¹ Loveman, Mara, “The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power,” American Journal of Sociology 110.6 (May 2005): 1651–1683CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and for West Germany Aly, Götz and Roth, Karl Heinz, Die restlose Erfassung. Volkszählung, Identifizieren, Aussondern im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1984), 141Google Scholar, translated as The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 146–47.

² Giddens, Anthony, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 12, 7, 19Google Scholar.

³ Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 181, 309. Both Giddens and Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 59, argue that there is no intrinsic relation between infrastructural and despotic power.

⁴ Agar, Jon, The Government Machine. A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 5Google Scholar. The connection between administrative writing and political power has also been a topic of recent historiography of empire. See, for example, Joyce, Patrick, The State of Freedom. A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 144-84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ogburn, Miles, Indian Ink. Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicagp: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Maier, Charles, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105.3 (June 2000): 807–31, esp. 819–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As a complement to Maier's account, see the discussion of territory, the “state effect,” and the state mode of production in Brenner, Neil and Elden, Stuart, “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory,” International Political Sociology 3 (2009): 353–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jureit, Ulrike, Das Ordnen von Räumen. Territorium und Lebensraum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2012), 17–22Google Scholar, challenges both Maier's periodization and what she sees as Maier's assumption that, over more than a century, the conceptualization of political space remained unchanged and virtually synonymous with that of the nation. In The State of Freedom, 53ff., Joyce offers a different account of infrastructure (both material and informational), the state, and governance.

⁶ Haas, Stefan, Die Kultur der Verwaltung. Die Umsetzung der preußischen Reformen, 1800–1848 (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁷ Clark, Christopher, “After 1848: The European Revolution in Government,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 22 (2012): 171–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ross, Anna, Beyond the Barricades. Government and State-Building in Post-Revolutionary Prussia, 1848–1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Raphael, Lutz, Recht und Ordnung. Herrschaft durch Verwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000)Google Scholar; Jörg Ganzenmüller and Tatjana Tönsmeyer, eds., Vom Vorrücken des Staates in die Fläche. Ein europäisches Phänomen des langen 19. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016); and, on the territorial dimension and discursive construction of administrative power, Wolfgang Göderle, Zensus und Ethnizität. Zur Herstellung von Wissen über soziale Wirklichkeiten im Habsburgerreich zwischen 1848 und 1910 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 77–112.

⁹ Ellwein, Thomas, Der Staat als Zufall und als Notwendigkeit (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Peter Collin, “Die Organisation der binnenadministrativen Kommunikation in der preußischen Verwaltung des 19. Jahrhunderts,” and Stefan Nellen, “Mechanisierte Sekretäre. Verwaltung im Zeichen der Schreibmaschine,” both in Peter Becker, ed., Sprachvollzug im Amt. Kommunikation und Verwaltung im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011), 335–59 and 247–74, respectively; Menne-Haritz, Angelika, “Schriftlichkeit im Entscheidungsprozeß der Verwaltung. Die Geschäftsordnung der preußischen Regierung Kassel von 1867,” in Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte 9 (1997): 83–96Google Scholar; and Feldman, Ilana, Governing Gaza. Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Aly and Roth, The Nazi Census.

¹¹ Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter, “Recognition and Registration: The Infrastructure of Personhood in World History,” in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter, ed., Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–36.

¹² Breckenridge and Szreter, “Recognition and Registration,” 7, 18–19.

¹³ Ellwein, Der Staat als Zufall und als Notwendigkeit), I: 359–62. Koopman, Colin, How We Became Our Data. A Genealogy of the Informational Person (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that birth certificates—as the most original or elemental documentation of civil identity—became the anchor for the administrative identity of the person, the basis for the assertion of an array of individual rights flowing from membership in the community, and the foundation for biopolitical programs (both hygienic and statistical) to promote the health of the population.

¹⁴ This decision to begin with the codification of Prussian regulations entails viewing parish registries (Seelenregister, Kirchenbücher), tax lists, and the other registries of local inhabitants (Bürgerrollen, Hausbücher), as well as the relevant early modern police ordinances, primarily as precursors of the later population registries, even though they all have their own histories.

