables. Indeed, the final data was intended to help comprise a single national register for the entire Greater Reich. Each card carried a single column coded for descent, designed into the card prototype long before the census was launched. A letter from the Order Police to the Ministry of the Interior at the end of 1938 explained: “This column on the registration card is included to be filled out at the right time. That time should come in May of next year during the population, occupation, and company census. The regular questionnaire will be supplemented by an additional card. This card will include the question of whether the person had any fully Jewish grandparent. Survey results will then be evaluated using this registration card.”7
The 25 million Supplemental Cards—one for each household—represented a virtual doubling of census files. To cope with the volume and still meet deadlines, the census tabulation was divided into two operations. First, each special envelope containing a Supplemental Card was labeled to correspond to the household’s general questionnaire, along with the district and municipality of origin. Then local officials, generally the police, affixed the letter “J” to both the questionnaires and cards of all Jewish families.8
The words “Do Not Send Directly to the [Berlin] Statistical Bureau” were printed on every envelope. Instead, both the general questionnaire and its companion special envelope were sent to the regional statistical offices for the tedious quality control procedures. Did the envelopes match up to the questionnaires? Were Supplemental Cards containing racial data and the general questionnaires filled out completely? Just preparing the 25 million census forms and 25 million Supplemental Cards for processing required a behemoth manual operation. Once approved, the questionnaires and cards were transported to Berlin and separated. The Supplemental Cards were sorted into three groups: non-Aryans, “higher educated people,” and all others. These were then tabulated to yield the racial data.9
Never before had so many been counted so thoroughly and quickly. The Reich Statistical Office hired an additional 2,000 staffers to process the forms and race cards, which were enough to fill more than seventy boxcars. As in 1933, Dehomag created cavernous counting rooms and management offices at the Statistical Office headquarters in Berlin to tabulate the information. Initially, Dehomag’s army of operators punched 450,000 cards per day. With time, the volume reached one million daily. The company met its deadline. Preliminary analyzed results were ready by November 10, 1939, the one-year anniversary of Kristallnacht, and, more importantly for Hitler, the anniversary of Germany’s surrender in the Great War.10
Intense demand to access the final information on racial Jews came from competing Nazi organizations as well as state and national government bureaus. But anxious local and state agencies would have to wait. For example, municipal officials throughout Saxony asked their regional statistical offices if they could examine the census data first to speed their ghettoization and confiscation campaigns. But the Reich Statistical Office in Berlin said no. Greater priority was granted to the SD and Adolf Eichmann’s Referat II 112, which both received copies of all census registration lists.11
The census yielded exactly the data Nazi Germany needed, including data for the areas beyond Germany. Within months, for example, bureaucrats in the Austrian Statistical Office had compiled a complete profile of Jewish existence in the country. A report dispatched to Reich officials opened with the explanation: “In the census of May 17, 1939, the question was put for the first time whether one of the individual’s grandparents was a full Jew by race.” With stunning specificity, the extensive summary concluded, “According to the initial results of this year’s census, there were 91,480 full Jews and 22,344 part Jews of Grades I and II in Vienna as of May 17, 1939. In the remaining Reich Districts of the Ostmark there were 3,073 full Jews and 4,241 part Jews.” Tables displayed the Jewish totals divided into full Jews, as well as Grade I and Grade II Jews. Each of those designations was sub-divided between male and female and then delineated district by district for all of Vienna. In Innere Stadt: 116 Grade II female Jews. In Aimmering: 27 Grade II males. In Wieden: 31 Grade I males. Precise numbers were tallied for key regions as welclass="underline" Salzburg, Tirol, and others.12
Dehomag’s final calculations yielded a grand total of 330,539 so-called “racial Jews” still dwelling within the expanded Reich—Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. This was far less than the wild projections of 1.5 million generated four years earlier when the Nuremberg Laws were drafted. The new count showed 138,819 males and 191,720 females—more females because about 35,000 Jewish wives had become widowed or detached from refugee men. Clearly, through persecution, emigration, death during incarceration, and outright execution, Greater Germany had lost about half its originally counted Jewish population of some 502,000, including Jews added when the Saar region was annexed in 1935. But, by adding Austria and the Sudetenland, the Third Reich discovered that by 1939 it had actually gained an additional 96,893 Jews.13
Moreover, there were hundreds of thousands more Jews in the old Czechoslovakia, now called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Millions more existed in Poland and other countries in Europe that Germany planned to conquer or dominate. Indeed, the same German refugees would be encountered again and again as they fled from nation to nation.
Emigration and deportation would not work. Jewish refugees were being, or would be, reabsorbed as Germany annexed or invaded new territories in Europe. Dehomag’s numbers told them exactly how many Jews could be found in the Greater Reich, and soon IBM subsidiaries throughout Europe would help compile the numbers for invaded territories as well. It seemed the more the Reich achieved its territorial goals, the more Jews it encountered.