Höfle telegram

Interception and Decryption

Unknown to the SS, their transmissions were being intercepted by the British Y service^[7], and decrypted by the Police Section of the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, who had broken the cypher in 1940.^[6] 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..^[8]

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.^[8] 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.^[6] The telegrams were included without analysis under 'miscellaneous' in a monthly round-up of decrypts and no further action was taken.^[2]

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.^[2] In 2001, the telegram was rediscovered and its significance recognized by researchers Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas.^[3]

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.^[9] In this context, the telegram's usage of Zugang ("arrivals") at the extermination camps, is a euphemism for the deaths of the victims.^[3] To 'arrive' at the Operation Reinhard camps was to die, as, for example, of the 434,508 'arrivals' at Bełżec only two survived.^[2] 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").^[9]

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.^[3]

Accuracy of figures

Höfle's telegram enumerated those murdered in the camps of Operation Reinhard up to the end of December 1942. It did not include figures for those dying during transport to the camps, those shot during the operation, those who died of disease or starvation due to German persecution, or those who died as the operation continued into 1943, after the telegram was sent.^[2]

In addition, the number of victims listed in the Höfle Telegram is likely to have been based on Deutsche Reichsbahn records of victims transported by rail from ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe and Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland to the camps at Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek. The SS paid the Reichsbahn the equivalent of a third-class ticket for every prisoner transported, with the payment collected from the SS by the German Transport Authority.^[10][11]

The waybills did not include the number of victims per train because calculations were determined on standard numbers of passengers per car.^[12] In practice, boxcars were crammed with up to 100 persons and routinely loaded at 150% to 200% of nominal capacity.^[13] During the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in 1942, trains carried up to 7,000 victims each.^[14]

Majdanek

The Höfle telegram confirmed that the camp at Lublin (Majdanek) was administratively part of Operation Reinhard, a connection historians had not previously fully established.^[3] The discovery of the telegram also affected death-toll estimates for the camp. The previous estimate of approximately 235,000 victims, compiled by Czesław Rajca of the Majdanek State Museum, was displayed at the camp museum for over a decade.^[15] In 2005, following a reassessment that drew in part on the Höfle telegram's figures, museum historian Tomasz Kranz revised the estimate to approximately 78,000–80,000 victims, a figure the museum board accepted as highly authoritative, but not final.^[16][17] The revised figures were comparable to those given by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which states there were 80,000–110,000 deaths at Majdanek.^[18] After presenting the revised figures, Kranz commented that, “It must be remembered, however, that the number of victims only gives an idea about the scale of genocide; it does not convey the measureless pain and suffering experienced by the people imprisoned and murdered at Majdanek.”^[19]