Cold Open
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On a muggy August 1940 morning in Lyon, France, René Carmille woke up to his radio, which was issuing a news report.
Colonel Charles de Gaulle has been convicted in absentia by a French court and sentenced to death—
He switched it off in disgust. A sham trial, held by a sham government, with a sham verdict against one of the true heroes of the last few weeks.
Those were in short supply. Two months earlier, in May, Carmille and many of his fellow 41 million French watched in horror and dismay as the army of Nazi Germany blitzkrieged its way through Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and finally France’s Ardennes region.
Like his fellow French, Carmille followed the news reports with dread as Nazi Germany quickly overran France’s defenses. The Nazi army was led by its tank divisions, armored vehicles that were ultra-fast for the time.
Carmille got up and put on his army uniform. He was a soldier, but he looked every bit the French bureaucrat, middle-aged with thinning hair and glasses.
He headed downstairs, where his wife and young son Robert were waiting. There wasn’t time for breakfast, they knew. Carmille grabbed a piece of bread, kissed them goodbye, and headed out.
René Carmille was a general in the French military, but he wasn’t needed on the front lines. He was needed at his office, Lyon headquarters of the French Army’s accounting division, which was part of the Army Administration Control Corps.
When he arrived at the office, he heard the familiar whirs and clicks of the Hollerith Machines. Since 1932, The French Army’s accounting department relied on these machines to keep track of each of its 4.7 million soldiers.
Of course, since the French government surrendered to the Nazis a few weeks earlier, those almost-5 million soldiers were forced to stand down. The Nazis occupied Paris and the northern half of the country, while Lyon and the rest of the south was under the control of the collaborationist Vichy government. But it was clear who was in charge.
When Carmille arrived, his staffers looked agitated—understandable. These days, everyone had to choose to collaborate with the Nazis, or face prison or worse.
An aide ran up to him.
General, the general manager at CEC Paris is on the phone. It’s urgent.
CEC Paris was a subsidiary of IBM, which supplied Carmille’s Hollerith machines. He hurried into his office and picked up the receiver.
General, I’m afraid your request for spare parts and punch cards will be delayed…indefinitely.
What’s wrong?
I’m getting reports from all over France that the Nazis are confiscating our machines. Their tanks arrive and the Holleriths vanish. If they haven’t come to Lyon, they will soon.
Thank you, Carmille said, and hung up.
Since France’s surrender a few weeks earlier, Nazi tank divisions roamed across the country, confiscating Hollerith machines, which mostly belonged to French banks, railroads, and the military.
True, these were just machines. But Carmille understood their potential—and if France ever hoped to be liberated from Nazi rule, he needed these machines.
For weeks, Nazi soldiers had marched through the streets of his city, brutalizing French citizens both Jewish and gentile alike.
He’d have to wait until dark to execute his plan.
That night, Carmille waited until his last employee left the office. Then, he unplugged his rapid counting machines—about the size of a small piano—loaded them onto hand carts, and brought them to a truck he’d borrowed from the motor pool.
He knew of a disused garage in town, so he headed there, hoping to avoid Nazi patrols. When he arrived, he unloaded his precious machines.
If he could somehow keep these machines out of Nazi hands, Carmille knew they could help him save his country.
On this episode: World War II, the Holocaust, early computing machines, the French resistance, and the birth of ethical computer hacking.
I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.
You're listening to Modem Mischief. In this series we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is the story of René Carmille.
Act One
This is the third Modem Mischief episode in a row set during World War II, before computers and computer hacking existed. So why are we telling you about it? Because, like the Alan Turing episodes, the story of Rene Carmille helps us understand how today’s computers arrived—and more specifically to this program…computer hacking.
With that, on with the show.
At some point, the Nazis were satisfied they’d confiscated enough Hollerith machines in France. Rene Carmille was able to return his two from the garage to his office at the army financial office.
Nobody came looking for them—perhaps because the average Nazi, or average French person, didn’t understand what they could do.
But Carmille did, and he had plans for them.