¹⁵ Frohman, Larry, Poor Relief and Welfare in Germany from the Reformation to World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 80ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Grossherzogliche Hessische Regierung to Reichskanzleramt (August 9, 1871), and the response (October 8, 1871), Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB) R1501, Nr. 114036.

¹⁷ Throl, F., Das polizeiliche Meldewesen. An der Hand der in Berlin bestehenden Einrichtung nach amtlichen Quellen dargestellt (Berlin, 1897)Google Scholar; and Friedrich Gronau, Das polizeiliche Meldewesen, 2. Aufl. (Köln, 1900).

¹⁸ Gronau, Das polizeiliche Meldewesen, 2, 4; and Throl, Das polizeiliche Meldewesen, 1, 3.

¹⁹ Schwichow, Ernst von, Die Mitwirkung der Ortsbehörden bei der Klassensteuer. Eine Uebersicht über die hierfür bestehenden Bestimmungen (Magdeburg, 1888)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Gronau, Das polizeiliche Meldewesen, 27, 37–40, A. Schmidt, Das Meldewesen. Anleitung zur Einrichtung des Meldeamts und zur Führung der Meldegeschäfte in kleinen und mittleren Gemeinden (H. Lamprecht, 1905), which devotes substantial space (43–44, 57–64) to the determination of the military status of newcomers, and http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/trumps-opa-kaempfte-um-bleiberecht-in-deutschland-14538356.html. In Prussia, conscription had originally been organized on the basis of the Kantonsystem, but it was successively reorganized after the revolutionary-era introduction of universal male military service, unification, and the 1875 secularization of civil status. See Emil Brandt, Das Deutsche Militär-Ersatz-Wesen, 3. neu durchges. Aufl. (Langensalza, 1894).

²¹ In reading the development of the German population registration system in terms of its evolution into a multifunctional information system for the civilian administration, both Ulrich Marenbach, Die informationellen Beziehungen zwischen Meldebehörde und Polizei in Berlin (Stuttgart: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), and I follow Lothar Beyer, “Der Streit um die Aufgaben des Meldewesens,” in Ralf Bernd Abel et al., Kommunikationstechnische Vernetzung (Darmstadt: S. Toeche-Mittler Verlag, 1986), 205–41.

²² Throl, Das polizeiliche Meldewesen, 7, 62. Paul-André Rosental, “Civil Status and Identification in Nineteenth-Century France: A Matter of State Control?” in Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, 137–65, esp. 141, 149–50, also describes the cross-references among different registries. In “Machineries of Data Power: Manual versus Mechanical Census Compilation in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Osiris 32 (2017): 129-50, Christine von Oertzen argues that in Prussia the disaggregation of the lengthy census lists into “counting slips” and “counting cards” represented an important conceptual innovation, which facilitated the analysis of social complexity based on the new concept of “data,” and that these changes opened the way for the development of a more efficient mechanism for the manual processing of census data. In the long run, the administrative innovations described by von Oertzen facilitated the introduction of punched cards and, later, electronic data processing.

²³ Gronau, Das polizeiliche Meldewesen, 7.

²⁴ See Beniger, James, The Control Revolution. Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Lauer, Josh, Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 9–10, 34, 180CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who uses the history of consumer credit reporting to argue that the private sector played the “leading role” in the formation of the modern surveillance society.

²⁵ Eingabe des Verbandsvorstandes der Vereine Creditreform e.V. in Leipzig, betreffend eine Vervollständigung des polizeilichen Meldewesens (January 31, 1902), as well as the petitions and other correspondence, in BAB R1501, Nr. 114024.

