A better solution would be needed.
BY 1939, Nazi race policy had evolved. No longer was Germany’s anti-Semitic crusade content with just ridding the Greater Reich of Jews. Hitler had always wanted all Europe completely Jew-free. In pursuit of that goal, NSDAP forces had spent years subversively cultivating paramilitary Fascist surrogates worldwide—from Brazil’s Integralite Party to Syria’s Phalange militia. Europe, of course, was the Nazi success story. Romania’s Iron Guard was highly organized and impatient. In Holland, it was the Dutch Nazi Party. Polish Brown Shirts terrorized Jews. In Hungary, the Arrow Cross Party agitated. In Croatia, blood-lusting Ustashi could not wait. Whether their shirts were black, brown, or silver, whether of German extraction or merely anti-Semites in other lands, these people could be relied upon to preach Hitler’s ideology of Jew-hatred, racial castes, and Aryan superiority.14
Wherever those of German ancestry or ultra-nationalists existed, the Reich sought to use them as advance troops organized around strict Aryan principles. The Auslandsorganisation of the NSDAP, an association of German Nazis living abroad, was the backbone of this movement. Berlin expected members to help achieve its goals. Typical was a published exhortation in the German press demanding all Aryans to observe rigid racial purity. In that same vein, Goering had demanded quite publicly in his speeches that Germans living in other countries terminate all Jewish employees and “be the servants of this Homeland.”15
But keeping track of potential German sympathizers globally was a prodigious task. As early as summer 1938, the German Foreign Institute at Stuttgart began compiling what it called a “German world migration register” to help identify its friends in other countries. Advocates insisted “[t]he World Migration Book must represent more than a card index but a German world… [where] eternal Germanism may live.” The Stuttgart Kurier asserted that the Migration Book would remind Germans worldwide of their “never ending task to work with word and deed for the maintenance of the German race.”16
Even as it rallied Nazi cohorts throughout Europe, Berlin pressured its neighbors to adopt anti-Semitic policies along Aryan lines to forestall German aggression. For example, just days before the Reich invaded Czechoslovakia, Berlin offered to respect Prague’s borders only if it submitted to a three-prong ultimatum: delivery of one-third of its gold reserves, dismantling of its army, and an immediate “solution of the Jewish problem” according to Nuremberg racial definitions.17
Country after country adopted laws identical to German race policies, ousting Jews, confiscating their assets, and organizing their expulsion long before the Reich crossed their borders. By spring 1939, Hungary had already passed a series of anti-Jewish measures, including land expropriation, professional exclusion, and citizenship annulment. A New York Times headline on the question declared, “Aim to Head Off Nazis.” Waves of pogroms and Nazi-style anti-Jewish boycotts and economic expulsions had long been sweeping Poland, especially in areas with many so-called Volksdeutsche, those of German parentage. By 1937, a leading party in the Polish government, “the Camp of National Unity,” declared the popular campaign had become official, to the delight of German-allied Polish Fascists. Similar persecution was regularly debated in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania. Eventually the majority of Europe would soon legislate Jews out of existence. It was all part of Berlin’s new continent-wide irresistible sphere of anti-Semitic influence.18
While Berlin was igniting anti-Jewish campaigns everywhere, NSDAP forces were quietly gathering population details on Jews throughout the Continent and preparing for the day when Nazi-inspired coups or outright invasion would permit the instant liquidation of one Jewish community after another. Nazi race and population scientists utilizing punch card systems were a crucial component of this effort.
Typical was a Nazi operative named Carl Fust, who was scouting church records for familial information in Lithuania as far back as 1936. On June 29, 1936, he reported his progress to the Reichssippenamt in Berlin. “I have now also registered all known books of the Tilsit Mennonite Community,” wrote Fust. “It was quite a task to find the present location of the books… The entries… go partly back to the year 1769; however, individual data goes back as far as 1722.”19 The Reichssippenamt automated its files with Hollerith machines.
On July 2, 1936, several Nazis met in a Breslau inn to discuss the services of Fritz Arlt, a Leipzig statistician. Arlt had created a cross-referenced card file on every Leipzig Jewish resident, down to so-called quarter-Jews. What made Arlt’s expertise desirable was that his cards also listed exactly which ancestral Polish towns their families originated from. At the Breslau meeting, Arlt was assigned to work with the security offices of the Auslandsorganisation. His groundbreaking Polish demography was deemed so pivotal, Arlt was asked to journey to Berlin to assist Eichmann’s Referat II 112, with travel expenses to be paid by the SD.20
The Reich did everything in its power to extend its census, registration, and genealogical reach throughout Europe. Once it invaded or forced its political domination in a neighboring country, it could then immediately locate both racial and practicing Jews. Berlin proved it could be done in Austria and the Sudetenland. But such demographic feats Europe-wide would be impossible without detailed, automated information about Jewish citizens in other lands. That required more than the resources of the Reich Statistical Office, it required multi-national statistical cooperation.
IBM subsidiaries throughout Europe had long been working in unison to take advantage of political and military events in Europe. Salesmen constantly shuttled from various countries to either New York or Berlin for training, and were then transferred back to their original countries to oversee punch card operations. In late 1939, with Thomas Watson’s consent, an international training school for IBM service engineers throughout Europe was opened in Berlin. IBM lectures and demonstrations for military leaders and government leaders were frequent—all under the watchful eye of IBM’s Geneva office.21
In the first three months of 1939 alone, IBM Sweden sold 1.9 million punch cards to Denmark, 1.3 million to Finland, and 696,000 to Norway. IBM NY sold 1 million cards to Yugoslavia, and 700,000 to Spain. Dehomag sold 261,000 to Hungary.22
On February 16, 1939, Reich legal authorities announced that the term Aryan would be replaced in many instances by a new term: European racial. Under the new guidelines, other ethnic groups and races, such as Germany’s Romanian and Hungarian allies, could be allowed to exist.23 But a Jewish presence would be allowed nowhere on the Continent.
By late spring 1939, Europe was wracked by incremental Nazi land grabs and invasions in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Memel region of Lithuania. Massive German military buildups, including troop concentrations on its extended frontiers, threatened Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, France, and England. European Jewry, including thousands of refugees, was threatened with extinction.