When it came to a national census, France was decades behind countries like the US, the UK, and Germany. In France, most record-keeping was still done by hand, which was virtually useless in a country that size.
Carmille knew Hollerith machines could change everything. True, he was still an army officer and not a national statistician, but he also had enough foresight to recognize where things were going.
In September 1940, Carmille approached the Vichy government and offered to conduct a national census of every French working person aged 13 to 65, using his Hollerith machines.
The Nazis were delighted. Currently, Germany was shipping tens of thousands of French workers back to Germany to make up for manpower shortages. A new, accurate census would make that easier.
Carmille was appointed the head of the new Vichy Demographics Service and began his census.
But Carmille had an ulterior motive.
The Nazis demobilized the French army in June from 4.7 million to just 100,000—no threat to Nazi Germany. But in his census, Carmille kept track of all former military members, including their specialties. The hope was, these records could one day be used to mobilize the French Resistance—in fact, Carmille was a member of the “Marco Polo” network of military officers who were organizing the resistance.
Really, Carmille would be doing two censuses—the official one, and the secret military one, all under the Nazis’ noses.
But Carmille’s census wasn’t the only one in France. The Nazis were also conducting a census of France’s Jewish population—as they did everywhere they conquered.
This was a year before the Nazi Final Solution to exterminate all Jews and other so-called undesirables in Europe. But since Hitler had taken power in 1933, the Nazis systematically persecuted, expropriated, ghettoized, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, while hundreds of thousands more fled their homes for safer lands.
Clearly, France’s Jewish community was next on the list.
It numbered about 300,000, but the Nazis didn’t know that. Neither did the French, who last tried a religion-based census in 1872.
The job of counting Jews fell to a French collaborator named Xavier Vallat, the newly established General Commissioner for Jewish Questions, led by. A heavyset ex-soldier who’d lost an eye in World War I, Vallat was a rabidly anti-semitic right-wing politician in the 1930’s. Now he was delighted to see his country occupied by like-minded people.
But the Jewish census wasn’t going well. For starters, Germany had just confiscated hundreds of Hollerith machines that could be used for the task, leaving Vallat and his cronies to conduct the census by hand. A year passed, with little progress.
Carmille watched with interest. To him, it was proof of the futility of doing census by hand. But he also saw an opportunity.
He wrote to Vallat and offered to take over the Jewish census, using his modern machines to automate it. With this information, Carmille promised he’d deliver France’s Jews to the Nazis.
Was Carmille anti-Semitic? Or was he just an ambitious bureaucrat? Or did he have other motives? Before we answer that, it helps to give some background on censuses and the new machines conducting them.
Today, accurate censuses are still difficult to create. In the late 19th century, it was even worse. Censuses were done by hand, and took too long to complete to be useful.
That changed thanks to German-American inventor Herman Hollerith.
Hollerith was a young, bright employee of the US Census, conducted every 10 years. He was hired for the 1890 edition, which wasn’t projected to be finished in time for the 1900 census.
But this was the second Industrial Revolution, and Hollerith suspected a machine could help. He studied simple machines that used punch cards to automate repetitive activities—weaving looms, music boxes, player pianos. Could a similar device be used to sort and tabulate population records?
Hollerith focused on the concept of the punch card—a piece of paper with a series of holes punched out of a series of columns, each delineating a different characteristic—age, gender, nationality, language spoken, occupation, and more.
Each time a census taker recorded information, it would be recorded on a punch card. Each punch card would be stored in a central location—but they were useless without a sorting machine.
You fed the punched card into the machine’s reader. From there, springs propelled it past a series of electrical brush contacts, which sensed the punched holes. As these cards raced through the machine, they could be “read” and sorted into all kinds of categories.
Previously, it might take weeks to locate all the bakers in, say, New York City. With Hollerith’s machine, you could do it in hours. Today we recognize Hollerith’s machine as a forerunner of computers.
