Höfle telegram

Common card · No. 488932

The Höfle telegram (also rendered as Hoefle telegram) is a one-page document containing detailed statistics on the 1942 murder of Jews in the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the concentration camp Lublin-Majdanek. The document includes two messages sent by SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on 11 January 1943: one, to SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, and one to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim in German-occupied Kraków. The telegram to Heim enumerates the number of "arrivals" at the extermination camps in the prior fortnight, as well as cumulative "arrivals" up to 31 December 1942. The term "arrivals" was a euphemism for killed, as almost all of those who arrived at the Operation Reinhard camps were put to death. Although the telegram was decrypted by the British Government Code and Cypher School at the time, its significance was not realised and it was stored in the classified archives of the Public Record Office. It was declassified...

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