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= Rene_Carmille =
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Introduction
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René Carmille (8 January 1886 - 25 January 1945) was a French military
officer, civil servant under the Republic and Vichy government, and
member of the French Resistance. During World War II, in his office at
the government's Demographics Department, he created the National
Statistics Service and the individual code number which would become
the social security number after liberation and is still used in
France today. While there, Carmille sabotaged the Nazi census of
France, thus saving tens of thousands of Jewish people from death
camps.
Pioneer of punched cards for registration
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René Carmille served in the French Army in the First World War,
initially as a battery commander and later in the Second Office (i.e.
the espionage service). In April 1924, he was appointed the
Comptroller of the army. As well as supervising several espionage
operations, he became a specialist in industrial management, notably
promoting the development of punch cards and electromechanical card
readers in France.
As a senior civil servant in the 1930s, he proposed a 12-digit
registration number based on the date and place of birth. This was
intended to be assigned to boys as soon as they were registered with
the civil registry, in part to support the anticipated war effort. He
visited IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag in Berlin and brought back a
sample of their 80-column punched card. In France, he supported the
work of Bull, a pioneering supplier of punched card machines. He
demonstrated the value of identifying individuals with what become the
social security number but also the value of codes for geographical
areas, economic activities and professions.
Clandestine mobilization
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After the outbreak of World War II, Carmille and Colonel du Vigier
proposed the creation of central records of French civilians. As most
of France was under German occupation, this was presented as a purely
civil matter, but secretly the plan was to use the data to rapidly
mobilize an army when required. This included records of demobilised
soldiers as well as a census of the entire working-age population, to
identify occupations, trades and qualifications.
As the collection grew, Carmille realised the value of a registration
number as it was less ambiguous than recording the first and family
names, as well as requiring fewer characters to record. As this was
officially a civilian operation, births of girls as well as boys were
recorded, by adding a thirteenth digit to the initial registration
number: 1 for men, 2 for women.
In January 1941 a contract worth 36 million francs was signed between
Bull and the Ministry of Finance to create an administrative
statistical information system. In the same year, Bull was convicted
of infringing IBM patents for having adopted the 80-column punched
card. The appeal was suspended but eventually judged in favour of Bull
in 1947. IBM lost the case because they were found to have issued
80-column punch card equipment before the patent was filed in France.
The Minister of Justice, Joseph Barthélémy (appointed 27 January 1941)
wanted to distinguish Jewish citizens from the other inhabitants.
Carmille argued that the civil status of the project did not allow
this to be done so only the individual's sex was recorded in the first
column.
A full national census was due to take place in 1941 but Carmille
replaced this with a "census of professional activities". This census
included a question (number 11): "Are you of Jewish race?", with
reference to the "Statute of the Jews" promulgated on 3 October 1940.
Question 11 of the census was only used to exclude or exempt Jewish
people from the "Chantiers de Jeunesse" or youth camps organised by
the Vichy government as quasi-military training camps. The census took
place on 17 July 1941. A record had to be drawn up for each French or
foreign person aged from 13 to 64 years old. Neither the number of
responses nor the results of this census have ever been published.
Lieutenants Colonel Henri Zeller and Georges Pfister instructed
Carmille to prepare for the clandestine remobilization of the French
Army. During the winter of 1941-42, Carmille identified the names of
220,000 trained veterans living in the free zone, controlled by the
Vichy government, and grouped them by locality and by unit. In this
way, a partial mobilization on a regional basis would be possible. He
also prepared punched cards that could print mobilization orders in a
matter of hours.
However, in November 1942, German troops moved to occupy the southern
zone of France. The French fleet was scuttled at Toulon on the 27th
and the Vichy government dissolved its armistice army. General
Verneau, head of the Army General Staff, gave orders "to destroy the
documents relating to the clandestine mobilization." In December,
Carmille decided to hide his work related to the clandestine
mobilization. The codes and the files were hidden in a Jesuit seminary
in Mongré, near Villefranche-sur-Saône in eastern France. He continued
to develop the civil services statistical tools including further
surveys and polls.
Statistics and discrimination
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The statistical service under Carmille was ordered to use its
registration number scheme to assist the identification of Jewish
people in France. Carmille did not explicitly refuse to obey, but
instead worked as slowly and obstructively as possible. He gave oral
instructions to colleagues to delay responses, leading to a kind of
"work to rule". This was made easier as many of the people concerned
were born abroad or in the annexed Alsace region and therefore had
never been assigned an identity number. This passive disobedience was
so effective that the "Digital report on the number of French and
foreign Jews counted in June 1941" had still not been completed by the
time of his arrest in February 1944. However, the police did not need
Carmille's files. They organized raids and deportations from their own
manual files.
Carmille has been described as being an early ethical hacker: "Over
the course of two years, Carmille and his group purposely delayed the
process by mishandling the punch cards. He also hacked his own
machines, reprogramming them so that they’d never punch information
from Column 11 [where citizens were asked to indicate their religion]
onto any census card."
Resistance, arrest and deportation
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Carmille was a member of the resistance network of Pierre Sonneville,
known as "Marco Polo". Throughout 1943 he coordinated his actions with
Algiers and London. On 4 September 1943, on Carmille's instructions,
André Caffot, helped by the resistance, flew from Reims to London to
give the Intelligence Service a sample of the identity card that the
Vichy government had recently created, as well as one of the machines
intended to punch cards.
At the same time, death notices received at the statistical service
were used by Carmille to make "real" identity cards with false
identities, which were then made available to resistance fighters,
German deserters and Jews. This enabled many to escape Nazi capture.
On 3 February 1944 René Carmille was arrested in Lyon along with his
chief of staff Raymond Jaouen. Described by the Germans as "the great
enemy of the German army, having maintained relations with London and
aiding terrorist groups", he was taken to the Hotel Terminus where he
was interrogated by Klaus Barbie, who tortured him for two days. He
was sent to the Montluc prison, then Barbie had both prisoners
transferred to Compiègne in northern France. From there they left for
Dachau by the "death train" of 2-5 July 1944, one of the last convoys
of deportees. Jaouen died of suffocation during the journey and
Carmille died of typhus on 25 January 1945 at Dachau.
In popular culture
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A short animated documentary was released about Carmille in 2010
called 'Interregnum' which stars Nicole Stamp.
References
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Notes
Bibliography
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Carmille