Hollerith revolutionized the American census of 1890, but this was just one potential application for his machine. Observers quickly realized it could be used for everything from insurance statistics to banking to railroad management, not to mention a dizzying array of military uses.
Hollerith proved ill-suited to turn his invention into a company, so he sold his designs to an industrial conglomerate. It was originally called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or CTR, but eventually was renamed to International Business Machines, or IBM.
Yes, that IBM.
Under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson, IBM expanded to more than 70 countries around the world, often operating through subsidiaries.
One of IBM’s most eager customers? Germany. IBM’s German subsidiary was named Dehomag, and through Dehomag it supplied machines and punch cards to the Weimar Republic and then Nazi Germany.
With these Hollerith machines, the Nazis conducted multiple censuses of its citizens, in particular its Jewish residents. IBM’s relationship with Nazi Germany was so important that Hitler awarded Watson the Order of the German Eagle.
Under pressure from American anti-Nazis, Watson was eventually forced to return the medal in June 1940, around the time the Nazis invaded France.
Watson’s decision destroyed IBM’s relationship with Nazi Germany. This is why the Nazis confiscated those hundreds of Hollerith machines after invading France.
By this point, there were thousands of Hollerith machines across Europe. The Nazis gladly used them both to conduct their war and to persecute Jews and other “undesirables.”
Most Europeans didn’t know they existed or what they did, much less how important they were to the war.
An exception was Rene Carmille.
Born in 1886, Carmille showed an early aptitude for mathematics and statistics. Like many of his generation, Carmille had to put this on hold to fight in the Great War.
Carmille served as an artillery commander, then was recruited to join France’s Second Office, its top spy agency. This relationship is likely how Carmille later joined the French Resistance.
After the Great War, Carmille studied at the prestigious French Polytechnical School, graduating in 1924. He then resumed his military service, working for the Army’s Administration Control Corps.
He was an accountant. It suited him. Carmille always looked for ways to make army record-keeping more efficient. When IBM salesmen pitched their Hollerith machines in France in 1932, he enthusiastically encouraged his government to buy some.
He installed these machines at an army weapons factory in Puteaux, and an explosives factory in Sevran-Livry.
Soon, Carmille’s machines revolutionized the factories’ bookkeeping. Every machine, spare part, requisition order, payroll receipt, and more could be documented and quickly accessed.
The French army took note, and Carmille rose up the ranks, becoming the Army’s comptroller general.
Carmille saw potential for more than just bookkeeping. A Hollerith machine could keep track of each factory’s payroll records, including dozens of personnel details. But why stop there? Why not create a national database for all French citizens?
In 1935, Carmille proposed the creation of a 12-digit identification number for every French citizen. Each digit would denote a different personal detail, and each ID number would be documented on a Hollerith punch card.
But the French government rejected it. France was always slower to adapt modern census methods than its European neighbors.
For the rest of the 1930’s, Carmille sought to modernize France’s census system. In 1936, he wrote a book outlining the many applications for Hollerith technology that could revolutionize France. He traveled to Germany twice and studied Hollerith systems managed by Dehomag, the IBM subsidiary.
But he couldn’t ignore Germany’s deplorable treatment of its Jewish citizens. During these visits, he witnessed Jews being paraded around Berlin wearing humiliating signs.
Carmille published articles in several French journals decrying both Nazism and its treatment of Jews.
In an article called “Views of Objective Economy,” he wrote:
“German Hitlerism therefore conceived the totalitarian State and brought about an offensive nationalism which suppressed all human freedom, even that of thinking in silence.
In another article titled “On Germanism,” he wrote:
“The truth is that the success of German anti-Semitism comes from a need for places. This language has won over the crowd of engineers without a place, lawyers without a cause, doctors without clients. Anti-Semitism can only get worse. New measures are needed to justify the old ones.”
In May 1940, war came to France. Like thousands of other French technocrats, Rene Carmille faced a choice: collaborate with the Nazis, or resist.
To the Nazis, Rene Carmille seemed to be the perfect collaborator—skilled in statistics and modern technology, someone who could help them corral the French population into neat little boxes.