²⁶ Verfügung vom 7. März 1902, betr. die Polizeiverordnungen über das Meldewesen, MBliV—Ministerial-Blatt für die gesammte innere Verwaltung in den Königlich Preußischen Staaten (1908-35: Ministerialblatt für die preußische innere Verwaltung; 1936ff: RMBliV—Ministerialblatt des Reichs- und Preußischen Ministers des Innern) 63 (1902), 64–66; Verfügung vom 16. Januar 1904, betr. die Regelung des Meldewesens, MBliV 65 (1904), 40–45; and Minister des Innern to Regierungspräsidenten (March 23, 1903), BAB R1501, Nr. 114024. These included instances where the individual registered without presenting a certificate of leaving, where the certificate did not name a future place of settlement, or where the place named on the certificate was not the place where the individual actually settled.

²⁷ Preußischer Minister des Innern to Reichskanzler (April 11, 1906), Reichskanzler/Reichsamt des Innern (April 20, 1906), and the other correspondence in BAB R1501, Nr. 114024.

²⁸ Gesetz über das Paßwesen (October 12, 1867), Bundes-Gesetzblatt des Norddeutschen Bundes, 1867, 33–35; Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBl.), 1879, 9, 155 (Russians); and John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Even though travelers did not have to obtain permission to cross borders during this liberal era, they still had to be able to prove their identity, and passports were frequently used for this purpose. For earlier Prussian passport regulations, see K.F. Rauer, Die preußische Paß-Polizei-Verwaltung (Nordhausen, 1844).

²⁹ Zweig, Stefan, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press: 1943), 409–10Google Scholar.

³⁰ Reinecke, Christiane, Grenzen der Freizügigkeit. Migrationskontrolle in Großbritannien und Deutschland, 1880–1930 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brinkmann, Tobias, “‘Grenzerfahrungen’ zwischen Ruhleben und Ellis Island: Das System der deutschen Durchwandererkontrolle im internationalen Kontext 1880–1914,” Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 2 (2004): 209–29Google Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Fitzpatrick, Matthew, Purging the Empire. Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation; and McKeown, Adam, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

³² Mark Salter, “Governmentalities of an Airport: Heterotopia and Confession,” International Political Sociology 1.1 (2007), 49–66.

³³ Verordnung, betreffend die vorübergehende Einführung der Paßpflicht (July 31, 1914), RGBl., 1914, 264; Verordnung, betreffend anderweite Regelung der Paßpflicht (December 16, 1914), RGBl., 1914, 521; and Verordnung, betreffend anderweite Regelung der Paßpflicht (June 21, 1916), RGBl., 1916, 599–609.

³⁴ Reichsamt des Innern to Kaiser/König (June 14, 1916), Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (GStAPrK) I. HA Rep. 89, Nr. 15674.

³⁵ Minister des Innern to Regierungs- und Polizeipräsidenten (June 26, 1915), GStAPrK I. HA Rep. 89, Nr. 101, Bd. 11.

³⁶ See Paß-Abteilung, Beauftragter des Generalintendanten des Feldheers to Regierungspräsident Bromberg (November 18, 1916), and Oberpräsident Posen (August 4, 1916), GStAPrK I. HA Rep. 30, Nr. 101, Bd. 11. On the logistics involved in monitoring transborder travel, see Minister des Innern (July 8, 1916), GStAPrK I. HA Rep. 30, Nr. 101, Bd. 11. In early 1917, control over passports was tightened even further as the authority to issue passports was centralized in the hands of designated visa offices.

³⁷ Verordnung, betreffend Strafbestimmungen für Zuwiderhandlungen gegen die Passvorschriften (May 21, 1919), RGBl., 1919, 470–71; Verordnung über die Abänderung der Verordnung vom 21. Juni 1916… (June 10, 1919), RGBl., 1919, 516–17; Notgesetz. Vom 24. Februar 1923, RGBl., 1923, 147–51 (Artikel IV); and Bekanntmachung zur Ausführung der Paßverordnung. Vom 4. Juni 1924, RGBl., 1924, 613–37.

³⁸ Bekanntmachung für den Grenzbezirk (June 21, 1916), and Landrat des Kreises Hohensalza to Regierungspräsidenten in Bromberg (June 24, 1916), both in GStAPrK I. HA Rep. 30, Nr. 101, Bd. 11. These and related measures created so many problems and aroused so much resistance that the army had to threaten to bring local officials before military courts in order to enforce them.

