Gleiwitz incident

Gleiwitz incident
Part of Operation Himmler
The historic Gliwice Radio Tower in 2012. It is the tallest wooden structure in Europe.
Type	Special operations
Location	Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia 50°18′48″N 18°41′21″E
Objective	Pretext for the invasion of Poland
Date	31 August 1939 (1939-08-31)
Executed by	German SS
Gliwice Radio Tower Location of the Gleiwitz Radio Tower in contemporary Germany

The Gleiwitz incident (Template:Lang-de; