Berlin stands at the far end of the biometric centre’s paper and machinery: records travel there to be sorted, while the centre’s staff are eventually sent back there or to other German research cities. In the novel, this administrative distance does not make the project abstract. It links the measurements imposed on individual bodies in the Glass Room to a larger system that claims to discover racial identity through data.

Administrative Destination

The centre’s monthly returns are processed locally, but the punched cards are duplicated and packed for a courier to Prague, then forwarded to Berlin. There, the great black machines sort, assemble, and analyse the cards at a rate of 150 per minute. Their operators expect patterns and correlations to reveal the supposed keys to human race and identity. Berlin is thus presented as the next stage in a chain that turns observations made in Město into centrally organised racial knowledge.

That chain joins bureaucratic routine to grand claims. While the centre’s staff record the month’s totals—672 people assessed, classified in categories including Slav, Aryan, and Mischlinge, with Roma and Jews listed separately—clerical work continues alongside the imagined scientific breakthrough. A maintenance letter from the machine manufacturer concerns only rescheduling weekly visits, from Tuesdays to Wednesdays. The ordinary paperwork and the promise of racial revelation occupy the same system; the cards and their destination make the scale of that system concrete.

From Home to Research Network

The destination matters because the data originate in a transformed private house. The former Landauer residence becomes the biometric centre: its upstairs rooms serve as offices, its kitchens are being converted into a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. In the Glass Room, the onyx wall and the open living space are repurposed for anthropometric instruments and photography. The original Bösendorfer piano remains, a conspicuous remnant of the home, while measuring equipment and documentation machinery occupy the building.

At the centre, each subject’s file records such details as birthplaces, languages, religion, race, and nation, as well as diseases and conditions attributed to family ancestry. Other stages of the examination include pattern tests, blood-group testing, blood-pressure measurement, bodily dimensions, skin and eye colour, and photographs. The staff present the procedures as confidential and scientific, but the resulting records are duplicated and sent onward. Berlin therefore belongs not just to a map of institutions but to the movement by which bodies, images, and personal histories become portable administrative material.

The Limits of Classification

The project’s central contradiction becomes explicit during Reinhard Heydrich’s inspection. Stahl acknowledges that diseases associated with Jewish populations do not provide a reliable distinction: not all Jews have them, and people with those diseases are not all Jewish. The centre’s alternative is to measure minute variations in phenotype and search for combinations that might support a racial diagnosis, with the Hollerith machines intended to sort the accumulated data. The method’s elaborate apparatus cannot resolve the underlying problem: the categories are politically assumed, while the researchers fail to establish a scientific means of distinguishing the groups they are ordered to classify.

The monthly figures dramatise the difference between counting and proof. The records arrive in Berlin with the expectation that mechanical sorting will disclose patterns, yet the centre is closed when the Reich Protector decides that its research has not justified itself. The stated objection is not that racial difference is unreal but that the scientists cannot quantify it to the authorities’ satisfaction. The novel places that demand beside the meticulous measurements and claims of objectivity, exposing how the appearance of precision can serve an ideology without validating it.

Closure and Dispersal

When the closure order arrives from the Reich Protector’s office, the staff pack their suitcases and receive rail passes for Berlin, Jena, and Leipzig. Instruments and furniture are removed; files are boxed for transfer to Berlin; other furnishings are sent to offices in Město, Prague, and Warsaw. The Hollerith machines are unscrewed from the garage floor and loaded onto trucks for an undertaking expected to make more fruitful use of them at the new camp complex near Oświęcim.

Berlin consequently appears both as a destination for the centre’s documentation and as one point in the dispersal of its personnel. The work ends at the house, but its records and equipment do not simply vanish with the institution. Their onward movement links the failed attempt to establish a usable racial diagnosis with the broader machinery of Nazi administration. The contrast is stark: the research cannot deliver the certainty its leaders demand, yet the files, machines, and institutional habits remain transferable.