³⁹ Sächsisch. Minister des Innern to Stellvertretendes Generalkommando XII. Armeekorps (February 27, 1918), BAB R1501, Nr. 114025.

⁴⁰ Rosamunde Van Brakel and Xavier Van Kerckhoven, “The Emergence of the Identity Card in Belgium and Its Colonies,” in Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, ed. Kees Boersma, et al. (Routledge, 2014), 170–85; Hull, Isabel, Absolute Destruction. Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell University Press, 2005), 248-57Google Scholar; Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 54–112, esp. 101–04CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jureit, Das Ordnen von Räumen, 159–219.

⁴¹ See, for example, the materials in Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) BR 0007, Nr. 15055; and MBliV, 1916, 130 (July 6, 1916).

⁴² Chef des Stellvertretenden Generalstabes der Armee to Reichsamt des Innern (May 18, 1917), BAB R1501, Nr. 114036.

⁴³ Sächsisch. Minister des Innern to Stellvertretendes Generalkommando XII (February 27, 1918).

⁴⁴ Reichskommissar für Zivilgefangene und Flüchtlinge, Denkschrift betreffend Abänderung der Bestimmungen über die Meldepflicht und die Behandlung der Ausländer (October 30, 1920), R1501, Nr. 114054.

⁴⁵ Preußischer Ministerpräsident to sämtliche Herrn Preußischen Staatsministern (April 26, 1921), and Prussian Interior Minister Carl Severing (SPD) to Reichsminister des Innern (December 28, 1920), both in BAB R1501, Nr. 114054.

⁴⁶ Preußischer Minister des Innern (February 18, 1926), BAB R1501, Nr. 114039.

⁴⁷ Roedenbeck, Martin, “Das polizeiliche Meldewesen in Preußen,” Goltdammers Archiv für Strafrecht 74 (1930): 257–74Google Scholar. Severing complained that the Eisenach decision to only require information pertaining to the head of household did not meet the needs of the criminal police. See Reichsminister des Innern to Preußischer Minister des Innern, Betrifft: Meldewesen (August 26, 1929), GStAPrK I. HA, Rep 77, tit. 343, Abt. II, Nr. 17, Beih. 6, Bd. 1.

⁴⁸ Neuregelung des polizeilichen Meldewesens. Runderlass des Ministers des Innern von 4.4.1930, MBliV 91 (1930), 353–66.

⁴⁹ Reichsminister des Innern to Preußischer Minister des Innern, Betrifft: Meldewesen (August 26, 1929); and Roedenbeck, “Das polizeiliche Meldewesen in Preußen.”

⁵⁰ Polizeiverordnung über das Meldewesen. Vom 22. April 1933, Preußische Gesetzsammlung, Nr. 30/1933, 129–47.

⁵¹ Rule, James, Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age (New York: Schocken, 1974), 24–25, 38–40, 290–98Google Scholar.

⁵² Ellwein, Der Staat als Zufall und als Notwendigkeit, I:450, 453, 456. The counterpart to this reconstruction of administrative knowledge in terms of the exchange of data among official registries was what Craig Robertson, “Paper, Information, and Identity in 1920s America,” Information & Culture 50.3 (2015): 392–416, has called the “paperization of identity,” though, as Vincent Denis, Une histoire de l'identité. France 1715–1815 (Ceyzérieu: Editions Champ Vallon, 2008), has shown, the origins of this process reach back to the eighteenth century, at least in the Old World. Although the development of surveillance and record-keeping practices in the United States lagged that of the more advanced areas of Western Europe by a half-century, see the account of personal information and the “organization” of American society in Igo, Sarah, The Known Citizen. A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 55-98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ In the interwar years a number of cities attached Addressograph (or, in German, Adrema) offices to their population registry offices. These offices helped rationalize the dissemination of information by using registry information to press the metal plates that were used to automatically address correspondence to the public. See the correspondence in NRW RW 0050-0053, Nr. 215; Regierender Bürgermeister (Bremen) to Reichs- und Preußischer Minister des Innern (March 13, 1935), GStAPrK I. HA, Rep. 77, Nr. 107a, Sonderakte, Bd. 1; Josef Sauermann, “Das polizeiliche Meldewesen maschinell!” Zeitschrift für Organisation 3 (February 20, 1929), 95-96; and Igo, The Known Citizen, 64ff.

