In 1941, set up an extensive mechanical data-processing system in Lyon using Bull punch-card machines, intended to census the population and professional activities. It was the embryo of the future National Statistics Service. His numbered files foreshadowed the present-day social security number.
The census questionnaire contained an explosive column: question 11 asked individuals whether they were "of the Jewish race," in reference to the Jewish statute of October 1940. Carmille had the technical means to process this data on a large scale and to deliver it to Vichy and the occupier.
He held in his hands a tool that could accelerate or obstruct the registering of a persecuted population. The choice played out in the silence of the punch-card workshops.
Tasked with mechanizing the 1941 census, which includes a question on belonging "to the Jewish race," how does Carmille handle this data in his punch-card files?
Carmille never had column 11 processed. Without openly refusing, he multiplied delays and oral instructions to slow things down (a "work-to-rule strike"), and his machines never punched or tabulated the data from the question on "the Jewish race." At the moment of his arrest by 's Gestapo on 3 February 1944, the count of the Jews had still not been completed. In parallel, he used his service as cover for the Resistance (the Marco Polo network, a clandestine census of men eligible for mobilization). Deported to Dachau, he died there of typhus on 25 January 1945.
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