When Rene Carmille volunteered to conduct a national worker’s census and then a Jewish census, he seemed too good to be true. And he was. They had no idea he was a highly placed member of French intelligence, or an ardent anti-fascist and Jewish sympathizer.
So, when Rene Carmille accepted the assignment to conduct a census of France’s Jews, the Nazis had no idea what his true intentions were—to sabotage the Jewish census entirely.
Obviously, for Carmille, the stakes couldn’t be higher. If he were found to be part of the French resistance, he’d be executed.
This didn’t stop him. For Carmille, secrecy was the top concern. There were few he could trust. One of those was his 22-year-old son, Robert.
With so many manpower shortages, Rene needed Robert’s help to manage the Lyon office while he traveled to various branches across southern France.
One day in late 1941, Rene was watching Robert as he was converting written census answers into punch cards.
Robert came to Question 11, which asked Are you a member of the Jewish faith?
The respondent answered “yes,” so Robert went to punch the appropriate box.
But Rene stopped him.
Don’t record the answers to Question 11.
Robert knew what his father was really saying—and the danger they were in. After a moment, he moved on to the next question, skipping the one about Judaism.
Over time, hundreds of thousands of such cards would be similarly processed, none of them identifying an individual as Jewish. This would thwart the Nazis efforts to count France’s Jews—but not stop them.
In the meantime, Rene Carmille continued his secret census of France’s resistance army. France needed his information.
But Carmille knew it was only a matter of time before he was caught. He just hoped he could make a difference.
Act Two
On November 11th, 1940, five months after the fall of France, Charles de Gaulle issued a radio message to his homeland from Algeria, the headquarters of the Free France forces.
Be assured, the cruel decrees directed against French Jews can and will have no validity in Free France. These blows are no less a blow against the honor of France than they are an injustice against her Jewish citizens. The wrongs done in France itself will be righted.
In other words, de Gaulle promised justice against any French collaborators who helped the Nazis persecute and murder Jews—but it’s worth noting that this only applied to Jews born in France, not the many foreign Jews seeking refuge there.
No doubt many French citizens took this warning to heed. But not enough.
While Rene Carmille’s Hollerith machines churned away, the Nazis and their French collaborators didn’t wait for the results of his census to begin their attacks on the Jewish community. They ransacked all manner of local records that might have indicated Jewish heritage—like baptism records or inscriptions on gravestones.
With this data, in May 1941 the Nazis left summonses at about 6,000 homes they thought were occupied by Jewish residents, ordering them to report to processing centers. About half actually showed up. They were sent to concentration camps.
In August, the Nazis conducted a raid on French agitators, but also targeted Jewish neighborhoods, arresting and beating any men between ages 18 and 50. Over four days, they arrested about 4,000 Jewish men. This raid made no distinction between French or foreign-born Jews, which caused widespread outrage across the nation.
And then in December, Nazis who were increasingly desperate to meet their quotas finally consulted French paper records of an old professional census, with which they found another 743 Jews.
Over 10,000 people suffered as a result of these raids, but they still fell short of Nazi quotas for Occupied and Vichy France.
So, the Nazis and their collaborators resorted to other means to locate France’s Jews.
That one-eyed French collaborator Xavier Vallat established an organization called “The General Union of French Israelites,” or UGIF. Ostensibly, it was a welfare organization for France’s Jews who were stricken by harsh laws against having an occupation or owning property.
In reality, it was an ally of the Gestapo. The UGIF kept records of everyone who showed up for welfare and then turned them over to authorities. On top of that, the Gestapo kept regular surveillance on the UGIF’s headquarters and simply arrested anyone coming out.
All of which is to say that Nazi Germany was determined to kill as many French Jews, foreign Jews in France, and other so-called undesirables as possible, whether it had accurate census data or not.
But Rene Carmille knew that some Jews could still be saved. About a year after he was placed in charge of the French Demographic Service, and after a year of shoddy census results, Vichy France granted Carmille even more power and authority. In October 1941, it merged the Demographic Service with its counterpart in Occupied France to create the National Statistical Service, with Rene Carmille in charge.