⁵⁴ Diewald-Kerkmann, Gisela, Politische Denunziation im NS-Regime oder die kleine Macht der “Volksgenossen” (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995)Google Scholar; Gellately, Robert, The Gestapo and German Society. Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mallmann, Klaus-Michael and Paul, Gerhard, “Allwissend, allmächtig, allgegenwärtig? Gestapo, Gesellschaft und Widerstand,” in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 41 (1993): 984–99Google Scholar. See also Elizabeth Harvey et al., eds., Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which describes the private sphere as a domain of self-mobilization on behalf of the racial community.

⁵⁵ Karl Heinz Roth, “‘Erbbiologische Bestandsaufnahme’—ein Aspekt ‘ausmerzender’ Erfassung vor der Entfesselung des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” in Erfassung zur Vernichtung. Von der Sozialhygiene zum ‘Gesetz über Sterbehilfe,’ ed. Karl Heinz Roth (Berlin: Verlag Gesellschaft Gesundheit, 1984), 57–100.

⁵⁶ Ehrenreich, Eric, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 58Google Scholar. These Nazi-era documents are still of great importance. In the early 2000s, a friend, who had just been appointed to a civil service position in Austria, was asked to document her German citizenship. When asked, the Austrian official with whom she was working sheepishly conceded that they were essentially asking for the information in her family Ahnenpass, which she then produced—with the swastikas having been carefully marked through by her parents.

⁵⁷ Maruhn, Siegfried, Staatsdiener im Unrechtsstaat. Die deutschen Standesbeamten und ihr Verband unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Verlag für Standesamtswesen, 2002)Google Scholar; Schulle, Diana, Das Reichssippenamt. Eine Institution nationalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2001)Google Scholar; and Jane Caplan, “Registering the Volksgemeinschaft: Civil Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–39,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 116–28.

⁵⁸ To borrow a turn from Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity. The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3, I use the population registries to study identification practices, rather than identities themselves.

⁵⁹ Betr.: Judenfrage; Erhebungen über die Rassezugehörigkeit und Verwertung des Ergebnisses durch die polizeilichen Meldebehörden (September 16, 1935), GStAPrK I. HA, Rep. 77, Nr. 107a, Sonderakte, Bd. 1; and Chef der Ordnungspolizei to Reichsführer SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei, Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei, Betr.: Überwachung des Judentums (July 3, 1937), GStAPrK I. HA, Rep. 77, Tit. 343, Abt. II, Nr. 17, Sonderakten, Bd. 2.

⁶⁰ Gesetz über das Paß-, das Ausländerpolizei- und das Meldewesen sowie über das Ausweiswesen (May 11, 1937), RGBl., 1937, 589–90.

⁶¹ Verordnung über das Meldewesen (January 6, 1938), RGBl., 1938, 13–28. The preamble to this law can be found in BAB R43-II, Nr. 411, Bl. 15–22. The original ordinance contained only the most basic elements of the population registration system. It was fleshed out by three important supplemental decrees in 1938 and then amended many times before the end of the war. The official commentary is Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Artur Kääb, Die Reichsmeldeordnung, 5. Aufl. (Munich, 1942), which reprints all of the supplementary decrees.

⁶² Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Reichsmeldeordnung, 15, 94.

⁶³ Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Reichsmeldeordnung, 15.

⁶⁴ Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Reichsmeldeordnung, iii.

⁶⁵ Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Reichsmeldeordnung, 6, 97ff.

⁶⁶ Drs. VI/2654, 7.

⁶⁷ Verordnung über das Erfassungswesen (February 15, 1937), RGBl., 1937, 205–20; and Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Reichsmeldeordnung, 189. On the military surveillance system in the Kaiserreich, see Brandt, Das Deutsche Militär-Ersatz-Wesen, 37–45, 90–100.

