The message on Holocaust deaths in 1942. The Höfle telegram.
During WW2, British Intelligence was able to read a good many secret German communications which were sent by the Enigma device. There was of course a huge amount of traffic and probably only a small part was decrypted and of that only a small part understood. Working from Bletchley Park in today’s Milton Keynes the operation was understaffed and overworked with an inadequate number of German speakers for the work that was needed to be done. The cryptologists had some amazing successes which no doubt saved many Allied lives. There were some battles which were won thanks to the cyptologists and without this information then these battles might have had a different result and the war might have lasted longer. However a great deal was just filed, probably only with a cursory look and the documents, classified top secret were then hidden from the public. They were declassified many years later.
Two documents were found in 2001 which showed the extent of the Holocaust. Both are dated 11 January 1943 and were sent in five minutes of each other. The first was addressed to SS Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Berlin, and the other to SS Lieutenant Colonel Heim, deputy commander of the Security Police and SD for the General Government in Kraków.
One of these two documents gives us an exact number of people who were murdered in the National Socialist death camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka as well as the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. Almost certainly both documents were the same but we only have one of the two in its complete format. However, as I shall explain, I think these exact totals are in fact, approximations.
The sender was SS Major Hoefle who was a deputy of Odilo Globocnik in Lublin. , The message to Eichmann was only partially intercepted and decoded by British Intelligence. The second message to Heim is much more complete. As of today, no similar decodes have yet been found. It is clear that British intelligence analysts did not understand the relevance understood the meaning or significance of these two messages '
I have done a separate video on the life of Hoefle but in short he was deeply involved with the Holocaust. Based in Lublin – the centre of the so called Operation Reinhard – which oversaw the death camps at Sobibór, Bełżec and Treblinka as well as the ghettos and slave labour camps in the region. From the telegram we also learned that the concentration camp at Majdanek was part of Operation Reinhard.
The addressee of the second message was SS Lieutenant Colonel Franz Heim, Not much is known about him. He was born on 13 February 1907. He trained as a pharmacist. He joined NSDAP and SA in 1930, a year later the SS. The Nazi seizure of power did not help him as he was unemployed. In 1935, he was able to get a job at the SD. At the beginning of the war he was active in an Einsatzkommando in Poland. These were the murder squads operating behind the lines seeking out anyone the SS thought might be unfriendly towards Nazi Germany. From the end of July to the end of August 1941, he was Deputy Commander of an Einsatzkommando murdering Jews in those eastern territories of Poland that had been occupied by the USSR in 1939. SS Oberführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, who was commander of the security police and the SD for the General Government appointed him to be his deputy in September 1941. Schöngarth was also deeply involved in mass murder and attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, a role that should not have gone to him but to the Higher SS and Police Leader East, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger. Heim was with Schöngarth in Kraków until the beginning of 1943, when he became too sick to continue working. On 1 March 1943 he was promoted to SS-Standartenfuhrer. He died of cancer on 19 February 1944
The subject of the radio telegram reads "fortnightly report Einsatz REINHART – using a T in the spelling and not a D.
The same spelling Einsatz Reinhart appears in both the printed and the typewritten office letterheads of Hoefle s section in Globocnik's staff. This could of course reflect Hbfle's inability to spell which given that he did not have the education of some of those around him is perhaps understandable. Globocnik, in charge of Operation Reinhard, who also did not benefit from a university education, did not keep to the same spelling either. However even as is noted in Robert Gerwarth’s biography on Reinhard Heydrich, even Heydrich himself spelled his name either with a D or with DT. Every entry in the staff list of the SS, the Dienstaltersliste der Schutzstaffel der NSDAP, has Heydrich’s first name spelled with ‘DT’.
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