René Carmille

Portrait of René Carmille (1886–1945)

René Carmille (* 1886 in Trémolat , Dordogne department; † January 25, 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp ) was the general auditor of the French armed forces and a member of the Resistance .

René Carmille graduated from the École polytechnique in 1906, then he became a French officer, general auditor of the French armed forces, during the German occupation he was the creator of the statistical office Service national des statistiques (SNS), from which in 1945 the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), as well as an individual personal code number, which became the French social security number after the liberation .

Carmille in the Léon Blum era

In commercial life in the 1930s, punch card technology for data processing was widespread. Carmille pioneered the use of punched card technology in French administrations. Carmille had already proposed in December 1934 that all boys should be given a personal key with the birth certificate at the registry offices for the French military substitute system. In this connection he carried out some important experiments in Rouen . Carmille was also negotiating with the Court of Auditors on reforming the army's budgetary system. He represented the Ministry of War in various statistical commissions and lectured at the École libre des sciences politiques . In 1938 he published a book "Vues d'économie objective" about an objective view of the economy and organized a conference "sur le Germanisme".

Statistics in the Vichy regime

The seated war resulted in more than a million French prisoners of war. The ceasefire agreement left the Vichy regime with an army of 100,000 soldiers. Colonel Jean Touzet du Vigier and the Inspector General Carmille proposed to the Vichy regime and the General Staff to create a community service with punch card registration of the population in order to enable covert mobilization. On December 15, 1940, René Carmille was commissioned by the Ministry of Finance to set up the Service de la Démographie , to which the statistical office (INSEE) is still subordinate. This office relied on staff from the military replacement authorities, who continued to maintain a large part of their registers. A hundred demobilized officers and non-commissioned officers were assigned to him. A tabulation facility was set up centrally in Lyon and had six regional branches in the unoccupied zone , one in Paris and others in Algiers, Tunis and Rabat. Three manufacturers shared the French tabulating machine market: Compagnie des Machines Bull , Compagnie électro-comptable (CEC) a subsidiary of IBM, and Société anonyme des machines à statistiques (SAMAS), the French subsidiary of Powers Accounting Machine Company with a plant in Saint -Denis . René Carmille had placed extensive orders with Bull . His relationship with the CEC was no longer as close as the largest European subsidiary of IBM was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen AG ( DEHOMAG ). Before the war, Carmille had visited DEHOMAG, and several of its representatives were now on the executive committee of the armistice agreement. In August 1940, the tabulating machines of the IBM subsidiary, CEC, were confiscated from the factories by German authorities in occupied France. Carmille moved tabulating machines from the French Army office to a garage.

Data processing for government access to the individual

A distinction between the data on the levying of forced laborers for use in the German Reich ( STO ) and those on the mobilization of the French army was in the details. The use of a punch card system for mobilization required:

• the registration of soldiers and military personnel, including prisoners, on punch cards
• the allocation of key numbers to the entire population
• the identification and perforation of the professions, skills and abilities of the working-age population.

While preparing the data for the negotiations between the Vichy regime and the Wehrmacht and the CICR on prisoners of war, Carmille realized that his system of key numbers was less than the first and last names and matriculation numbers of the military master roles, which were varied according to the type of weapon Number of digits required and was safer because it allowed less ambiguity. The birth certificates of millions of people who were born in France in the last 65 years were evaluated in the local courts to assign the personal code for the purpose of "identification" of the population. Since the simulation was carried out for civil purposes, the female part of the population was also recorded and differentiated. In the thirteenth column there was a 2 for a woman and a 1 for a man. This created the basis for the future social security number in France .

