The spring 1940 cow census in occupied Belgium, also monitored by British intelligence, reflected an equal feat of livestock counting. After the count, each animal was required to wear an identity card.31
Schotte’s spring 1940 memo also listed the extraordinary programs of material control covering inventories as diverse as “arms, clothes, airplane spare parts” and all raw materials, such as “rubber, oil, steel, iron.” Moreover, reported Schotte’s report, “records [are] kept of each factory with the type and class of its machines” and whether they were currently being used for battle or classed as potential suppliers.32
In occupied lands, material censuses and registrations organized Nazi plunder of resources. For example, a butter census was scheduled for occupied Denmark to discover large stores of butter hoarded by Danes. As railroad cars loaded with the material and merchandise of a foreign country entered Germany, punch cards kept track of the inventory. This system was refined as the months progressed and as Germany’s occupation broadened. Schotte later described the evolved system for a government official who summarized it this way: “The original inventory throughout a country is represented by cards,” the official wrote. “For a period of ten days in Germany, cards are punched of incoming and outgoing movements and then at the end of ten days are sorted by commodity, together with the inventory card… [so] the inventory is never more than ten days behind time.”33
Schotte’s spring 1940 memo also cited the organization of all “automobile records: (military and in some cases also the private cars).” Private vehicles were routinely seized by invading Germans, first from Jews, and then from other citizens as well. Identifying cars and trucks was one of the first statistical efforts Germany generally mounted after invading any foreign territory.34
Hollerith machines were deeply involved in combat records as well, according to Schotte’s spring 1940 memo. For example, Luftwaffe missions were all duly recorded to calculate the details of aviator combat, asserted the report. Schotte’s memo bragged that punch cards maintained a “record of each flight of a military aviator, for his personal record and calculation of premiums.” In addition, all German war injuries were analyzed by complex Hollerith programs that allowed Reich planners at the Central Archive for War Medicine in Berlin to conduct sophisticated medical research. In World War I, it was Hollerith analyses of head-wound injuries that helped the Austrian military design the most protective helmet possible.35
Schotte’s spring 1940 report also listed “decoding” of enemy dispatches as a prime Hollerith application.36
As each month advanced, Hollerith machines became more involved in each and every move of the German forces. Eventually, every Nazi combat order, bullet, and troop movement was tracked on an IBM punch card system.37
In 1940, IBM NY knew the exact location of its machines in the Reich on an updated basis. Without that tracking, it could not audit IBM Europe’s charges and depreciate its equipment. One typical machine list in its Manhattan office was entitled “International Business Machines Corp. New York” and labeled in German words “Machines as of September 30, 1940.” This particular thirteen-page inventory identified each machine by client, location, type, serial number, and value. Five alphabetizers in the 405 model series, for instance, were located at the German Army High Command. Those five machines bore serial numbers 10161, 10209, 11316, 13126, and 13128, with each one valued between RM 8,750 and RM 11,675.38
Other alphabetizers were placed at a myriad of offices, according to the list, including various military inspectorates, offices of the punch card control agency, the census bureau, the branches of Reich Statistical Office, and strategic arms manufacturers such as Krupp and Junkers Aircraft. Again, each installation reflected the type of machine, serial number, and value.39
Ironically, all the rush orders placed into the militaries of such countries as Holland and Poland worked to the Reich’s advantage. When the Nazis invaded, all Hollerith machines were seized and converted to German use. IBM subsidiaries were then on hand to service the Reich’s needs. Sales to Germany’s enemies never bothered IBM’s hypersensitive Reich sponsors. Indeed, some in the Nazi hierarchy may have even viewed such sales as a virtual “pre-positioning” of equipment in neighboring nations, nations that many throughout Europe and America expected to be invaded imminently. In the case of Poland, for example, IBM leased Hollerith equipment to the Polish military in 1939 just before the German invasion, and then immediately after the invasion created a new Berlin-based subsidiary for the occupied territory. Accounts in annexed regions were transferred to Dehomag. In the case of Holland, systems were leased to the military in early 1940; a completely new subsidiary was planned in March 1940, just weeks before the invasion, and rush-formalized just after the invasion.40
IBM had almost single-handedly brought modern warfare into the information age. Through its persistent, aggressive, unfaltering efforts, IBM virtually put the “blitz” in the krieg for Nazi Germany. Simply put, IBM organized the organizers of Hitler’s war.
Keeping corporate distance in the face of the company’s mounting involvement was now more imperative than ever. Although deniability was constructed with enough care to last for decades, the undeniable fact was that either IBM NY or its European headquarters in Geneva or its individual subsidiaries, depending upon the year and locale, maintained intimate knowledge of each and every application wielded by Nazis. This knowledge was inherently revealed by an omnipresent paper traiclass="underline" the cards themselves. IBM—and only IBM—printed all the cards. Billions of them.
Since Herman Hollerith invented his tabulators at the close of the nineteenth century, the feisty inventor had fought continuous technologic and legal battles to ensure that no source but his company could print a card compatible with the sorter’s complex mechanisms. Once a customer invested in a Hollerith machine, the customer was continuously tied to the company for punch cards. This exclusivity was nothing less than the anchor of the lucrative Hollerith monopoly.41
Watson vigilantly continued Hollerith’s legacy. During the Hitler years, the Department of Justice litigated IBM’s monopoly, focusing on the firm’s secret pacts with other potential manufacturers, which forbid any competition in punch card supply. Unique presses, extraordinary paper, near clinical storage, exacting specifications, and special permission from Watson were required for any IBM subsidiary to even begin printing cards anywhere in the world. Should any non-IBM entity dare enter the field, Watson would shut them down with court orders. For example, when the German paper manufacturer Euler, associated with the Powers Company, tried to print IBM-compatible punch cards, Watson restrained them with an injunction. For good measure, IBM wrote special clauses into its German contracts prohibiting any client—whether an ordinary insurance company or the NSDAP itself—from utilizing any card other than one produced by IBM. In short, Hollerith cards could only be printed at IBM-owned and -operated printing facilities and nowhere else.42