Overview

A controversial book when originally published in Germany, The Nazi Census documents the origins of the census in modern Germany, along with the parallel development of machines that helped first collect data on Germans, then specifically Jews. The authors begin by examining the history of statistical technology in Germany, from the Hollerith machine in the 1890s through the development and licensing of IBM punch-card technology. From its general use in collecting data on all German people, the methods employed by the Nazis developed into compulsory registration to establish information on individuals' racial designation. The authors argue that this information was collected first because of demands based on questions of security and the tracking of racial groups, including Jews and Gypsies. Later this information - and methods employed for gathering it - led to disastrous results for these and other peoples. Ultimately, as the authors point out in this short, rigorously researched book, the system the Nazis employed to track, gather information, and control populations initiated the modern system of citizen registration.

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9781592132591

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Reviews

There can be few complaints about The Nazi Census as a history of the Nazi period. It is regularly cited in published works for facts about dates of registration programs and change in citizenship policy. As part of Aly's attempt to augment the complicity of silence with the complicity of science, it is also an important work in an evolving historiography on Nazi world-making and -unmaking. The book is also fascinating as a revelation of the recent pedigree of many everyday practices of the state. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences The Nazi Census is a book of great historical originality and considerable topical urgency. The authors provide a chilling historical perspective to contemporary preoccupations with the logics and limits of identity registration and documentation. Unrivalled as a political history of population statistics and identity documentation in Nazi Germany, the book is also not afraid of controversy. Not everyone will accept the authors' grim message about the inherently dehumanizing effects of the statistical process, but their readable and quirkily original book makes a powerful case for seeing data collection as a threat to individual safety rather than a solution to problems of security in the modern world. --Jane Caplan, Marjorie Walter Goodhart Professor of European History, Bryn Mawr College and Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford Originally published in 1984, this controversial study challenges census-taking by examining how the Hitlerian regime pioneered both the concepts and the processes of modern statistics-gathering about populations. No reader of this fascinating study can fail to be moved by the coldly bureaucratic thoroughness and mechanical efficiency with which the Nazis went about their business of targeting Jews, Gypsies, and other socially or biologically unwanted segments of German society. --Michael R. Marrus, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto

Author Information

Gotz Aly is an independent historian of Nazi Germany. Karl Heinz Roth is a journalist and author. Both live in Germany. Edwin Black (translator) is a Washington-based writer and author of the bestselling IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, and the award-winning Holocaust finance investigation, The Transfer Agreement.

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