Demand for registration of the Jews

Justice Minister Raphaël Alibert wanted to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews in the personal code. Carmille pointed out that this is not possible when collecting data from registry offices, except perhaps in Algeria. Such a question had not been raised since the introduction of the Church-State Separation Act in 1905 in France. The survey was finally carried out from March to August 1941 without any further encryption (gender only). The central administration in charge of the survey was the same that had previously been in charge of the census in accordance with the five-year program for the Statistique generale de la France (SGF) under the direction of Henri Bunle. Censuses had taken place in 1931 and 1936, with the next scheduled for 1941. Carmille had this replaced by an occupation survey (recensement des activités professionnelles) (AP), with a classification of occupations according to the requirements in the event of a possible mobilization. In order not to collaborate with the German occupiers, Carmille limited the count to the area of ​​the Vichy regime. With regard to Jews, he added an additional question no. 11: "Are you of a Jewish race", which referred to the "status of the Jews" issued on October 3, 1940. The census took place on July 17, 1941. Question # 11 asked Jews not only what religion they practiced, but also that of their grandparents. The project made headlines around the world. A few weeks later, an article in the New York Times said: Special recording machines are used for this census. Every citizen receives a number which is made up of thirteen digits. With the survey, an index card should be created for every German or foreign person aged 13 to 64.

Neither the number of answers nor any other result of this count has ever been published. Today it can be stated that neither the census, the record of occupational activities nor the number given by Carmille played a role in the racist arrests, deportations and looting. The method was not reported to be caught. It is correct that the census and the registration of workplaces of July 1941 took place in the area under the control of the Vichy regime almost at the same time as the police operation against Jews in June 1941. The services of the SNS of Clermont-Ferrand and Limoges were asked for identification by means of ID numbers and tabulation machines. Carmille did not specifically decline this assignment so as not to add to his difficulties. As far as possible, he put off and carried out duty according to the rules , which was effective since many of the people concerned were born abroad or in Alsace and therefore did not have an ID number. After three years it was found that the French coding required in June 1941 only led to an incomplete recording of foreigners and Jews, which was not completed when Carmille was arrested in February 1944. These were anonymous tables, which recorded the number of Jews by gender and department, sorted by nationality, occupation and place of residence, coded with holes. The police of the Vichy regime under René Bousquet organized raids and deportations according to their own files and handbooks that had been compiled before the war (for example from the André Tulard index cards). The Gestapo demanded that the Vichy regime promise to expel and expel the Jews. Carmille delayed the release of data for as long as possible and stated that he would update the data. Eventually the Germans gave him an ultimatum, which he bowed to.

The Service national des Statistiques (SNS)

Henri Bunle and the SGF, which he led, protested against the infiltration of their offices by the military. In response, the Service of Demography (SGF) was renamed Service national des Statistiques (SNS) on October 11, 1941 . Six more offices were set up in Northern France, the future regional directorates of INSEE. The clandestine mobilization, the central goal of Carmille, reached a level of coverage which was far above the estimates. Carmille used a program that he had developed before the war and was still in use for civilian purposes in France for three years, of powerful tabulating machines for files of individuals, companies and institutions, tests, surveys and investigations, hiring at the l 'École Polytechnique. One of the basic conditions of the mission was the oath to observe strict professional secrecy and a school for the application of this became the École nationale de la statistics et de l'administration économique (ENSAE) in 1962 .

The mobilization in Algeria

Algeria was the great hope of those waiting to take up the fight against the invaders. French citizens, foreigners and Arabs lived side by side. The Décret Crémieux of 1870, which granted French citizenship to Algerian-born Jews , aroused jealousy among Muslim Algerians, and anti-Semitism also existed among "white" Europeans . The censuses, up to that of 1936, recorded Europeans, Jews and Muslims separately. On October 7, 1940, the Vichy regime repealed Crémieux's decree as part of the “statut des Juifs” (see chronology of the collaboration of the Vichy government in the Holocaust ). The Jews in Algeria, like the Arabs, became objects and excluded from public administration and public schools. At the end of June 1940, René Carmille sent the material for the military replacement office in Rouen, including a prototype of an evaluation by air.

In May 1941, Carmille met General Maxime Weygand in Algiers , the commander in chief in the French colonies in Africa and the League of Nations mandate in Syria . On November 8, 1942, the Allies landed in North Africa. On December 26th, the Conseil Impérial appointed General Henri Giraud High Commissioner for French North and West Africa. Jean Monnet organized the rearmament of the French army. On December 5, 1942, Gaullist forces occupied the SNS office in Algiers. This is confiscated by the military authorities and Braconnot organizes the mobilization. Thanks to the punch card technology from Carmille, de Gaulle was able to mobilize very quickly. The regional office of the statistical office of Algiers remained militarized until September 1, 1946.