Carmille traded in his military uniform for civilian clothes. He was becoming the top French census taker. But he was also living a double life as a French Resistance fighter, and a saboteur of the Holocaust.
In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, dragging America into the war and tilting the scales against the Axis powers. Despite this, Nazi Germany accelerated its plan to eliminate Europe’s Jews. In January 1942, Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference to plan the so-called “Final Solution.”
But throughout 1942, the Jewish census Carmille promised the Nazis just…didn’t arrive.
Carmille pulled every trick he could think of to delay the process. He issued deadlines and then changed them. He instructed his employees to work as slowly as possible, and to not identify Jews on punch cards. Shipments of punch cards or spare parts would go missing. It’s also likely that Carmille tampered with at least some of his census machines to prevent them from identifying who was Jewish.
And this brings us to the subject of hacking.
On Modem Mischief, we hope we’ve given you a clear picture of what a hacker is. If not, a hacker is anyone who modifies a machine for purposes other than it was intended. The word predates modern computer hacking. It was coined by MIT students in the 1950’s who spent their time playing with model railroads. A “hack” was any shortcut or workaround that made the toy railroads run better.
But you can hack many machines, and soon the word was applied to computers.
Like we said earlier, the Hollerith machine was a precursor to modern computers. So, by modifying his Holleriths for his own purposes, Rene Carmille is considered one of the first hackers. Today, we’d call Carmille a hacktivist, or someone who sabotages a computer for ethical reasons.
Thanks to Carmille’s influence, the National Statistical Service failed to produce the promised Jewish census.
But Carmille and the French resistance took more proactive measures to fight back against the Nazis.
Carmille’s office received death notices from all across France. With these, Carmille and his colleagues created 20,000 false identification cards and issued them to Jews and other Nazi undesirables, allowing them to avoid detection.
Carmille’s office also continued to conduct the official worker’s census which he proposed back in 1940—which, again, was just a pretext to conduct a secret military census to aid the French Resistance.
Carmille secretly documented 800,000 French military personnel in France, of whom 300,000 could be mobilized against the Nazis. He held onto this information until the right time.
But for Carmille, that time never arrived.
In November 1942, Operation Torch kicked off. Under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower, American and British forces invaded Algeria, a former French colony now under Nazi control.
The Allied assault attacked three ports simultaneously–Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. Casablanca, the main French Atlantic naval basis, surrendered after a brief siege. Oran surrendered after bombardment from British battleships. In Algiers, meanwhile, the
SFX: Naval cannons.
French Resistance recently launched a coup against the Vichy government, throwing its defenses into disarray.
Once landed, 107,000 Allied troops faced about 120,000 French, plus another 24,000 Germans and Italians. But thanks to secret negotiations before the invasion, many French soldiers who still chafed under Nazi rule embraced the Americans and British–their former allies in World War I.
Soon, the Nazis were out of Africa.
Then, tens of thousands of French soldiers previously loyal to the Vichy government merged with the Free French Forces under Charles de Gaulle to create the French Liberation Army. This army would contribute to combat operations for the rest of the war.
But how did the French organize their resistance army so quickly and efficiently? With the help of Rene Carmille.
In his capacity as director of the National Statistics Service, Rene Carmille set up a census office in the country, which used Hollerith machines to count Algeria’s Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
After the invasion, the Free French forces converted the Algerian Hollerith machines to their own purposes—creating identification cards for every member of the emerging Free French Army. Within days, de Gaulle and his people tabulated 200,000 pro-French combatants in Algeria.
It was a massive victory for the French–and the Nazis responded.
Days after the invasion of Algeria, the Nazis retaliated by invading the Vichy-occupied region in southern France. Now all of France was under Nazi control. Whatever advantage Carmille had from working with a Vichy government was gone.
Carmille knew he was in trouble. A few weeks after the invasion of Algeria, he set fire to all of his mobilization records, and buried the most sensitive documents.
