Hermann Julius "Hans" Höfle (help·info) (19 June 1911 – 21 August 1962) was an Austrian-born SS-Sturmbannführer (Major). He was deputy to Odilo Globocnik in the Aktion Reinhard program, serving as his main deportation and extermination expert. As such he was heavily involved in crimes against humanity.

File:Akta personalne SS-BDC.pdf

Born in Salzburg, Austria, Höfle joined the NSDAP on August 1, 1933, with party number 307,469. He joined the SS at the same time. Before the war, he worked as an auto mechanic.

After the conquest of Poland, he served in Nowy Sącz, in Southern Poland. In November 1940 he served as an overseer of a Jewish labour camp southeast of Lublin. Up to December 1941 Höfle was in Mogilev, Russia. He was involved in deportations to the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. He lived and worked from the Aktion Reinhard headquarters with the Julius Schreck Barracks, Ostland Strasse, in Lublin.

Höfle was "Coordinator" of Operation Reinhard and deputy to Odilo Globocnik (effectively making Höfle second-in-command within the program), serving as his main deportation and extermination expert. Höfle had chief authority of Operation Reinhard beside Globocnik. At the beginning of the operation, he held the rank of Hauptsturmführer (Captain). SS members, including those from Action T4 who were assigned to the operation, reported to the headquarters in Lublin and were instructed to their duties by Höfle. For an example of the limited paperwork, every member of Operation Reinhard signed the following declaration of secrecy:

Ingrid Rimland, Ed.D. (born May 22, 1936 in Halbstadt (Molotschna) in Ukraine) is a Ukrainian-born American author, child psychologist, activist and former social worker. She has written several novels loosely based upon her own experiences from growing up in a Mennonite community in Ukraine and as a refugee child during World War II. Her novel The Wanderers (1977), which won her the California Literature Medal Award for best fiction, tells the story of the plight of Mennonite women caught in the social upheavals of revolution and war.

Born into a Russian-German Mennonite community in Ukraine she grew up trilingual (German, Russian and Ukrainian) in the then-Soviet Union. Her family had been wealthy prior to the Russian revolution, but the community faced persecution under the communist regime due to their pacifist beliefs and heritage. In 1941, when she was five years old, her father was deported to a Siberian concentration camp by the Soviets and she never saw him again. Most of her family was exterminated by the Soviets. Fleeing the Red Army, she ended up in Germany with her mother in 1945. After several years as a refugee, they emigrated to an isolated Mennonite community in the rainforests of Paraguay in 1948, with the help of Dutch and American Mennonites. In Paraguay, Ingrid married and had children. She moved to Canada in 1960 and to the United States in 1967, becoming a US citizen. In the US, she obtained a doctorate in education in 1979 and worked as an educational psychologist in California public schools, specializing in special education and migrant education for children, and simultaneously running a private practice in child psychology.