The Gleiwitz incident

At around 8 p.m. on 31 August 1939 six or seven men in shabby civilian clothes walked into the radio station building on the Tarnowitzer Landstraße in Gleiwitz – today Gliwice, then a German town a few kilometres from the Polish border. Firing into the ceiling, they terrorised the staff and locked them in the cellar, and after spending a quarter of an hour or so searching for the equipment they broadcast a short proclamation in Polish over an emergency microphone. Listeners in the area heard that the radio station was “in Polish hands”. A few minutes later the attackers drove off. At the entrance to the building lay the body of an unidentified man in civilian clothes.

They were not Polish insurgents but officers of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security service, under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks. The dead man was Franciszek Honiok, an Upper Silesian farmer and agricultural machinery salesman, a former Silesian insurgent with pro-Polish sympathies, who had been arrested by the Gestapo the day before and brought to the radio station drugged, so that his corpse could serve as “proof” of a Polish attack. That same night the SS staged two more “Polish” attacks in Upper Silesia. All of them were meant to supply Adolf Hitler with a pretext for the war he had resolved to begin at dawn the next day.

The event is rightly described as a false-flag attack on a German radio station. Two widespread misconceptions, however, should be corrected at the outset. The attackers at Gleiwitz did not wear Polish uniforms, but civilian clothes, because they were posing as Silesian insurgents, not soldiers. Nor were the bodies of several concentration camp prisoners dressed as Polish soldiers left there. That was done elsewhere, at the customs house at Hochlinden; at Gleiwitz the only fatal victim was Honiok.

A pretext to order

Hitler had been preparing for war with Poland since the spring of 1939. The Case White (Fall Weiss) directive of April had set readiness for the attack for 1 September, and the pact with the USSR, signed on 23 August, had deprived Poland of any hope of help from the east. One political problem remained: Britain and France, bound to Poland by guarantees and alliances. Hitler counted on their not entering the war if the conflict could be presented as a response to Polish aggression – or at the very least on his own people, who viewed the prospect of war without enthusiasm, believing that the Reich was defending itself. On 22 August, on the Obersalzberg, he told the Wehrmacht commanders, according to the surviving note of the meeting, that he would provide “a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not”, since no one would afterwards ask the victor whether he had told the truth.

Preparing the pretext was entrusted to the SS. The order went to the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, while planning and supervision were taken over by the chief of the Security Police and SD, Reinhard Heydrich, assisted by the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller. The whole undertaking was called “Unternehmen Himmler”, and in the historical literature also Operation Himmler or Operation Tannenberg (the SS later used the same code name for the operations of the task forces in occupied Poland). At the beginning of August Heydrich presented the plan to his subordinates. The governor of the Oppeln (Opole) administrative district and SD officer Herbert Mehlhorn raised objections: an operation involving hundreds of men would come to light and leave Germany morally compromised. Heydrich cut the discussion short by invoking the Führer’s order. On 9–10 August, together with the head of the Gestapo in Oppeln, Emanuel Schäfer, he toured the border area and chose the sites: the radio station at Gleiwitz, the German customs house at Hochlinden (today Stodoły, a district of Rybnik) and a lonely forester’s lodge near Pitschen (today Byczyna) in the Kreuzburg (Kluczbork) district.

Larger detachments of Polish-speaking SS men, trained at the SD school in Bernau near Berlin, were assigned to Hochlinden and Pitschen. The Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s military intelligence service, was obliged on Hitler’s orders to supply Polish uniforms, weapons and army paybooks. The most macabre element of the plan was Müller’s idea: the bodies of “fallen Poles” were to be left at the scenes of the “attacks”. Prisoners from the Sachsenhausen camp were chosen for this role; in documents and conversation they were cynically referred to as “tinned goods” (Konserven).

