Guest post written by Counting Lost Stars author Kim van Alkemade
Kim van Alkemade was born in New York City and spent her childhood in suburban New Jersey. Kim’s parents met in the iconic Empire State Building. Her late father was an immigrant from the Netherlands who survived the 1941 bombardment of Rotterdam. Her American-born mother is a descendant of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who got their start in the garment industry and lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Kim attended college in Wisconsin, studying English and History at UW-Parkside and earning a doctorate in English from UW-Milwaukee. For many years, she was a professor at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania where she taught writing. Her creative nonfiction essays have been published in the literary journals Alaska Quarterly Review, So To Speak, and CutBank. Her third historical novel, Counting Lost Stars, about an unwed college student who has given up her baby for adoption helping a Holocaust survivor search for his lost mother, was inspired in part by her father’s experiences in Nazi occupied Holland. Kim makes her home in Saratoga Springs, New York, with her partner, their two rescue dogs, and three feisty backyard chickens.
The Nazi genocide against European Jews was a crime committed on such a colossal scale that it boggles the mind to this day. While the antisemitism that fueled Hitler’s “Final Solution” dates back to the Middle Ages, the system the Nazis developed to murder six million people was thoroughly modern. We know what that system entailed: the relentless transport trains, the horrific concentration camps, the deadly gas chambers, the gruesome crematoria. What most people don’t know is that the terrifying efficiency of this vast hate crime was made possible by an early form of computer technology.
Originally developed by Herman Hollerith to tabulate the 1890 United States census, punched card technology became part of Thomas Watson’s International Business Machines company in the 1920s. Hollerith machines began to manage the information needs of everything from department stores to railroads. In the 1930s, punched card computers were manufactured by IBM in the United States and in Europe by IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag. Hollerith computers were so vital to Hitler’s war plans that he awarded Thomas Watson a Merit Cross of the German Eagle during Watson’s lavish visit to Berlin in 1937. After the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the Nazis applied the same information technology used by businesses around the globe to their secret campaign of genocide. Turns out, punched card computers proved to be as efficient in managing the murder of millions as they were inventorying widgets in a warehouse.
Surprised? I know the feeling. When I read Edwin Black’s 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust, I was floored by his account of how the Nazi regime used punched card computers to compile census information, identify Jewish people, generate arrest lists, schedule transport trains, invoice companies for slave labor, administer their sprawling system of concentration camps, and generate reports that tallied their victims. I saw the evidence of this for myself when I requested a primary document from the YIVO archives at the Center for Jewish History in New York: a memoir written in 1948 by a Holocaust survivor named Rudolf Martin Cheim.
Cheim was a German Jew who, having sought refuge from Hitler in Holland, was arrested in Amsterdam and imprisoned at Westerbork, a transit camp from which 100,000 people were transported to their deaths. Though most went to Auschwitz or Sobibor, Cheim was sent to Bergen Belsen, where he was assigned to work in the camp’s Labor Office. Cheim’s memoir describes how Hollerith computers were used at the camp to generate lists, including the daily reports that were sent to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin. Punched cards were coded with information about each prisoner’s nationality, birth date, gender, and fitness for work. Cheim memorized the codes that represented the reason for a person’s imprisonment: 01 for Jehovah’s Witness, 02 for homosexual, 03 for political prisoner, 04 for military prisoner, 05 for Jude, Jew. There were codes for the Einlieferungslager, or “consignment warehouse,” from which prisoners had been transported: Dachau was 01, Auschwitz 02, Budapest 03, Drancy 04, and so on. Finally, the codes recorded each person’s fate: 1 meant transfer to another camp, 2 indicated death by disease, 3 execution, 4 escape. Code 5 meant Sonderbehandlung, “special treatment,” the Nazi euphemism for extermination. Though each prisoner was given a five-digit number, none of the cards employed the double-punched alphabetical codes that would have given them a name.
It was a Dutch civil servant named Jacob Lentz who was in charge of population statistics and used Hollerith tabulators to compile a population census so accurate that virtually every Jewish person in Holland could be pinpointed on a map. The deadly result was that a higher proportion of Holland’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust than from any other Western European country—including, famously, Anne Frank.
My father was born in Holland in 1934. He experienced the terror of the Nazi bombardment on Rotterdam, grew up under German occupation, and helplessly witnessed his Jewish neighbors being arrested and taken away to Westerbork. When he emigrated to the United States after the war, he met my mother, a Jewish girl from the Bronx, at the iconic Empire State Building. As their daughter, I carry their histories in my blood—blood that would have categorized me as a Mischlinge under the Nuremberg Race Laws.
I hope readers will think about the essential nature of computer technology to make anything it is applied to exponentially more efficient. Today, we use DNA databases to find distant relatives and learn about our heritage—but the information in these databases can just as easily be used to locate and target people of a specific ethnicity. We’ve all seen how social media not only connects people and communities, but also amplifies misinformation and disseminates harmful messages. Artificial Intelligence is beginning to blur the line between humans and machines. Nazism has already shown us that harnessing ancient hatreds to the power of computers can result in unimaginable catastrophe. It takes courage for individuals to counter the essential nature of computer technology with the human capacity for love, and these historical crimes are more relevant today than ever.
