The telegram

Hi friends, yesterday on the news, they announced that Belgium had sent his last telegram. I did not know that this communication system was still working.

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A telegram means the message sent by a telegraph.

The telegraph is a system for transmitting messages, called telegrams, from one point to another over great distances, using codes for fast and reliable transmission.

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The radiotelegram, successor of the telegram, is a form of telegram sent or received by radio waves from or to a mobile or fixed station.
Like cable telegrams and first telegrams, commercial, military or administrative radio messages were generally coded for reasons of confidentiality as well as lowering the cost of transmission.

The success of the telegram has diminished with the arrival of the telex, the fax and the generalization of the telephone and e-mail.
It still survives in some countries, for example in the United States, only 21,000 telegrams were sent in 2005 against 200 million in 1929.3
In Belgium, Proximus, which has a telegram monopoly, stopped this service on 29 December 2017.

Famous telegrams

Telegram from Panizzardi

Is a coded application related to the Dreyfus Affair and deciphered by the Quai d'Orsay's digit team.

Telegram Riegner

Sent by Gerhart Riegner, a German lawyer exiled in Switzerland and representative of the World Jewish Congress in the country, on August 8, 1942, to the British Foreign Office and the US State Department, to warn them of the Nazi plan. extermination of the Jews.

The confirmation of the implementation of the "Final Solution" through the testimonies of Kurt Gerstein and Gerhart Riegner.

Kurt Gerstein assigned to the health service of the Waffen SS witnessed on 2 August 1942 the execution of a transport of Jewish deportees to the killing center of Belzec. On the train from Warsaw to Berlin he reported to a Swedish diplomat attached to the Berlin embassy the scenes he had witnessed. The diplomat sent a report which remained a dead letter to the Stockholm Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the weeks following his return to Berlin, Gerstein tried to inform the Nuncio and the Swiss legation. At the time of the Liberation, he surrendered to the French troops and wrote a detailed report on his activities. Interned in Paris, he was found hanged in his cell on July 25, 1945.

The second source confirming the genocide is the telegram sent by Gerhart Riegner, director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, to his counterparts in New York and London, via the American and British legations of Bern, on August 10, 1942. He informed of a plan for the deportation to the East and the extermination of 3.5 to 4 million Jews with the probable use of prussic acid.

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Telegram Zimmermann

Sent by the German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann on January 16th, 1917, to the German Ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt. He instructed the ambassador to contact the Mexican government and propose an alliance against the United States. It was intercepted by British and its contents accelerated the entry into the war of the United States.

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