⁶⁸ Wehrüberwachung. RdErl. d. RuPrMdI von 29.8.1936, and Paßtechnische Behandlung der Wehrpflichtigen und der Arbeitsdienstpflichtigen, RdErl. d. RuPrMdI v. 12.12.1936, both in RMBliV, 1936, Sp. 1199–1200, and 1679–82; and Ernst Peters, Standesamt und Erfassungswesen (Berlin, 1939).

⁶⁹ Brandt, Das Deutsche Militär-Ersatz-Wesen, 91.

⁷⁰ Gayer, Theodor, “Schafft die fortlaufenden Verzeichnisse ab—führt Karteien ein!” Zeitschrift für Organisation 1 (1927): 99–101Google Scholar; see also Schlenker, Paul, “Die Schuppen-Karteien. Ihre Arten und die Voraussetzungen ihrer Verwendung,” Zeitschrift für Organisation 1 (1927): 453–61Google Scholar, which begins with the declaration that “the bound volume is silent and rigid.” On the modernization of office and business practices, see Delphine Gardey, Écrire, calculer, classer. Comment une révolution de papier a transformé les sociétés contemporaines (1800–1940) (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2008); Gerri Flanzraich, “The Library Bureau and Office Technology,” Libraries and Culture 28:4 (1993): 403-29; and Yates, JoAnne, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. In the public sector, this rationalization movement, which was known as Büroreform, was implemented in Prussia and the Reich administration between the 1890s and 1945. See Drews, Bill, Grundzüge einer Verwaltungsreform (Berlin, 1919)Google Scholar; Verwaltungsakademie München, ed., Wirtschaftliche Arbeit in der öffentlichen Verwaltung (Munich, 1929); Arnold Brecht and Comstock Glaser, The Art and Technique of Administration in German Ministries (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1940); Heinz Hoffmann, Behördliche Schriftgutverwaltung (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1993), 25–75; and Cornelia Vismann, Akten. Medientechnik und Recht, 3. Aufl. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011), which is available in English in abridged form as Files. Law and Media Technology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). By the end of the 1950s, the focus of debate had shifted from the rationalization of office work and record keeping to their “automation.” In Bürotechnik. Zur Soziologie der maschinellen Informationsbearbeitung (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1963), Theo Pirker argued that sociological inquiry had gone fundamentally astray in attempting to explain the impact of punched cards and computers on the organization, functioning and work processes in administrative settings using concepts (the division and mechanization of labor) that had originally been developed to describe modern industrial processes. Instead, he argued that administrative offices should be conceptualized as information processing apparatuses.

⁷¹ The letter (November 27, 1934), which is reprinted in Aly and Roth, Die restlose Erfassung, 36–39, and The Nazi Census, 34–38, can be found in GStAPrK I. HA, Rep. 77, Nr. 107a, Sonderakte, Bd. 1. Aly and Roth get both the date and the archival reference slightly wrong.

⁷² Reg. Bauamtmann Brodersen, Vorschlag über die Einrichtung von Volks-Universalkarteien, BAK B106, Nr. 45485, 5. The cover letter, which is dated October 16, 1967, states that the proposal was originally submitted to the Reichskanzlei in January 1944 and that minor changes had been made in November 1945.

⁷³ Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Reichsmeldeordnung, 16–17. The British successfully operated a centralized National Registry. See Agar, The Government Machine, 201–61; and Manton, Kevin, Population Registers and Privacy in Britain, 1936–1984 (New York: Palgrave, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ The official commentary is Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Artur Kääb, Die Volkskartei (Munich, 1939). The National Registry is also treated in Aly and Roth, Die restlose Erfassung, 44–52; Holger Mühlbauer, Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Entwicklung des deutschen Einwohnermeldewesens (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 77–89; and Wietog, Jutta, Volkszählungen unter dem Nationalsozialismus. Eine Dokumentation zur Bevölkerungsstatistik im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), 158–66Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ The role of the National Registry in targeting adults who were either not engaged in remunerative work or who were working in occupations for which a labor book was not required was made explicit in Auswertung der Volkskartei. RdErl. d. RFSS (14.3.1940), NRW BR 005, Nr. 23279.

