Reich personnel number

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The Reich personnel number was created in the time of National Socialism in Germany to enable individual registration of persons by means of the machine reporting system. This was based on preliminary tests carried out on the model of the city of Ansbach .

initial situation

The need to record the entire population individually had several starting points:

  • Before 1938 there was no registration requirement in large parts of the German Reich or it was often circumvented.
  • The registrations of citizens with the residents ' registration office , military registration office and nutrition office (issuing food cards) were not automatically linked, and sometimes contradicting information was provided.
  • The newly developed machine data processing was supposed to prove its efficiency in pilot projects, independently of the data from the census (1933) recorded on index cards .
  • In the advanced state of war (“ total war ”), the National Socialist regime wanted to draw the population into every last corner and exploit it for its own purposes.

The successful recording of the population of Ansbach with the help of punch cards under the direction of Kurt Passow , which was available in November 1944 and had revealed some incorrect information through data comparison, was to be extended to the whole of the Reich, but this failed due to the lack of tabulating machines . Another problem was the limited data capacity of punch cards at the time, on which there was no longer any space for too much individual data. Magnetic storage was still in the development phase.

execution

In December 1944, Kurt Passow and his staff set up the central Reich personnel number index in Märkisch-Rietz near Berlin, based on a concept drawn up by the Government Building Councilor Friedrich Herbst. The Reich personnel number had a 12-digit sequence: x | xx | xx | xx | xx | xxx

The first column defines the gender, the second to fourth birthday, month and year (each with 2 digits), the fifth the nationality and the last the serial number. The punch card file was created in 3 copies: according to the serial number, according to the alphabetical order of names and as a security reserve in the bunker. The card index enabled the authorities to record the entire population until the surrender. This was underlined by a "decree of the Führer on a general representative for reporting and evaluation" of December 28, 1944, in which he once again referred to the "recording of all personal and material forces and their management according to the respective requirements of the total war" urges while demanding the most modern technical possibilities.

The combination of date of birth and 4-digit serial number can still be found today e.g. B. in the insurance number of health insurance companies or in the structure of the pension insurance number.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Passow, 1965
  2. ^ N: Metropolis et al .: A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century . New York, 1980
  3. ^ Minutes of September 29, 1944; National Archives Washington, T-73
  4. ↑ Aly / Roth, 2000
  5. ^ National Archives Washington, T-73, after Aly / Roth, 2000
  6. ↑ VSNR - German pension insurance number

literature

  • Götz Aly, Karl Heinz Roth: The complete coverage. Counting, identifying, sorting out in National Socialism . Frankfurt am Main 2000
  • Kurt Passow: The machine reporting system as the basis for leadership in World War II . In: Wehrtechnische Monatshefte (No. 62), 1965