Naujocks’s men in Gleiwitz

On 10 August Heydrich summoned Naujocks, a not quite 28-year-old SD officer from Kiel and a former boxer, who already had a killing to his name: in 1935 his group had shot Rudolf Formis, who ran an anti-Hitler radio station, near Prague. According to the testimony Naujocks gave after the war, Heydrich explained to him that “actual proof of Polish attacks” was needed for the foreign press and for German propaganda. Naujocks and a handful of men were to seize the radio station at Gleiwitz for long enough to broadcast a proclamation in Polish. Besides four of his trusted SD men, the group included a radio technician and a Polish-speaking announcer.

In mid-August (sources give 12 or 15 August) the group arrived in Gleiwitz in two cars and took rooms in two hotels, one of them the elegant Haus Oberschlesien. Its members posed as businessmen and engineers, carried no SS or police papers and were forbidden to contact the local authorities. They reconnoitred the area and waited for the codeword. It seemed it would come on 25 August, when Hitler gave the order to attack on the morning of 26 August. A few hours later he halted the offensive, and calling off the provocations was a chaotic affair: the unit that was to “attack” the customs house at Hochlinden was already near the border in the dark and turned back at the last moment. Heydrich berated the commanders, removed Mehlhorn and the unit commander, Otto Hellwig, and ordered the plan to be simplified. Naujocks waited in Gleiwitz for several more days and finally asked for permission to return to Berlin. He was told to stay.

Around midday on 31 August Hitler signed Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War, setting the attack on Poland for 4.45 a.m. on 1 September. At around 4 p.m. Naujocks took a telephone call in his hotel and heard the agreed codeword: “Großmutter gestorben” (“Grandmother has died”). Only at a short briefing that evening did most members of the group learn exactly what they were to do.

The raid

At around 7.30–7.40 p.m. the group left the hotel and a quarter of an hour or so later was at the radio station. The 8 p.m. hour was no accident: dusk was falling, people were at home listening to the evening news, and the streets were not yet so empty that cars would attract attention. A few days earlier the postal guard had been replaced by police, and on 31 August, on Himmler’s orders, the guard was reduced to a few men. At least some of them were in on the operation. The gate was open and the porter was not at his post.

The attackers, armed with sub-machine guns and revolvers, entered the transmitter hall through the back door, where three members of the station staff and a policeman were sitting through the evening programme. They fired a few shots into the ceiling, ordered everyone to put their hands up, tied up the staff and locked them in the cellar under guard. It was then that the plan turned out to rest on faulty reconnaissance. Since 1935 the Gleiwitz station had not broadcast its own programme. The tower on the Tarnowitzer Landstraße relayed the broadcasts of the Breslau station, and the studio with the microphones was housed in an old building on what is now Radiowa Street, several kilometres away. For quite some time Naujocks’s technician searched in vain for a way to get on the air. In the end, by threatening them with guns and beating them, the attackers forced the staff to show them the so-called storm microphone, which the announcer used a few times a year to interrupt the programme and warn listeners that the transmitter was being switched off because of a thunderstorm.

Through this microphone the announcer read out the prepared proclamation in Polish (according to some accounts in German as well). Its exact wording is not known. According to Naujocks it lasted three or four minutes, called for a fight against Germany and ended with the cry “Long live Poland!”. The Gleiwitz station’s weak signal, however, could only be heard locally, and many receivers picked up only a few words along the lines of “Attention, this is Gleiwitz. The radio station is in Polish hands…”. In Berlin nobody heard it. The attackers fired a few more shots for effect and withdrew. The station’s technical manager, alerted by the break in the programme, ran over from his staff flat in time to see strangers at the equipment; he struck one of them and ran off to alert the telephone exchange.

