The Höfle telegram (or 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 Lublin-Majdanek). The document consists of several radio telegrams, decrypted and translated, including 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, giving the number of 'arrivals' at the extermination camps in the prior fortnight, as well as cumulative 'arrivals' until 31 December 1942 ('arrivals' being a euphemism for 'murdered', as all but a handful of those who arrived at the Operation Reinhard camps were killed). Although the telegram was decrypted by British signals intelligence at the time, its significance was not realized and it was stored in the classified archives of the Public Record Office in Kew, England. It was declassified in 1997 and its significance was recognized by Holocaust researchers in 2001.
Background
In January 1942, the Wannsee Conference, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, drafted a plan for the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question, the systematic murder of all European Jews. In June 1942, Heydrich was assassinated. The subsequent plan to murder the Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland was given the name "Operation Reinhard", probably after Heydrich. To efficiently carry out the murders of hundreds of thousands of Jews, three extermination camps (Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka) were built, each one capable of murdering tens of thousands of Jews per day. The camps began operating in March 1942 under the control of SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globočnik. As chief of staff to Globočnik, Hermann Höfle was responsible for supervising construction work at the extermination camps, coordinating the removal of Jews from ghettos, the dispatching of trains to the extermination camps and use of the property of the murdered Jews.
Transmission, deciphering, and declassification The Schutzstaffel (SS) had its own radio network, which it used to coordinate its actions in Eastern Europe, and signals on this network were enciphered using Enigma machines. On the morning of 11 January 1943, Höfle sent two telegrams from Lublin, both encrypted using the Enigma machine. The first was transmitted by Höfle to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, the second to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim in German-occupied Kraków. It is likely that the two telegrams contained the same information.
Interception and Decryption Unknown to the SS, their transmissions were being intercepted by the British Y service, and decrypted by the Police Section of the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, who had broken the cypher in 1940. The cryptanalysts codenamed the various Enigma settings used by the SS after fruit, and the codename for the setting used by the camps was 'Orange'. Both of Höfle's telegrams were sent using the Orange setting and both were intercepted and decrypted, although the telegram to Eichmann was only partially captured.. The British decryption of SS internal communications, meant that they were aware that Jews were being massacred by the Einsatzgruppen in autumn 1941 and spring 1942 but there had been no further references using the standard euphemisms, "Special Duties" and "actions according to the usages of war". Intercepted communications from known camps seemed to indicate they were work camps, if ones with high mortality rates. The British analysts who decrypted the message had failed to identify the Operation Reinhard camps, and did not know that Operation Reinhard was a plan to exterminate the Jews in the General Government, so Höfle's references to 'L', 'B', 'S' and 'T' were not understood. The telegrams were included without analysis under 'miscellaneous' in a monthly round-up of decrypts and no further action was taken.
Declassification and Recognition The telegrams were filed in the British classified archives at Kew until 1997 when the intercepts of the Police Section were declassified. In 2001, the telegram was rediscovered and its significance recognized by researchers Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas.
Contents As transcribed, and as translated into English, the telegram reads:
Analysis After its rediscovery, the meaning of the information in the Höfle telegram was determined by Witte and Tyas as follows.
Euphemistic usage of 'Arrivals' Nazi bureaucrats routinely used euphemisms such as "Special Duties", "actions according to the usages of war", and Sonderbehandlung ("Special Handling") to disguise the persecution and murder of their victims. In this context, the telegram's usage of Zugang ("arrivals") at the extermination camps, is a euphemism for the deaths of the victims. To 'arrive' at the Operation Reinhard camps was to die, as, for example, of the 434,508 'arrivals' at Bełżec only two survived. Later, in the section of the Korherr Report based on Höfle's figures, Koherr replaced 'arrivals' with Sonderbehandlung. Heinrich Himmler then insisted that the euphemism, which had become too well known, was replaced with a new even more euphemistic term: Durchgeschleust ("processed").
Consistency of figures The interception, deciphering and transcription of the Höfle telegram was not 100% accurate. The correct figure for total 'arrivals' at Treblinka is considered to be 713,555, rather than 71,355, because that yields the given total of 1,274,166 and tallies with the Korherr Report's total number of 1,274,166 Jews 'processed' in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland.
Accuracy of figures
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