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If you have any original Hellschreiber telegrams (or original printed tape that is not glued onto  a telegram form), please contact me.

The 1944 Feld-Hell Fernschreiben (telegram) below is from General Wenck to Major-General Wisch, congratulating the latter with his promotion. General Wenck was Chief of Staff of the 1st Panzer Army and youngest general in the German Army during WWII;  Major-General Wisch was Commander of the 1st SS Division LSSAH.

(courtesy and © M. Lippl; click on image or here to get full size)

Italy signed an armistice with the Allied forces on 3 September 1943 (published 5 days later). General Antonio Gandin and his Acqui Division of the 7th Army, were located on Kefalonia island on the west side of Greece. He was instructed by the Italian High Command to not attack the Germans unless attacked by them. On September 11, he  was instructed to consider the German troops as hostile. He refused to surrender to, and cooperate with the Germans. During the morning of September 15, the Luftwaffe began to bomb the Italian positions on Kefalonia with Stuka dive bombers - as witnessed by the telegram below: "situation at 16:00 hours - fighting continues, several Stukas fought off by our artillery". On 21 Sept 1943, the Acqui Division was decimated by the German troops, esp. by the notorious Gebirgsjäger Regiment, who had been ordered to not take any prisoners. During the fighting, over 1200 Italian troops were killed. Some 5000 were killed off after their surrender. This event is referred to as the Acqui Massacre or the Cephallonia Massacre. On September 24, General Gandin and his staff were executed by the Germans.

Telegram from General Gandin of 15 September 1943
(courtesy Ferruccio Parri Archives of the Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia (INSMLI), Milan, Italy)

The Hellschreiber message below (encrypted with a Lorenz SZ40 "Enigma" machine) was intercepted by the British at Bletchley Park, on 14 August 1941. It is from an transmission between the German stations in Vienna and Athens. Intercepted messages were glued onto a "W/T Red Form" sheet (W/T = Wireless Telegraphy). The picture to the right shows that the form is actually red, to indicate its secret nature. This particular one has an intercepted encrypted Morse-code message from 1943 - the last transmission from the German battleship "Scharnhorst", before it was sunk.

Intercepted encrypted Hellschreiber message (left)
(source: ref. 1; click on either image or to get full size)

	Ref. 1: figure 1 (also see p. 1) in "The "Tunny"Machine and Its Solution" (document partially declassified in 2007), John H. Tiltman, 15 pp.
	Ref. 2: "The Tiltman Break", Friedrich Ludwig Bauer, Appendix 5, pp. 370, 371 in "Colossus: the secretsof Bletchley Park's codebraking computers", B. Jack Copeland (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 019284055X, 462 pp.
	Ref. 3: p. 388 in "Decrypted secrets: methods and maxims of cryptology", Friedrich Ludwig Bauer, 4th ed., Springer Verlag, 2007, 525 pp.

Hell Feldfernschreiber and Morse signals intercepted by the US during early WWII
(source: ref. 4)

Ref. 4: "Picking News Out of the Air; Services Put Radio to Work", Newsweek (US ed.), Vol. 19, 2 February 1942, pp. 62-63

The four "practice" messages below are Appendix 1-4 from a personal Hellschreiber manual that was written in 1940 by Rudolf Heinrich, soldier in the Signal Corps of the Wehrmacht:

"Der Typenbildschreiber Tbs 24a – 32" here is the original German document, handwritten primarily in Sütterlin script (copyright Yuri Desyatnik; used with permission). here is a German version, transcribed to modern script by R. Gellhaus (edited by me) here is an English version (the transcribed German version, translated to English by me). for linguistically inclined readers, here is a version that has both the transcribed and the translated version, side by side.

((double-)click on the images to get full size)

                        
((double-)click on the images to get full size)

The following Hellschreiber telegram (from 1991!) is a "Bahndienstfernschreiben", i.e., a telegram of the national German railway company ("Deutsche Bundesbahn"). Though not printed with a Hell Feldfernschreiber system, it is still a historic artifact. It was printed with a 1950s Hellschreiber Model "72 / GL" (or - equivalently - a model "73 AGL" or "39 L"). Such machines use a start-stop synchronization method, so they do not need to print two identical parallel lines of text. They print on narrow paper tape (9.5 mm).

(source: courtesy B. Rothe)

1954 Hell 72 "GL" printout  - message of the  Seewetterdienst des Deutschen Wetterdienstes (DWD; Marine Weather Service) in Hamburg

(source: "Einleitung", p. 5 of Das Hell-Jahrhundert: Lothar Deckert berichtet über Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell und seine eigenen Tätigkeiten in der Firma",  Lothar Deckert, Verlags- und Druckhaus Schmidt & Klaunig KG, 2007, 180 pp.)

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