On the evening of 31 August 1939 SD men under Alfred Naujocks, posing as Polish insurgents, attacked the radio station in Gleiwitz, then a German town, and broadcast a short proclamation in Polish. Outside the building they left the body of Franciszek Honiok, a Silesian with Polish sympathies arrested by the Gestapo the day before. The provocation was meant to give Hitler a pretext for the war he began at dawn the next day.