SFX: fire starting, shovel burying dirt
But there was no way to avoid suspicion.
Naturally, Nazi Germany wondered why Carmille’s Holleriths in Algeria could organize an entire army in days, but failed to tally France’s Jews for more than a year.
Carmille’s operation had the Nazis' attention. Soon after the Nazi takeover of Vichy France, the Nazi intelligence service began an investigation into Carmille’s activities.
The task was assigned to a Nazi intelligence officer named Walter Wilde. Other than his name appearing in a few documents, we don’t know much about him.
Nazi spies infiltrated Carmille’s offices and discovered evidence that he wasn’t keeping track of France’s Jews. This information was forwarded to Wilde’s office, and he wrote a report to his superiors, which read:
The Section received from Paris a dossier in which there was found information about a special bureau in Lyon which, under the cover of a census of the population, was in fact a secret mobilization office.
We had been informed that nearly all the directors of that office were General Officers or Superior Officers of the resistance. The Demographic Office could find, in a matter of moments, using special cards, all the specialists, like Aviators, Tank Drivers, Mechanics, etc, both officers and enlisted personnel needed to make up organized units.
This was not a census bureau but rather an office of mobilization.
Yet the Nazis made the unusual decision to leave Carmille alone—for now.
As we mentioned, France’s national record-keeping was still in disarray after decades of neglect, and the Nazi confiscation of France’s Hollerith machines made this worse.
Carmille’s worker census was the only reliable accounting of France’s labor force.
Nazi Germany needed French workers. Every month it was still forcibly relocating thousands of French workers to Germany to make up for its manpower shortages. This included French clerks, bankers, train conductors, engineers, mechanics, everyone who could help the Nazi war machine.
The Nazis needed Carmille, even if they knew he was a traitor.
Did Carmille know he was under suspicion? We don’t know. Throughout 1943, he continued his day job of tallying France’s working population, and continued to delay the results of the Jewish census. He navigated the increasingly difficult corporate terrain between IBM, its French subsidiary, CEC, and its German subsidiary Dehomag.
At one point in 1943, he traveled to IBM Belgium under an assumed name and provided secret intelligence on the Nazi commisar who’d been appointed to run Dehomag.
He even found time to deliver a graduation speech at his alma mater, the Paris Polytechnical School:
No power in the world can stop you from remembering that you are the heirs of those who defended the country of France. From those who stood on the bridge of Bouvines to those who fought at the Marne. Remember that.
No power in the world can stop you from remembering that you are the heirs of Cartesian thought, of the mysticism and mathematics of Pascal, of the clarity of the writers of the 16th century, and the perennial accomplishments of the 19th century thinkers. All this in France. Remember that.
No power in the world can stop you from realizing that your institutions furnished the world with great thinkers, that freedom of thought has always existed with rigor and tenacity. Remember that.
No power in the world can stop you from knowing the immense work of your ancestors is for you a categorical imperative which must guide your path of conduct. Remember that.
All this is written in your soul and no one can control your soul, because your soul only belongs to God.
Read one way, it was innocuous encouragement for future students. Read another, it was a defiant call to arms against the Nazi oppressors.
Regardless of its intent, Carmille’s days were numbered.
Act Three
At noon on February 3rd, 1944, Rene Carmille was in his office at the National Statistics Service when he heard the heavy thudding sound of jackboots coming down the hall.
SFX: marching
He knew what was coming, and he didn’t see any point in trying to escape.
Soon, his office door opened. Several SS soldiers stormed in. Their commander held an arrest warrant.
Carmille was dismayed to see that the SS officers had already handcuffed his chief of staff, Raymond Jaouen.
The lead officer stepped forward and read from the warrant. “
Mr. Carmille, you are a great enemy of the German army, having maintained relations with London and aiding terrorist groups. You’re hereby under arrest.
Carmille said nothing—or if he did, it’s never been recorded. He was just glad the Nazis seemed only interested in him and not any of his co-conspirators—especially his son, Robert.
