A few weeks ago, one of my readers asked me an interesting question. “How did the Nazis find all the Jewish people, especially people like Herman’s family who didn’t practice the religion?” My first response was the usual, perhaps obvious, one. “The German’s were meticulous record keepers,” I explained. “They gathered information from city, church, and synagogue records of births, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, and marriages, which in the past routinely included religious affiliation.”
But even as I spoke, I realized that this answer was not adequate.
It really did not explain how families like Herman’s, which did not claim any religious affiliation, were targeted. Even more puzzling, it did not explain how all the records were collated into useful lists. How did the Nazis know, in such a systematic and accurate way, where every person of Jewish heritage lived in order to first confiscate their valuables, then take over their businesses, and finally arrest them and relocate them to ghettos, and later, to slave labor and concentration camps? How did the SS always know who the people were on the packed trains that arrived at the camps, and later, who died or was available for work details? With over 6 million people to keep track of, how was all this precision and organization possible without computers? It could not have been simply a matter of German list mania and record-keeping.
I wanted to give my reader a better answer, and with today’s miracle of the computer and the Internet, I soon found it. It all came down to card shuffling—the sorting and shuffling of Hollerith cards to be exact. If you are old enough, say over 40 or so, you may remember those stiff paper cards full of little holes that were sometimes encountered in schools, offices, or the voting booth. Before computers, these cards were indispensable for counting and collating all kinds of information. Commands and data were represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions.
Herman Hollerith was the son of intellectual German immigrants who settled in upstate New York in the second half of the 19th Century. At the age of 19, Herman began work for the Federal Census Bureau whose task it was to conduct a census every 10 years. However, because of the growing US population, the tabulation of the census data was taking longer and longer. Though the census scheduled for 1890 approached, the final count of figures from the previous census was still far from complete. But, Herman Hollerith had an idea. Inspired by the punch cards used by music boxes, player pianos, and train conductors, he invented a card with precisely placed holes to represent specific data needed by the census bureau, such things as gender, nationality, and occupation. He also created a machine designed to read these cards. His invention was used for the first time in the 1890 US census. That census was completed in record time. Hollerith’s invention made advanced and more comprehensive census-taking possible around the world. His business producing machines and punch cards was so hugely successful that it evolved into the company we now know as IBM. Germany was one of its earliest customers.
Which brings us back to Hitler and the Nazis.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he promised the German people he would create a Master Race and eliminate European Jewry. Nazi ideology defined Jews by bloodline, not by religious practice. Neither conversion to Christianity nor lack of any religious practice and total cultural assimilation mattered. The field of “Race Science” took on the veracity of a true science in the German political community. Race was so integral to Hitler’s doctrine that he early established the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood within the Interior Ministry to deal with the areas of race law and policies.
Within weeks of Hitler’s rise to power, a census of all Germans was ordered that would include the gathering of racial information. The Führer wanted fast results, and the German subsidiary of IBM, Dehomag, was eager to help. They produced punch cards especially designed for the data Hitler wanted, and they rented the Nazis the machines to read and tabulate the cards. Dehomag organized and oversaw the entire process, hiring the data processors who transferred written information gathered by census takers onto punch cards. The operation was so efficient that 450,000 cards per day were processed. For any Jews uncovered, an additional and specialized card was processed.
The entire three-part system, gathering information on paper forms, processing the punch cards with the holes that represented the gathered data, and tabulating the cards to get the specific information needed for any action, was highly successful and enabled the SS and the Gestapo to enforce rapidly escalating anti-Jewish legislation. However, the 1933 census didn’t gather enough data on ancestry to facilitate Hitler’s Final Solution, which demanded the extermination of all Jews with any taint of Jewishness in their bloodline. In 1938, another more complete and race ancestry specific census was undertaken in Germany, as well as and in the recently annexed areas of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Sudetenland. Dehomag IBM punch cards and technology were again the driving force behind this massive census.
Throughout the days of the Holocaust, the SS and the Gestapo used Hollerith machines and IBM punch cards to organize deportations, monitor prisoner demographics, and generate lists of those inmates to be liquidated. Nearly every concentration camp maintained a Hollerith Department on site and Dehomag IBM was instrumental in creating the system of hole-punches needed for whatever information the Nazis wanted to have at hand. Hollerith cards and readers were also used to keep track of rail schedules and the distribution of war materiel. When the Nazis invaded one country after another across Europe, there were always Hollerith machines and the subsidiaries of IBM ready to help them identify, count, and sort the Jews of the occupied nations.
Of course, The Third Reich was not the only nation to use Hollerith’s invention. Without it, our Social Security system would never have been implemented in 1936. The Enigma code breakers in England used Hollerith machines, and Hollerith equipment was landed on the beaches of Normandy within days of securing the beachhead. For the first half of the 20th Century, Hollerith punch cards and readers were the only technology available to modern governments and organizations for the tabulation and co-ordination of information. It was used by the US military, corporations both large and small, city and state governments, educational institutions — in short, every entity that needed to gather data, keep track of it, and easily organize it for later use. Unfortunately, between 1933 and 1945, this also included the Nazi Final Solution.
If you are interested in the unabridged story, you can read IBM and the Holocaust, by Edwin Black, 2001, Three Rivers Press 
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