Gleiwitz Incident
is arguably the most notorious False Flag operation of all time, particularly
due to its far reaching consequences. This was the spark that Adolf Hitler
needed to invade Poland and start WWII in Europe. Obviously not content with
gobbling up all of Austria with the Anschluss of 1938 and the Sudetenland in
Czechoslovakia the same year (followed up by the entire country in 1939) Hitler
agitated for more Lebensraum, or living space for his Greater Germany vision.
The next obvious
target for expansion was Poland. Sensing that neither France nor Great Britain
were going to tolerate further “justified” expansion, Hitler went about
fabricating a reason to invade Poland.
On the night of
August 31, 1939, German security troops escorted Jewish concentration camp
victims to a radio tower near the Polish border town of Gleiwitz. There they
dressed them in German border guard uniforms and had them promptly shot. Hitler
used this pretext of “Polish Aggression” to invade Poland the next day on
September 1, 1939. Two days later Great Britain and France declared war on Nazi
Germany, WWII had begun!
In August 1939 Hitler was stirring up tension with Poland
and he was prepared to fabricate whatever was needed as a pretext to invade. On
August 11th, he told the League of Nations High Commissioner
If there’s the slightest provocation, I shall shatter Poland without
warning into so many pieces that there will be nothing left to pick up.
On August 22nd Hitler spoke to his military commanders
I will give propagandistic cause for the release of the war, whether
convincing or not. The winner is not asked later whether he said the truth or
not.
In fact, preparations for Operation Tannenburg had begun
on August 8th when SS-Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich told his men that war
with Poland was ‘inevitable’.
The idea for fake “border incidents”, in which Germany
would apparently be the victim of attacks by Poles probably came from Heydrich
himself. It was he who was ordered to stage them, assisted by SS-Oberfuhrer
Muller, head of the Gestapo.
They started by scouting the Silesian border between
Germany and Poland and soon found suitable locations near the town of Gleiwitz.
What they wanted were relatively isolated outposts of the German government
that could be attacked by ‘Polish aggressors’. The attacks would be on a
forestry station, a customs house and a radio station, where the ‘Poles’ would
take over a German radio broadcast and make nationalistic statements in Polish.
This would have a dramatic impact on ordinary Germans listening to their radios
at home.
A plan was rapidly put together where SS troops dressed
as Polish ‘rogues’ accompanied by units from the Polish army would ‘attack’
other SS troops dressed as German border guards. A refinement that was
introduced during the planning was that some of the ‘Poles’ would be killed in
the attack, so that their bodies could be presented to the worlds’ press as
“evidence”. The victims were to be concentration camp inmates dressed as Poles,
known as “canned goods”.
If the context and implications were not so serious the
whole ‘pretend’ episode could be seen as a complete farce, especially as the
Nazi’s had to go to extreme lengths to maintain the secrecy of the operation yet
were simultaneously giving the nod to various individuals to keep ‘out of the
way’. It was arranged that the regular Wehrmacht would keep clear of specific
border areas so that they would not get mixed up in actually responding to
‘Polish aggression’.
The descent into farce came closer when on August 23rd,
almost as soon as the ink was dry on the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression pact,
Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland to start at 4.30 am on 26th August. The
first of three successive code words for Operation Tannenburg to commence on
August 25th was sent. When the second code word was sent on the evening of 25th
two of the ‘attacking’ units became confused and started to cross the border
without waiting for the final third code word. Yet Hitler had had a change of
mind, rescinding his order to invade because of British guarantees to Poland
and a lack of support from Mussolini. Operation Tannenburg was now halted as
well. German motor cyclists were sent out to deliver desperate messages to the
‘Polish’ forces telling them to stop.
This led to a revision of the overall plan. Now the
takeover of the Radio station by ‘Polish rebels’ became more important. To give
it added credibility it was decided that a real ‘Polish rebel’ was needed, so
that he could be killed while ‘attacking’ the German radio station. The
unfortunate Franz Honiok was selected from police files as being a well-known
local Polish sympathizer who had fought with the Poles during the 1921
rebellion by Silesian Polish nationalists, even though he was a German
national. The 41-year-old farmer and agricultural equipment salesman was picked
up by the Gestapo on 30th August and held incommunicado.