Carmille and Raymond were brought to the Hotel Terminus, a lavish 60-room lodging built in the Art Noveau style and festooned with paintings and sculptures.
These days, it was the headquarters of the Gestapo in Lyon, and particularly Department IV, which was tasked with eliminating the French Resistance.
The SS took them to a room on the second floor, which was converted into an office.
Behind the desk sat a younger man in a a gray SS uniform—Carmille guessed early 30’s. He had black hair and equally black eyes.
The man didn’t bother to introduce himself, but they knew who he was—any Resistance fighter in Lyon would have heard the stories about this man.
His name was Klaus Barbie, but the Resistance knew him as “The Butcher of Lyon.”
As a younger man, Barbie wanted to become a priest. At 22, he joined Heinrich Himmler’s SS in 1935. He quickly demonstrated his abilities to crush resistance cells and then glean intelligence from them via interrogation.
Right now, he was petting a cat cuddled in his lap.
Mr. Carmille, I understand you have some information for me.
Again, Carmille said nothing.
Barbie offered a smile as thin as a knife’s edge, then stood, approached Carmille, and slapped him in the face.
SFX: slap.
Then, Barbie smiled.
It’s OK. You can tell me everything. In the end, everybody talks.
Carmille turned to his chief of staff.
Don’t tell them anything, Raymond.
Barbie would keep Carmille in his custody for two days. No details have emerged from what happened during these two days, but we do know it was agonizing torture.
In 1987, seven people who were all members of the French Resistance testified about what it was like to be tortured by Barbie.
One woman testified to relentless beatings, with Barbie slapping and punching her open wounds—always with that thin smile.
Another woman was strung up with handcuffs with spikes inside them and interrogated about the whereabouts of the French resistance leader. When she refused to divulge anything, Barbie ordered her stripped naked and placed in a bathtub full of freezing water. Her head was connected to a chain, which Barbie would use to pull her head underwater. After that, she was made to lie flat on a chair and beaten with a ball with metal spikes, fracturing a vertebrae.
Again, we don’t know what happened to Rene Carmille or Raymond Jaouen during these two days of torture. To Barbie, Carmille was just one of thousands of French resistance fighters and Jews to be interrogated and then disposed of.
But we do know they never talked. They never gave up anything about the Resistance, or his efforts to create a secret military registry, or his sabotage of the Jewish census.
After two days, Barbie had enough. Carmille and Jaouen were sent to Montluc Prison, in Lyon. From there, they were transferred to the city of Compiègne, in northern France.
In July 1944, in the days following the Allied invasion of France, the two French technocrats were placed on a so-called “death train.”
The journey took them about 500 miles east, but Jaouen died of suffocation on the way.
Now alone, Carmille arrived at a site about 10 miles outside Munich. It used to be a munitions factory, but today it was home to the concentration camp, Dachau.
Like hundreds of thousands before him, Carmille first would have been examined by a Nazi physician to determine if he was physically fit enough for forced labor. Those unfit were shipped to a gas chamber in Hartheim, Austria.
Carmille was evidently deemed fit enough. So, his head would have been shaved, and he would have been assigned a striped uniform and tattooed with a registration number: 76608.
Ironically, his name and registration number would have then been catalogued for by a Hollerith machine—Dachau was one of 12 concentration camps that used them to catalog its prisoners, who included Nazi political adversaries like Carmille, as well as Roma, gay men, the mentally ill, so-called anti-socials, and of course the Jews.
These Hollerith machines were all provided by IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag.
Most likely, Carmille and thousands of other prisoners would have been forced to make munitions for Nazi Germany—artillery shells, bullets, explosives, and so on. This was Dachau’s specialty in 1944.
By now, Rene Carmille was 59 years old. He could see the writing on the wall.
Long hours of physical labor combined with low rations, poor sanitary conditions, and overcrowding meant that his days were numbered.
His only hope was that the advancing Allied armies would arrive in time.
