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 the "Jewish race," how does Carmille handle this data?
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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