⁷⁶ Bernhard Kroener, “The Manpower Resources of the Third Reich in the Area of Conflict between Wehrmacht, Bureaucracy, and the War Economy, 1939–1942,” in Germany and the Second World War, vol. V/I, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 787–1154, esp. 850–67.

⁷⁷ Besprechung vom 24. November 1938, betr. Volkskartei, Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (BLHA) Rep. ZA I Pol, Nr. 2701; and Daluege to Leiter der Parteikanzlei/Martin Bormann (June 17, 1943), BAB R19, Nr. 407.

⁷⁸ I have not been able to locate in the archives any preliminary discussion or early drafts of the National Registry ordinance.

⁷⁹ Reichsführer SS to Regierungspräsidenten in Potsdam (July 25, 1938), in BLHA Rep. 8, Beeskow, Nr. 3546.

⁸⁰ Vermerk über die Sitzung des Reichsverteidigungsrats am 18. November 1938, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (1948), Vol. XXXII, 411–15.

⁸¹ Wietog, Volkszählungen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, 159–60, suggests that the creation of the registry was postponed in order to not coincide with the census scheduled for May.

⁸² Reichs- und Preußischer Minister des Innern to Landesregierungen (June 1937), BLHA Rep. ZA I Pol., Nr. 2701. A pithier version of this statement can be found in Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Volkskartei, 65.

⁸³ Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Volkskartei, 47, 65. One observer estimated that this accounted for 80 percent of the value of the new system. See Regierungspräsident Potsdam/Graf G. Bismarck to Reichsführer SS, Betrifft: Volkskartei (December 24, 1938), BLHA Rep. ZA I Pol., Nr. 3724.

⁸⁴ The value of such registries had been demonstrated by the Labor Administration, which in the summer of 1938 had used its files to rapidly compile statistics on the millions of persons to whom labor books had been issued. Tooze, Adam, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945. The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 236Google Scholar. The information processing system maintained by the labor offices was the largest and most modern one in the country. Jochen Mayer, “Speichern-Verarbeiten-Übertragen: Arbeitsbücher, Karteikarten und Statistiken im Arbeitseinsatz des ‘Dritten Reiches’,” Workshop Unabhängige Historikerkommission zur Geschichte des Reichsarbeitsministeriums 1933–1945 (October 2015). I would like to thank Mayer for sharing his paper with me.

⁸⁵ Vereinfachung der Volkskartei. RdErl. d. RFSS… (29.1.1942), MBliV, 1942, S. 270, NRW BR 0005, Nr. 23279.

⁸⁶ Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Volkskartei, 28. Beginning in April/May 1941, the supplementary cards regarding Jewish ancestry that had been completed in conjunction with the 1939 census were made available for comparison with the population registries and the National Registry. See Reichsführer SS to the Höhere Verwaltungsbehörden, Betrifft: Ergänzungkarten für Angaben über Abstammung und Vorbildung (March 31, 1941), NRW BR 005, Nr. 23279. On the impact of such comparisons, see Wietog, Volkszählungen unter dem Nationalsozialismus, 161–66, 191–93.

⁸⁷ Besprechung vom 24. November 1938, betr. Volkskartei, BLHA Rep. ZA I Pol, Nr. 2701.

⁸⁸ Leiter der Partei-Kanzlei/Bormann to Reichsminister des Innern/Frick, Betrifft: Verwaltungsvereinfachung; hier: Einstellung der Arbeiten an der Volkskartei (May 28, 1943), BAB R41, Nr. 159. Despite their differences, Labor Ministry officials were extremely eager to gain access to the newly constructed registries. See Reichsarbeitsminister to Herrn Reichsminister des Innern, Betrifft: Volkskartei (July 9, 1939), BAB R41, Nr. 159.