On January 25th, 1945, Rene Carmille passed away at Dachau from typhus. Three months after that, the Allies arrived at Dachau and liberated its 67,000 prisoners. A month after that, the Nazis surrendered.
We’ll probably never know how many people died at Dachau, but it’s at least 28,000. Their stories are just now beginning to be told, including Rene Carmille’s.
In the decades following the end of World War II, Rene Carmille’s contributions to history and computing were lost to history. It was only in the 1990’s that his story began to be told—but the fight wasn’t over.
Act Four
In the mid-1990’s, about 50 years after the war was over, the French government under Jacques Chirac finally opened the country’s World War II archives from both Occupied and Vichy France.
From there, a team of journalists and historians analyzed the data and presented their findings—one of the most comprehensive reports on French collaboration and resistance during the War.
Rene Carmille…didn’t come off great. To put it mildly.
Those journalists and historians discovered Carmille’s surviving official memos and personal letters. They saw his efforts to assist the Nazis with their workers’s census, and then their Jewish census, and they concluded that he was just another Nazi collaborator. At best, Carmille was a neutral technocrat who wanted to use the Nazi invasion to justify modernizing France’s census taking. At worst, he was in lock-step with the Nazis ideologically and wanted to help them execute the Final Solution.
When Carmille’s son Robert saw this, he was outraged.
Now in his 80’s, Robert wrote a series of letters to the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, and gave an interview to Edwin Black, one of the few historians who had studied Carmille’s work.
By telling his father’s story, Robert shifted the narrative. Historians gave Rene Carmille a closer look.
Today, it’s estimated that Carmille saved about 100,000 lives during the Holocaust—more than Oskar Schindler, and more than practically any so-called “hacktivist” can claim today.
France conducted another census in 1946, just months after the war ended, but a decade since the last census. This one made much wider use of Hollerith machines and was the most accurate to date—as Carmille would have wanted.
That same year, France began codifying laws to issue Social Security benefits—using the same descriptive ID number that Carmille first proposed in the 1930’s and then again in 1941 to the Vichy government. Carmille’s innovation was the precursor to France’s Social Security number.
Punch card machines like Hollerith’s remained in use in various forms until the 1980’s. These machines, and other punch card readers made by companies like Bull and Powers were the precursors to modern computers.
Punch card machines became obsolete around the time IBM introduced its first Personal Computer.
IBM’s part in this story can’t be overlooked. It enjoyed a direct business relationship with Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1940, controlling 90% of its German subsidiary, Dehomag. With Dehomag’s machines, the Nazis were able to carry out the Holocaust. With profits from these sales, IBM was able to expand into the business empire it is today.
Even after the Nazis seized Dehomag, IBM still controlled the vast majority of the European market, using a series of subsidiary companies to continue supplying the Nazis machines, punch cards, spare parts, expertise, and maintenance throughout the war.
Throughout all this, IBM maintained plausible deniability—it wasn’t directly involved in these business transactions, it could claim, even though it controlled them all.
After the war, IBM recovered its Hollerith machines seized by Nazi Germany and returned them to regular use. IBM and its president, Thomas J. Watson, largely escaped punishment or even public scrutiny for their role in the Holocaust. Today, the company disputes any assertions that its business relationship with Nazi Germany was inappropriate.
Unlike IBM, countless people across Europe resisted Nazi Germany even after it conquered their countries. Rene Carmille was one, but his impact is larger than most. Not only did he save 100,000 lives and assist the French Resistance to topple the Nazi regime, he revolutionized France’s census and Social Security.
As if that wasn’t enough, Rene Carmille’s efforts also presaged modern hacktivism by decades. In the Internet Age, hacktivists we’ve covered on Modem Mischief like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Jeremy Hammond, and others, all owe Rene Carmille a debt.
More people should know his story.
I’m Keith Korneluk and you’ve been listening to Modem Mischief.
CREDITS
Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/modemmischief or click the link in the show notes. You can also support us through a paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by Jim Rowley. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka This Dude is a Bad Greg. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!