Hitler decided to go ahead with the invasion on 30th
August with the commencement of ‘Fall Weiss’ set for 5.45am on 1st September.
Operation Tannenberg was back on. The attack on the Gleiwitz Radio staton went
ahead on the evening of the 31st.
At around 8pm the ‘rebels’ managed to break into the
unlocked compound and beat up the three radio station employees, all German
nationals. Then their problems began. First they could not find a microphone.
Further assaults on the radio station employees led to the discovery that it
was not a radio station at all, merely a radio transmitter relay station for
Radio Breslau, located many kilometers away. In desperation the ‘rebels’ found
an emergency channel used for sending out local flood warnings and used this to
send out their message of ‘Polish aggression’. How many people heard it, if
any, is not known. However, hundreds of thousands of Germans sitting at home
listening to light music on the radio did not have their evenings interrupted
by insurrectionist messages in Polish, as originally planned.
Meanwhile Franz Honiok, who had earlier been drugged into
semi-consciousness, was dragged out, placed near the entrance to the radio
station and shot in the back of the head. Later that evening the local police were
called in to take photographs of the body, which they were forced to hand over
to the Gestapo. When these were viewed in Berlin it was decided that they were
not good enough – so the Gestapo went back and took pictures of the body in a
different position – mysteriously by this stage a second body had been added.
Eventually it was decided that even these could not be used for propaganda
purposes. What happened to the bodies has never been established.
Later that evening the attacks went ahead on the Pitschen
Forestry Station, where a bucket of ox blood was spread around, and at the
Hochlinden Customs House, where the bodies of the “canned goods”, the
concentration camp inmates, were left. However, it was the attack on the
Gleiwitz ‘radio station’ that attracted the most attention. The ‘takeover of a
German broadcast by Poles’ was being reported by German radio by 10.30pm and by
the BBC the same evening, and featured in the New York Times the next day.
Hitler referred to ‘three serious border incidents’ in his speech to the
Reichstag on the 1st September announcing the war. The Nazi’s persisted with
the Gleiwitz myth for years, it was only first seriously challenged at the
Nuremburg trials.
Details of the Gliwice raid first emerged during the
Nuremberg trials, but it was not until 1958 that the full facts were revealed
after the British writer Comer Clarke tracked down former SS-Sturmbannfuhrer
Alfred Naujocks in Hamburg. Confronted by Clarke, Naujocks admitted: "Yes,
I started it all. I don't think anyone will bother about me now." In the
resulting article, he was identified as "The Man Who Started The Last
War".
Naujocks, who died in 1960 and who never faced a
war-crimes tribunal, disclosed how he had been summoned to the Berlin office of
Reinhard Heydrich, the feared head of the German secret police.
"Heydrich told me 'Within a month we shall be at war
with Poland. The Fuhrer is determined. But first we have to have something to
go to war about. We've organized incidents in Danzig, along the East Prussian
border with Poland, and along the German frontier. But there has to be something
big and obvious'."
Naujocks described how Heydrich strode over to a wall map
of Eastern Europe and stabbed a finger at Gliwice. "This is where you come
in. The idea is that six men and yourself will burst into Gliwice radio
station, knock out the staff and broadcast a speech in Polish and German,
attacking Germany and the Fuhrer and announcing Poland's intention of taking
the disputed territories by force."
Heydrich told how a body, dressed in Polish uniform, was
to be left on the radio station steps to ''prove'' the Polish connection. The
top secret operation was given a codeword: Grossmutter gestorben,
("Grandmother died").
Yes, most of the hard facts of what happened at Gleiwitz
come from Naujocks, who defected to the Americans in November 1944 after
falling out of favor with his Nazi superiors. Little is known for certain about
the SS men under his command who participated in the attack, though given the
almost astronomical casualty rates suffered by Waffen-SS units in the war, it
is entirely possible they were indeed all killed.
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