IBM and the Holocaust (71 page)

Slave revenues for all camps totaled RM 13.2 million for 1942. This program of working inmates to death had a name. The Reich called it "extermination by labor." Atop the ironwork entrances of many slave camps was an incomprehensible motto:
Arbeit Macht Frei
—"Work will set you free."
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EVERY HELL
has its hierarchy. Each Hollerith code carried consequences. In the concentration camps, the levels of inhumanity, pain, and torture were not the happenstance of incarceration as much as a destiny assured by Hollerith coding. Many unfortunate groups were shipped to the camps. But the Jews, coded as they were, were singled out for special cruelties that forced them to either live a more tortured life or die a more heinous death.

It was impossible to shirk one's Hollerith code. Most camps classed prisoners into sixteen categories:

On arrival, all prisoners would register and receive their five-digit inmate number, as well as a striped uniform sewn with a color-coded triangular chest patch. The patch identified the man at a distance to both guards and more privileged prisoners. Generally, but not always, political criminals wore red patches. Homosexuals wore pink. Serious criminals wore green. Jews, coded 8, were forced to wear two triangular patches forming the six-pointed Star of David. Various additional markings and colors on the yellow star connoted either "race polluter" or political Jew.
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As horrific as camps were for all, Jews coded by number experienced an additional nightmare of unspeakable dimension. Because Jews were instantly recognizable by their patches, they could be denounced at every turn as "Jewish swine," or "Jewish muck," with the attendant physical abuse.
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One could never escape his code.

Coded maltreatment also meant segregated quarters and more severe work conditions for Jews. In Buchenwald, for example, Jews were almost always confined to the so-called Little Camp, where prisoners were housed sixteen to a 12' x 12' "shelf," triple-decked. Many new inmates were initiated by spending time in the Little Camp, where they were expected to quickly lose about 40 percent of their body weight, and then move on to other barracks. But Jews were not released. Emaciated Jewish prisoners who "had been around long enough" or who refused to be mentally broken, were arbitrarily condemned to death—generally an entire shelf at a time.
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Once the murder decision had been made, all sixteen Jews in the shelf were immediately marched to a small door adjacent to Buchenwald's incinerator building. The door opened inwards creating a short, three-foot-long corridor. Jews were pushed and herded until they reached the corridor end. There, a hole dropped thirteen feet down a concrete shaft and into the Strangling Room. A camp worker recalled, "As they hit the floor they were garroted . . . by big SS guards and hung on hooks along the side wall, about 61/2 feet above the floor . . . any who were still struggling were stunned with a wooden mallet . . . An electric elevator . . . ran [the corpses] up to the incinerator room."
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In another camp, Jews were once singled out on Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that features the lighting of small candles. Guards ordered Jews to gather round. Eight were selected and strung upside down. The Jews were then forced to douse the hanging men with oil, and ignite them one by one. As the immolating Jews shrieked in pain, the unfortunate audience was compelled to joyously sing the Christmas carol "Silent Night."
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For the smallest of infractions, including not standing completely erect or speaking out of line, Jews were regularly flogged in an official method prescribed by Berlin administrators. For example, Jews were tied to a board for twenty-five lashes on the buttocks delivered by exuberant guards who often jumped into the air to increase momentum. If the Jew screamed out, the beating was increased ten more strokes. Because they were Jews—and only because they were Jews—if the guard was in the mood he could increase the number to sixty lashes.
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Many random cruelties such as floggings, kicking, testicle beatings, and other sadistic acts were inflicted against Jews, especially by those of higher rank among the prisoners, such as Poles or German criminals. Other prisoners often attempted to curry favor with their guards by brutalizing Jews. Guards often demanded it as sport. Jews, no matter how broken or bloody, could not be admitted to the infirmary at some camps; one inmate recalls Jews were classed as "well or dead."
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Hollerith codes afflicted not just Jews, but others at the bottom of the hierarchy of camp victims. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses were coded 2. Known as "Bible Researchers," Jehovah's Witnesses were singled out for their abstinent refusal to register for the German draft and their Christian rejection of anti-Semitism. They were rewarded with a greater level of maltreatment than almost any prisoner other than a Jew coded 8. To relieve their daily agony of beatings and camp killings, Jehovah's Witnesses needed only to sign a declaration denouncing their church and submit to the military draft. This they steadfastly declined to do. For their courage and conscience, Jehovah's Witnesses were tortured and slaughtered.
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Each special incarcerated group bore the horrors inflicted by their codes. Homosexuals coded 3 and assigned pink triangles were singled out for bestial treatment. Even traditional Germans who had been classed as "work-shy" or "asocial," that is, people who simply did not fit the Nazi mold, found themselves the targets of specially prescribed mistreatment in ways that other coded prisoners were not. The bottom of the Personal Inmate Card logged prescribed tortures in a section headed
Strafen im Lager,
"Punishment Administered in Camp." In addition to daily random brutalities, officially prescribed punishment was often meted out on specific orders issued by the SS Economics Administration in Berlin. The agency had instant access to an inmate's history of prior infractions and punishment. Typical was the Personal Inmate Card for Auschwitz III prisoner 11457; directly over the section entitled
Strafen im Lager
was the telltale stamp,
Hollerith erfasst.
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When transferring to another camp, one's coded identity was never left behind.
Zentral Institut
Hollerith Transfer Lists always included it. Even in death, Nazi victims were coded. Four main death codes were punched into
Zentral Institut
Hollerith cards:

Most death reports were coded C-3, even when people were openly murdered. But the fourth death code was in fact a secret one. F-6 stood for
SB, Sonderbehandlung
or "Special Treatment." Any punishment coded F-6 was in fact an order for extermination, either by gas chamber or bullet.
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The multitude of columns and codes punched into Hollerith and sorted for instant results was an expensive, never-ending enterprise designed to implement Hitler's evolving solutions to what was called the Jewish problem. From Germany's first identifying census in 1933, to its sweeping occupational and social expulsions, to a net of ancestral tracings, to the Nuremberg definitions of 1935, to the confiscations, and finally to the ghettoizations, it was the codes that branded the individual and sealed his destiny. Each code was a brick in an inescapable wall of data. Trapped by their code, Jews could only helplessly wait to be sorted for Germany's next persecution. The system Germany created in its own midst, it also exported by conquest or subversion. As the war enveloped all Europe, Jews across the Continent found themselves numbered and sorted to one degree or another.

By early 1942, a change had occurred. Nazi Germany no longer killed just Jewish people. It killed Jewish
populations.
This was the data-driven denouement of Hitler's war against the Jews.

Hollerith codes, compilations, and rapid sorts had enabled the Nazi Reich to make an unprecedented leap from individual destruction to something on a much larger scale. No longer were such vague notions as "destruction" and "elimination" bandied ambiguously in speeches and decrees. From early 1942, the prophetic new Nazi word openly pronounced in newspapers was
extermination.
The context, as spoken in Europe and widely reported in the media, always connoted but one objective:
mass killing.
Systematic co-ordinated extermination would yield an unimaginable new solution to the Jewish problem in Europe. This ultimate phase was known as
Endlosung.
In German, the term conveyed a singular meaning: "The Final Solution."
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SEVERAL FORCES
were in play on January 1, 1942, as Hitler set the Final Solution in motion.

First, the Reich was well along in implementing its policy of pauperizing and enslaving European Jewry. In this campaign, the goal of emigration had become essentially curtailed or nonexistent, replaced by a program of "extermination by labor," organized ghetto starvation, and pit massacres. Still many Jews were hearty enough, or lucky enough, to survive the rigors of inhumane Nazi-style "forced labor," or escape into the forests.