Franciszek Honiok

While Naujocks’s men were looking for the microphone, a Gestapo car drew up outside the radio station. In it was Franciszek (Franz) Honiok. He had been born in 1896 or 1899 in Łubie near Peiskretscham (Pyskowice), into a Polish-speaking peasant family. In 1921 he had fought in the Third Silesian Uprising (PL); after the partition of Upper Silesia he moved briefly to the Polish side, and when he came back and the German authorities sought to expel him, he successfully defended his right to remain in Germany before an international arbitral tribunal. He was a bachelor, walked with a limp and cycled round the villages selling agricultural machinery, making no secret of his Polish sympathies. He belonged to the Union of Poles in Germany. The Gestapo had him on file. For the authors of the provocation he was the ideal victim: a credible “Polish insurgent”, and single – someone about whom nobody would come asking.

On the evening of 30 August a Gestapo officer from Oppeln arrested him at an inn in Łubie. He spent the night in a makeshift cell, with no record of his arrest, and on 31 August was taken to the police jail in Gleiwitz. That evening an SS man in a white coat – according to the investigators’ findings the SS doctor Horst Strassburger – gave him an injection of a powerful narcotic. Müller’s men drove the unconscious Honiok to the radio station and left him at the entrance to the building. After the war Naujocks testified that he had seen him lying there with a bloodied head and could not say whether he was still alive. Policemen who came running from a nearby station after hearing the broadcast later saw the body in the transmitter hall, beside a pool of blood. Honiok was most probably shot on the spot, but who fired the shot, and whether he had not already died from the injection, has never been established. Naujocks always denied that he or his men had killed him.

The Gestapo immediately took over the investigation, and the criminal and uniformed police were pushed aside. Photographs of the body were flown to Berlin that night. One of the photographers testified years later that he had seen two bodies in the studio, but no other source confirms this. For a quarter of a century Honiok’s family did not know what had become of him. His name was established only in the 1960s by German journalists and prosecutors. He is regarded as one of the first – and often as the very first – victim of the Second World War.

Hochlinden and Pitschen

Gleiwitz was the best-known, but not the only, performance of that night. At the forester’s lodge near Pitschen, about a hundred kilometres north-west of Gleiwitz, a unit of SS men in civilian clothes under the command of Otto Rasch fired on the building on the evening of 31 August, shouting slogans in Polish, and then withdrew. The forester, himself a member of the SS, almost certainly knew about the “attack” in advance and had sent his wife away from home that night.

The most elaborate and most criminal of the stagings was at Hochlinden, on the border by the road from Gleiwitz to Ratibor (Racibórz) – the Stodoły incident (PL). During the night of 31 August–1 September, before dawn according to most accounts, SS men in Polish uniforms, from the unit commanded by Karl Hoffmann after Hellwig’s removal, “attacked” the German customs house: they fired into the air, shouted Polish commands, smashed the windows and wrecked the interior. The “defence” was played by a group of trainees from the border police school at Pretzsch under Hans Trummler (PL), who fired over the heads of the “attackers”. Meanwhile Müller’s men brought in drugged prisoners from Sachsenhausen dressed in Polish uniforms. They were shot on the spot and their faces mutilated to prevent identification. The number of victims is uncertain; six is the figure most often given. The next day the bodies were shown to foreign journalists as those of Polish soldiers.

There were other operations too. From the second half of August incidents multiplied along the border and deep inside Poland, behind which stood the German services and saboteurs from the German minority: from the failed attack on the Jablunkov Pass on the night of 25–26 August to the bombing at Tarnów station on 28 August. German propaganda attributed them the other way round: all these “Polish provocations” were supposed to prove that Poland was terrorising Germans and preparing an attack.

Propaganda

At 10.30 p.m. German radio broadcast on all transmitters a communiqué from the DNB news agency: “Polish insurgents” had attacked the Gleiwitz radio station and broadcast an anti-German proclamation, and the raid was “probably the signal for a general attack” on Reich territory, supported by regular Polish troops. The next day the entire German press wrote of a “bandit raid”. On 31 August Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the affair had to be blown up to enormous proportions.

