What primary Nazi documents (Korherr Report, Höfle Telegram, Wannsee minutes) reveal about the Final Solution?

1. Wannsee: policy coordination and the admission of a continent-wide plan

The Wannsee Protocol from January 1942 documents Reinhard Heydrich’s convening of senior officials to coordinate the “Final Solution,” showing the intent to integrate multiple government branches—SS, civil administration, and transportation—into a continent-wide program to “solve” the Jewish question, with explicit references to populations and responsibilities that demonstrate this was policy-level planning rather than ad hoc violence ^[1].

2. Korherr Report: a statistician’s tally that reveals scale, timing, and euphemism

Richard Korherr’s March 1943 statistical report, delivered to Heinrich Himmler, systematically tallies Jewish population changes across Europe, concluding that roughly four million Jews had disappeared from pre-1933 levels and showing that the most intense phase of industrial annihilation occurred between March 1942 and February 1943; Korherr’s report also documents how Himmler ordered the replacement of the term “Sonderbehandlung” (“special treatment”) with the euphemism “processed,” evidencing conscious efforts to conceal the murderous meaning in official records ^{[2] [3] [6]}.

3. Höfle Telegram: contemporaneous operational totals for Operation Reinhard

Hermann Höfle’s radio telegram of January 11, 1943, sent to Eichmann and others, lists precise arrival figures for Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek and yields a subtotal—1,274,166—that Korherr later reproduced, making the Höfle message one of the few contemporaneous Nazi documents providing camp-level numerical evidence for Operation Reinhard’s massive killings ^{[4] [5] [7]}.

4. Numbers, matching records, and what they imply about murder

The numerical concordance between Höfle and Korherr—Korherr quoting Höfle’s 1,274,166 figure for Jews “pushed through” those camps—strengthens the inference that these counts documented systematic deportation-to-destruction rather than mere relocation; historians and postwar trials treated Korherr’s figures as key evidence that two-thirds of victims were killed in the intense 1942–early-1943 period ^{[7] [6] [2]}.

5. Bureaucracy and logistics: the Final Solution as administrative project

Beyond killing, the documents expose the logistical apparatus—transport records, RSHA summaries, statistical offices, and Himmler’s interventions—that made mass murder function as an administrative project: Korherr compiled data from RSHA reports and Eichmann’s office, and Wannsee assigned departmental responsibilities, showing collective state machinery rather than isolated criminality ^{[3] [8] [1]}.

6. Contested readings, euphemisms, and hidden agendas in sources

These documents also reveal deliberate linguistic concealment and produce points for contestation: Himmler’s order to change “Sonderbehandlung” to “processed” in Korherr shows an intent to hide murderous meaning inside bureaucratic language ^[3], and while most mainstream scholarship treats Höfle as authentic and corroborative, some fringe sources challenge its authenticity—an argument that mainstream archives and cross-referencing with Korherr and other records have largely rebutted ^{[9] [10] [7]}.

7. Conclusion: converging documentary proof of genocidal policy and mechanics

Taken together, Wannsee establishes high-level planning and interagency coordination ^[1], Korherr furnishes a confidential statistical audit of the program’s scale and timing and documents euphemistic concealment ^{[2] [3]}, and Höfle supplies contemporaneous camp-level tallies that match Korherr’s totals for Operation Reinhard, producing convergent documentary proof that the Final Solution was an organized, state-directed campaign of mass murder rather than disparate excesses or population transfers ^{[4] [7] [5]}.