“It’s the story of the world’s first personal information catastrophe, and that catastrophe ushered in the worst atrocities of World War II.”

By James Grippando

WHEN ACCLAIMED theatre director Joe Adler asked me to write the story of the Nazi’s use of IBM Technology in the Holocaust, he envisioned a one-act play about corporate greed and profits over principles. I wasn’t interested. IBM was hardly the only U.S. company to benefit financially from a German subsidiary that helped fuel the Nazi war machine. Standard Oil, the General Electric Company, Ford Motor Company, and other household names are on that list, and those stories have been told. What my director didn’t realize—and what I discovered as soon as I dug into the research—was that IBM’s place in the history of the Second World War is unique. It is the story of the world’s first personal information catastrophe, and that catastrophe ushered in the worst atrocities of World War II. That was the story I wanted to write. The result was Watson: A Dramatic Play Based on the True Story of Nazi Use of IBM Technology in the Holocaust.

The modern tech world’s joke about the data-mining business model—“if the product is free, you are the product”—is more true than funny. It is no secret that virtually everything we do on the internet becomes part of our personal data profile, which “Big Data” collects and sells to anyone interested in knowing who we are, what we think, or even how we feel. Yet, most people simply accept their loss of personal information and privacy without objection or thought, continuing to shovel personal information into the insatiable maw of social media. They like it.

This willingness to share ourselves with total strangers may strike you as a new phenomenon born of the internet. But technology didn’t suddenly turn humankind into open books. Technology exploited the natural human inclination to share and be helpful. The Nazis’ use of technology illustrates how vulnerable “being human” makes us.

Most of us are familiar with The Diary of a Young Girl, by Ann Frank. It is the moving and probably best-known example of “neighbor informing on neighbor,” the Nazis’ reliance on informants to identify Jewish families in hiding, which led to trainloads of innocents being shipped off to concentration camps. Ann Frank herself died in 1945 in Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp. For decades, people asked, “Who was the snitch? Who gave up the Frank family?” Betrayal on this level surely happened, and, in the case of the Frank family, it may well have been “neighbor informing on neighbor.” In the main, however, it was the Nazis’ abuse of technology that made the Holocaust so frighteningly efficient.

Historians have now documented the “punch card” systems, precursors to computer technology, which the Nazis used to impressive and horrifying effect—not only in the war against the Allies but in the genocidal campaign against Jews and other minorities.

Punch-card systems were the technology behind the Holocaust, the electro-mechanical machines that Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before: the automation of genocide. These punch cards were created from personal information that millions of Jewish “heads of household” provided voluntarily in censuses conducted by the Third Reich in the 1930s. In 21st Century parlance, they liked it.

To say that the Nazis were obsessed with census taking is another way of saying that the Nazis were obsessed with data. And obsessed they were. In May 1938, the New York Times reported that the Third Reich would take its first census of over 80 million people. That census required all respondents to state not only if they were of the Jewish faith, but also whether they had a Jewish grandparent. The idea was to cast the net wide enough so as to identify even non-practicing Jews. The results were processed using IBM technology at the rate of 25,000 punch cards per minute. It produced chilling results. People identified in the 1938 census as having a Jewish grandparent later ended up in concentration camps. Some of them didn’t even know they were Jewish – a cousin, an uncle or an aunt may have unwittingly linked their relatives to a Jewish grandparent who was completely unknown to other members of the extended family. But the Nazis could connect the dots. It was in the census data they’d collected and processed with state-of-the-art IBM technology. 

Much of what we will never know about the Nazis’ use of technology in the Holocaust was lost before the war ended. Allied bombings during the war destroyed 89 per cent of the Berlin Headquarters of IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (“Dehomag”). Willie Heidinger, the president of Dehomag—and a member of the Nazi Party—died of heart failure in 1944 and was never held accountable.

Soon after Germany’s surrender, Dehomag general manager Herman Rottke, Heidinger’s right-hand man for nearly 15 years, was arrested by the Red Army and taken to a Russian prison camp. He was never seen or heard from again.

In my play Watson, I found it necessary to tell this story through conversations that could have happened, based on facts that we have now established. Here’s an example of one such exchange in which a Red Army Officer interrogates Rottke after the fall of Berlin:

Red Army Officer: Let’s say the Nazis wanted to identify every person with a Jewish grandparent. They could search millions and millions of paper records. Months of work. Correct?

Rottke: Years.

Red Army Officer: Or . . . they could transfer census data to punch cards like these. (Showing.) And let Hollerith machines sort the cards at—how many per hour?

Rottke: (too proud to deny it) Twenty-five thousand.

Red Army Officer: And if the Nazis wanted to know the street address of every man, woman, and child with Jewish blood, Hollerith cards could tell them.

Rottke: (arrogantly) A very basic design for a German engineer.

Red Army Officer: If the Nazis wanted a list of property taken from Jews, Hollerith cards could make such a list, no?

(No answer from Heidinger.)

If the Nazis needed slave labor to build a wall around the Warsaw ghetto, Hollerith cards could find Jewish masons. Right?

(A penetrating glare from Heidinger, but more silence.)

If the Nazis wanted every train to Auschwitz completely full and running on time, could Hollerith cards do that?

Rottke: (with evermore contempt) Hollerith cards are used by railways all over the world.

(Watson: A Dramatic Play Based on the True Story of Nazi Use of IBM Technology in the Holocaust, Act III, at pp. 128-129.)

IBM (the parent company) denies any complicity in the actions of its German subsidiary. A class action lawsuit filed against IBM on behalf of Holocaust survivors in 2001 (Grossman v. IBM) was unsuccessful. Nonetheless, historians have been critical of IBM’s first CEO, Thomas J. Watson Sr.

“Watson “didn’t see the Nazis for what they were,” wrote K. Maney, authof of the 2007 book The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and the Making of IBM. “He saw them, for he wanted them to be.” 

In June 1937, Watson became president of the International Chamber of Commerce, urging “world peace through world trade.” At the same ICC congress, held in Berlin, Watson became the first American to receive the Merit Cross, the highest honor Adolph Hitler had (up until that point) ever bestowed on a non-German.

Charles Lindberg was later decorated. Only Henry Ford received a higher honor. The following year, Kristallnacht turned Nazi violence against Jews into worldwide news. By the end of 1939, Poland had fallen, and France and England were at war with Germany. By April 1940, Polish Jews were being herded into ghettos for eventual transport to concentration camps, and by May 1940, British troops were literally running for their lives on the beaches of Dunkirk. 

Finally, in June 1940—almost three years after the award and only at the urging of friends and the demand of prominent Jewish Americans—Watson returned the Merit Cross to Hitler.

But why? Business reasons? Social pressures? Or was it truly an act of courage and conscience?

Those questions fascinated me as a storyteller, and historians continue to debate them with no clear answer. What is clear, however, is the enduring relevance of the loss of personal information at the hands of powerful corporations and governments. And what keeps me up at night are the lessons we can learn from the dawn of “Big Data” in the Second World War.

James Grippando is a New York Times bestselling author of 30 novels published by HarperCollins and the winner of the Harper Lee Prize. He is also the author of Watson: A Dramatic Play Based on the True Story of Nazi Use of IBM Technology in the Holocaust, now available on Amazon. Visit his website at www.jamesgrippando.com