This coincided with the last act of the diplomatic game. On the evening of 31 August, after Berlin had demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary be sent by 30 August and had announced its “proposals”, the Polish ambassador, Józef Lipski, was received by Joachim von Ribbentrop, but without full powers to accept the German terms. At 9 p.m. German radio announced the sixteen points as having been “rejected” by Poland. An hour later the same airwaves were filled with the news from Gleiwitz. Since 31 August Poland had been carrying out a general mobilisation, proclaimed the day before after a delay forced on it by London and Paris, which had asked it not to “provoke” Hitler.

Hitler’s words

At around 10.10 a.m. on 1 September Hitler addressed the Reichstag in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House. He did not mention Gleiwitz by name. He said that fourteen border incidents had occurred the previous night, three of them “very serious” – historians link these with Gleiwitz, Hochlinden and Pitschen. The most famous lines of the speech ran: “This night, for the first time, Poland has fired on our territory with regular soldiers too. Since 5.45 we have been returning fire!”

Nothing in it was true, not even the time. German troops crossed the border and opened fire at around 4.45, the hour set in the directive signed the previous day, and according to most findings the first bombs fell on Polish targets a few minutes earlier still. Nobody had fired from the Polish side. Hitler was not “returning fire” in response to any attack; he was starting a war he had planned six months earlier, and the time of 5.45 is wrong by a whole hour. Abroad, the German version convinced almost no one: correspondents were taken to the scenes of the “attacks”, but no independent commission was admitted, and the British and French governments were not taken in. The only senior dignitary who privately cited Gleiwitz as a cause of the war was Hermann Göring, in a conversation with the Swedish intermediary Birger Dahlerus.

After the war

The background to the provocation came to light at Nuremberg. On 20 November 1945 Naujocks, who had given himself up to the Americans in 1944, made a sworn affidavit describing the Gleiwitz operation, and on 30 November General Erwin von Lahousen of the Abwehr testified before the International Military Tribunal that his department had been obliged to supply the SS with Polish uniforms and documents for “Unternehmen Himmler”. Because both accounts ran together the different operations of that night, it was repeated for decades that the attackers at Gleiwitz had worn Polish uniforms and left behind the bodies of camp prisoners – a version taken up by many books, including Western ones. The precise course of events was reconstructed only by German prosecutors in an investigation opened in Hamburg in 1963, after the screening of the East German film Der Fall Gleiwitz, and by Polish researchers, above all Andrzej Szefer, and later Andrzej Jarczewski of the Gliwice Museum (PL) and Bogusław Tracz of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).

No one was ever punished for the killing of Honiok or of the Sachsenhausen prisoners. Naujocks, sentenced in Denmark for his part in the killing of Danish resistance activists, was released in 1950, went into business in Hamburg and died in 1966 before the investigation could bring charges against him. Heydrich was killed in an assassination in 1942; Müller vanished in Berlin in May 1945.

Significance

The Gleiwitz incident was the evening on which the diplomacy of the summer of 1939 came to an end. From the organisers’ own point of view it was a failure: hardly anyone heard the proclamation, the “evidence” was so flimsy that even Hitler preferred not to mention Gleiwitz by name, and Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September. It did, however, achieve what was expected of it at home: it gave the Germans the formula of a “defensive” war, which many of them believed.

A few hours after the raid, at dawn on 1 September 1939, the Wehrmacht attacked Poland: the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Westerplatte, the Luftwaffe bombed Wieluń, and the German armies crossed the border from Pomerania to the Carpathians. The same services that had prepared Gleiwitz followed the army as the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, murdering the Polish elites according to lists drawn up in advance. The method of a faked “enemy attack” was not new – in 1931 Japanese officers had blown up a railway line near Mukden to justify the seizure of Manchuria – and in November 1939 the Soviet Union repeated it by shelling its own village of Mainila before attacking Finland. The 111-metre wooden tower of the Gleiwitz radio station, one of the tallest wooden structures in Europe, still stands today as a branch of the museum and a historic monument, a reminder that the Second World War began with a lie and with the murder of a defenceless man.