⁸⁹ Regierungspräsident in Potsdam/Graf G. Bismarck to Reichsführer SS, Betrifft: Volkskartei (December 24, 1938), and Oberregierungsrat Stegmann to Liebermann von Sonnenberg (January 6, 1939), both in BLHA Rep. ZA I Pol., Nr. 3724; and Liebermann von Sonnenberg and Kääb, Die Volkskartei, 48–49.

⁹⁰ Leiter der Partei-Kanzlei/Bormann to Reichsminister des Innern/Frick, Betrifft: Verwaltungsvereinfachung; hier Einstellung der Arbeiten an der Volkskartei (May 28, 1943), BAB R41, Nr. 159. Bormann calculated that suspending the National Registry would free up about three thousand persons for other duties.

⁹¹ Reichsführer SS to Leiter der Parteikanzlei (February 27, 1943), Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (BayHStA) MInn 91735; and Daluege, Stellungnahme zum Schreiben des Leiters der Parteikanzlei vom 28. Mai 1943 an Reichsminister Dr. Frick, Betr.: Verwaltungsvereinfachung. Einstellung der Volkskartei (June 12, 1943), BAB R43-II, Nr. 659.

⁹² Vermerk, Betrifft: Volkskartei (July 10, 1943), R43-II, Nr. 659; and Vereinfachung der Verwaltung; hier Volkskartei (August 18, 1943), MBliV, 1943, 1343, in BLHA Rep. ZA I Pol., Nr. 2701. However, a population registry by age cohort was simply too valuable to dispense with completely, and Himmler ordered local officials to maintain a supplementary registry of the same age cohorts that would have been included in the registry. Runderlass des Reichsführers SS (August 27, 1943), BayHStA StK, Nr. 6309.

⁹³ Bormann to Frick, Betrifft: Verwaltungsvereinfachung. Hier: Einstellung der Arbeiten an der Volkskartei (May 28, 1943), BAB R 41, Nr. 159; and Himmler to Bormann, Betrifft: Verwaltungsvereinfachung. Einstellung der Arbeiten an der Volkskartei (June 24, 1943), BAB R43-II, Nr. 659.

⁹⁴ In contrast, as Lambertz, Jan, “The Urn and the Swastika: Recording Death in the Nazi Camp System,” German History 38:1 (2020): 77-95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, shows, the recording by the civil registries of the deaths of concentration camp inmates (and especially those of Jews) was characterized by a combination of administrative precision and cynical deception.

⁹⁵ Aly and Roth, The Nazi Census, 119ff.

⁹⁶ I have briefly discussed these technologies in Larry Frohman, “Population Registration, Social Planning, and the Discourse on Privacy Protection in West Germany,” Journal of Modern History 87.2 (June 2015): 316–56. Although there is no account of the use of punched cards in interwar Germany for accounting and inventory management purposes, see Vahrenkamp, Richard, “Die erste Informationsexplosion. Die Rolle der Lochkartentechnik bei der Bürorationalisierung in Deutschland 1910 bis 1939,” Technikgeschichte 84.3 (2017): 209–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁷ See the correspondence on this issue in BAB R2, Nr. 11659; and Jane Caplan, “‘Ausweis Bitte!’ Identity and Identification in Nazi Germany,” Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective, ed. James R. Brown, et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 224–42. The Nazis could, however, impose security arrangements in occupied territories that they could not impose at home. On the population registration and ID card systems established in the Netherlands, see Friso Roest, et al., “Policy Windows for Surveillance: The Phased Introduction of the Identification Card in the Netherlands since the Early Twentieth Century,” in Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond, ed. Kees Boersma, et al. (London: Routledge, 2014), 150–69; and Bob Moore, “Nazi Masters and Accommodating Dutch Bureaucrats: Working Towards the Führer in the Occupied Netherlands, 1940–1945,” in Working towards the Führer, ed. Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 186–204.

⁹⁸ This is the topic of my study The Politics of Personal Information. Surveillance, Privacy, and Power in West Germany (forthcoming New York: Berghahn, 2020).