After the 1939 invasion, Heydrich of the Security Service, the official who had sent out the all-defining September 21 Express Letter, sent a follow-up cable to his occupying forces in Poland, Upper Silesia, and Czechoslovakia. This cable outlined how a new census scheduled for December 17, 1939, would escalate the process from mere identification and cataloging to deportation and execution as people were rapidly moved into Polish ghettos to await the next step.104
Heydrich’s memo, entitled “Evacuation of the New Eastern Provinces,” decreed: “The evacuation of Poles and Jews in the new Eastern Provinces will be conducted by the Security Police… The census documents provide the basis for the evacuation. All persons in the new provinces possess a copy. The census form is the temporary identification card giving permission to stay. Therefore, all persons have to hand over the card before deportation… anyone caught without this card is subject to possible execution…. It is projected that the census will take place on December 17, 1939.”105
More than a half-million people were to be deported from the Warthe region alone, based on “Statistical information (census lists, etc.) from German and Polish sources, investigative results of the Security Police and the Security Service, and surveys… [which would] constitute the foundation.”106
How long would it take to quantify and organize the deportation of millions from various regions across Eastern Europe based upon a December 17 census? Relying upon the lightning speed of Hollerith machines, Heydrich was able to assert, “That means the large-scale evacuation can begin no sooner than around January 1, 1940.”107
Ultimately, the late December census took place over several days, from December 17 to December 23, 1939. Each person over the age of twelve was required to fill out census and registration in duplicate, and was then fingerprinted. Part of the form was stamped and returned as the person’s new identification form. Without it, they would be shot. With it, they would be deported.108
December was a busy month for IBM’s German subsidiary—and extremely profitable. Throughout Germany and the conquered territories, Dehomag frantically tried to keep up with the pace of unending censuses, registrations, and analyses of people, property, and military operations that required its equipment, repair services, and card processing. Millions of cards were printed each week just to meet the demand. Understandably, whereas Rottke had been incensed at Watson’s initial refusal to transfer the alphabetizers as requested, all the hard feelings were now gone.
DECEMBER 6, 1939
Mr. Thomas J. Watson, President
International Business Machines Corporation
590 Madison Ave.
New York NY USA
Dear Mr. Watson:
As Christmas is approaching I feel an urgent desire to express to you and your family my most sincere and best wishes for a joyful Yule-tide. Mrs. Rottke and my two sons add their good wishes hereto. I take this opportunity to thank you again most heartily for the understanding by you in regard to my requests during the past year. I hope that the difficult times, which have come over the European nations once more, will not last too long. My family and I are enjoying good health, which I sincerely trust is also the case with yourself and your family.
In early 1940, IBM Geneva sent Watson a statement of Dehomag’s 1939 profits. The numbers were almost double the previous year, totaling RM 3,953,721 even after all the royalty income and other disguised revenue. The Dehomag profit statement to Watson also explained that somehow almost half the 1939 profit, RM 1,800,000, was suddenly recorded in December 1939.110
The strategic alliance with Hitler continued to pay off in the cities and in the ghettos. But now IBM machines would demonstrate their special value along the railways and in the concentration camps of Europe. Soon the Jews would become Hollerith numbers.
VIII. WITH BLITZKRIEG EFFICIENCY
HITLER’S ARMIES SWARMED OVER EUROPE THROUGHOUT the first months of 1940. The forces of the Reich slaughtered all opposition with a military machine unparalleled in human history. Blitzkrieg—lightning war—was more than a new word. Its very utterance signified coordinated death under the murderous onslaught of Hitler’s massive air, sea, and 100,000-troop ground assaults. Nothing could stop Germany.
Nazi Europe—and Berlin’s new world order—was becoming a reality. Austria: annexed in March 1938. Sudetenland: seized October 1938. Czechoslovakia: dismembered March 1939, and the Memel region ceded from Lithuania that same month. Poland : invaded September 1939. By January 1940, nearly 42 million people had come under brutal German subjugation. Disease, starvation, shattered lives, and fear became the desolate truth across the Continent.
The Jews were running out of refuges. One overrun sanctuary after another slid back into the familiar nightmare of registration, confiscation, and ghettoization. No sooner did the Swastika flag of occupation unfurl, than the anti-Semitic decrees rolled out. Eastern European countries not yet conquered emulated the pattern as German sympathizers and surrogates in Romania, Hungary, and Italy undertook Berlin’s bidding to destroy local Jewish populations.
As the winter receded, the Reich prepared for further aggression. By spring 1940, Nazi Germany began dismembering Scandinavia and the Low Countries. April 9, the Wehrmacht invaded Denmark and Norway. Several days later, tiny Luxembourg was taken. May 15, Germany crushed Holland into complete submission. May 28, Belgium capitulated to German forces. During April and May, Germany’s enslavement jurisdiction grew to 65 million Europeans.1
Cities across Europe smoldered in ruin. Warsaw was pulverized into a shambles. Rotterdam was mercilessly bombed even after its surrender on May 14 because, as Berlin propagandists explained, Dutch officials exceeded the ultimatum deadline by some twenty minutes. An elaborate Nazi newsreel, filmed by parachuting cameramen, showed Rotterdam almost completely aflame. Airports at Brussels and Antwerp were bombed and strafed by hundreds of Luftwaffe planes.2
Nazi-commandeered trains crisscrossed the continent hauling into Germany looted coal, scrap metal, foodstuffs, machinery, and the other essentials Berlin craved. When they weren’t carrying raw materials, or transporting troops, the railroad cars freighted conscripted labor en route to work projects as well as expelled Jews destined for concentration camps.3
Mass executions, organized plunder, and ruthless invasion—these blared across the front pages of the newspapers, the frames of newsreels, and the broadcasts of radio news. Germany was portrayed in emotional headlines and feature articles as a savage, murderous nation bent on destroying and dominating all of Europe no matter how many people died. On April 2, Poland’s exile government declared that in addition to a million prisoners and forced laborers transported to German work sites, an estimated 2.5 million had died as a result of military action, executions, starvation, or frigid homelessness. Headlines continued as the New York Times grossly exaggerated the five days of Germany’s invasion of the Netherlands which commenced May 10; the newspaper claimed a quarter of the Dutch army was killed—more than 100,000 (even though the number was 2,200).4
Moreover, millions of Jews were now clearly earmarked for death by virtue of Hitler’s oppressive measures. In November 1939, the New York Times published reports from Paris declaring that 1.5 million Jews trapped in Poland were in danger of starving to death. On January 21, 1940, World Jewish Congress Chairman Nahum Goldmann warned a Chicago crowd of 1,000, as well as wire service reporters, that if the war continued for another year 1 million Polish Jews would die of calculated starvation or outright murder. Such dire predictions only capped years of saturation media coverage about inhumane Jewish persecution and horrifying concentration camps.5