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The Höfle Telegram (or Hoefle Telegram)is a document discovered among recently declassified World War II materials from the public records office in Kew, England. Sent by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on January 11 1943 to SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, it gave death tolls for the Aktion Reinhard camps through December 31 1942.
It gives deaths for 1942 as L (Lublin Majdanek) 24,733, B (Belzec): 434,508, S (Sobibor) 101,370, T (Treblinka) 713,555 for a total Jewish victims of Aktion Reinhard in 1942 as 1,274,166.
According to the National Security Agency, "It appears the British analysts who had decrypted the message missed the significance of this particular message at the time. No doubt this happened because the message itself contained only the identifying letters for the death camps followed by the numerical totals. The only clue would have been the reference to Operation Reinhard, the meaning of which – the plan to eliminate Polish Jewry that was named after the assassinated SS General Reinhard Heydrich – also probably was unknown at the time to the codebreakers at Bletchley."
References
- PRO: HW 16/23 (ZIP/GPDD 355a, messages 12 and 13/15, transmitted 11 January 1943.
- Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15:3 (2001) pp. 468-486.