Höfle telegram

[2][3] The telegram contains the detailed statistics on the 1942 killings of Jews in the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard including at Belzec (B), Sobibor (S), Treblinka (T), and at Lublin-Majdanek (L).

The payment was collected from the SS by the German Transport Authority on behalf of the Reichsbahn according to a schedule, at a cost of 4 Pfennig per track kilometer.

[8] The standard means of delivery was a 10-metre-long covered goods wagon, although third class passenger carriages were also used with train tickets paid by the Jews themselves, when the SS wanted to keep up the "resettlement to work in the East" myth.

[9] The Deutsche Reichsbahn manual, which was used by the SS for making payments, had a listed carrying capacity of each trainset setup at 50 boxcars, each loaded with 50 prisoners.

[10] Notably, during the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in 1942, trains carried up to 7,000 victims each, which reduced the cost to the SS by more than half.

[11] According to an expert report established on behalf of the German "Train of Commemoration" project, the receipts taken in by the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn for mass deportations in the period between 1938 and 1945 reached a sum of US$664,525,820.34.

Apart from providing identical totals as of December 31, 1942, the Höfle telegram also indicates that the camp at Lublin (Majdanek) was part of Odilo Globocnik's Operation Reinhard, a fact that historians previously had not fully realised.