The forced labor service Service du travail obligatoire (STO)

The Relève "Law" was dated May 30, 1941 and was published on February 28, 1942. It was badly done and led to lasting reservations on the part of the French about the reporting system. On May 1, 1942, Fritz Sauckel demanded 250,000 workers for Germany from the Vichy regime. Laval was hoping for volunteers at the June 16, 1942 meeting. On June 22, 1942, he pointed out that he was buying the return of a French prisoner of war from Germany for three "voluntary" skilled workers. In a radio speech, he confessed his hope of victory for Germany. The failure of voluntary forced labor service became apparent on September 4, 1942. In his memoirs, Alfred Sauvy writes of a telephone call from Minister Jean Bichelonne , who asked what to expect from a mobilization with punch cards from the statistical service for the STO.

A request to this effect was sent to Carmille in Lyon. The challenge was to use the punch cards to mobilize a Gaullist army with the stipulation that French skilled workers would be assigned to the German war economy. The time and place of an Allied landing were unknown. In November 1942, the Wehrmacht occupied southern France, which had previously been administered by the Vichy regime. The French army, granted by the Germans in the armistice, was disbanded and gathered in the Organization de résistance de l'armée (ORA).

In his biography of Charles de Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes the ORA as “an organization very suspicious of Gaullism, close to Giraudism ”. Until the occupation of the south of France, Carmille had limited the job search to the south of France in order not to let the addresses of the men fit for military service get into the hands of the Germans, this reason now applied to all of France. On December 4, 1942, Carmille approached Philippe Pétain with the Regional Directorate of National Statistics in Clermont-Ferrand . In 1975, the Inspector General of the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE) Raymond Gaudriault, “Following the visit, at Petain, M. Carmille, M. Rabache, Regional Director, M. Roques, (Head of the technical service) and I, met in a separate room. ”Mr. Carmille described in detail how his files worked and what they could do. Mr. Carmille explained that different attributes could be collected, Petain asked how many? René Carmille presents the dual use attributes.

Resistance

The keys were kept secret and the essential sets of cards were hidden in the Mongré Jesuit seminary near Villefranche-sur-Saône . Carmille was a member of the resistance of Pierre Sonneville ( nom de guerre : Marco Polo) and tried in 1943 to coordinate the actions of Algiers and London. Three of the liaison officers were in Algiers. On September 4, 1943, André Caffot flies on Carmille's instructions from an area of ​​the Réseau Jade-Amicol near Reims to London, brings an identity card for the Vichy regime in order to create papers and legends for the resistance fighters, deserters and Jews from death reports. Because of his lack of commitment, Minister Jean Bichelonne wanted to replace Carmille with his deputy, Saint-Salvy. He was known for his collaboration, but had to leave the SNS on March 1, 1943. Carmille could not prevent the official reports from mentioning the STO or the ID numbers on the forms. However, no case has come to light in which the ID number was entered on forms for convening the STO. While around 875,000 French were doing forced labor in Germany, tens of thousands of young people withdrew to the Maquis , met with resistance fighters from Spain and tried to sabotage the STO as part of the Resistance.

Arrest, torture, deportation and death

At noon on February 3, 1944, René Carmille was arrested in Lyon with his office manager Raymond Jaouen and taken to the Hotel Terminus , where he was interrogated and tortured by Klaus Barbie for two days. They were interned in Montluc . Klaus Barbie handed over the two prisoners in Compiègne . From there, from July 2nd to 5th, 1944, they were taken by train to the Dachau concentration camp on the last transport of the deportees . Raymond Jaouen choked on the drive. Carmille died of typhus on January 25, 1945 in Dachau concentration camp.

In 1945 the key number was renamed from Carmille to 'French Social Security Number' and the SNS to INSEE .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ De la mécanographie dans les administrations, Paris, collection Sirey, 1936
2. ↑ Histoire de la Compagnie des Machines Bull 1941-1947 [1]
3. ↑ [2]