automating Auschwitz: IBM, I.G. Farben

[Doug Millison]

[...] Thanks to the new discoveries, researchers can
now trace how Hollerith numbers assigned to inmates
evolved into the horrific tattooed numbers so symbolic
of the Nazi era. (Herman Hollerith was the German
American who first automated U.S. census information
in the late 19th century and founded the company that
became IBM. Hollerith's name became synonymous with
the machines and the Nazi "departments" that operated
them.) In one case, records show, a timber merchant
from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz in August
1943 and was assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM
Hollerith number, 44673. The number was part of a
custom punch-card system devised by IBM to track
prisoners in all Nazi concentration camps, including
the slave labor at Auschwitz. Later in the summer of
1943, the Polish timber merchant's same five-digit
Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm.
Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans
at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.

Tattoos, however, quickly transmogrified at Auschwitz.
Soon, they bore no further relation to Hollerith
operations for one reason: The Hollerith number was
designed to track a working inmate—not a dead one.
Prisoner deaths at Auschwitz climbed at a staggering
rate. Various tattoo numbering schemes ultimately took
on a chaotic incongruity all its own as an internal
Auschwitz-specific identification system. 

Central to the Nazi effort was a massive 500-man
Hollerith Gruppe, installed in a looming brown
building at 24 Murnerstrasse in Krakow, Poland. The
Hollerith Gruppe of the Nazi Statistical Office
crunched all the numbers of plunder and genocide that
allowed the Nazis to systematically starve the Jews,
meter them out of the ghettos, and then transport them
to either work camps or death camps. 

The trains running to Auschwitz were tracked by a
specially guarded IBM customer site facility at 22
Pawia in Krakow. The millions of punch cards the Nazis
in Poland required were obtained exclusively from IBM,
including from one company print shop at 6 Rymarska
Street across the street from the Warsaw Ghetto. The
entire Polish subsidiary was overseen by an IBM
administrative facility at 24 Kreuz in Warsaw. 

The exact addresses and equipment arrays of the key
IBM offices and customer sites in Nazi-occupied Poland
had already been uncovered. But no one had ever been
able to determine whether there was an IBM facility
at, or even near, Auschwitz—until now. Auschwitz chief
archivist Piotr Setkiewicz finally pinpointed the
first such IBM customer site. 

Auschwitz was actually three concentration camps,
surrounded by some 40 subcamps, numerous factories,
and a collection of farms. The original Auschwitz
became known simply as Auschwitz I, and functioned as
a camp for transit, labor, and detention. Auschwitz
II, also called Birkenau, became the extermination
center, operating gas chambers and ovens. Nearby
Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz, existed primarily as
a slave labor camp. 

The newly unearthed IBM customer site was a huge
Hollerith Büro. It was situated in the I.G. Farben
factory complex, housed in Barracks 18, next to German
Civil Worker Camp 7, about two kilometers from
Monowitz. Archivists found the Büro only because it
was listed in the I.G. Werk Auschwitz phone book on
page 50. The phone extension was 4496. "I was looking
for something else," recalls Auschwitz's Setkiewicz,
"and there it was." 

Many of the long-known paper prisoner forms stamped
Hollerith Erfasst, or "registered by Hollerith,"
indicated the prisoners were from Monowitz. Now
Auschwitz archivist Setkiewicz has discovered about
100 Hollerith machine summary printouts of Monowitz
prisoner assignments and details generated by the I.G.
Farben customer site. Comparison of the new printouts
to other typical camp cards shows the Monowitz systems
were customized for the specific coding Farben needed
to process the thousands of slave workers who labored
and died there. The machines were probably also used
to manage and develop manufacturing processes and
ordinary business applications. The machines almost
certainly did not maintain extermination totals, which
were calculated as "evacuations" by the Hollerith
Gruppe in Krakow. "The Hollerith office at IG Farben
in Monowitz used the IBM machines as a system of
computerization of civil and slave labor resources,"
said Setkiewicz. "This gave Farben the opportunity to
identify people with certain skills, primarily skills
needed for the construction of certain buildings in
Monowitz." At press time, the diverse Farben codes and
range of machine uses were still being studied. [...] 
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0241/black.php



"By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any
piece of machinery, was the real and major result of
the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended to
include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range
rocket program and the death camps, such as
Auschwitz."
--Thomas Pynchon







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