Höfle Telegram

The Höfle Telegram (or Hoefle Telegram) is a cryptic one page document discovered in 2000 among the declassified World War II archives of the Public Record Office in Kew, England. The document consists of two top secret messages, one to SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, and one to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim in German-occupied Kraków (Cracow), sent by SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on 11 January 1943.

The Telegram contained the detailed statistics on the 1942 killings of Jews in the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Lublin-Majdanek; as compiled by Höfle, most likely from the very precise records shared with the Deutsche Reichsbahn (DRG). Even though the Holocaust train-records were notoriously incomplete as revealed by the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes against the Polish Nation, the quoted numbers shed a new light on the evidential standard of proof for the scope of the crimes committed by the SS. The telegram gave train arrivals in the prior fortnight, as well as cumulative arrivals until 31 December 1942, for the camps of Einsatz Reinhardt (later commonly called Aktion Reinhard), the most deadly phase of the "Final Solution".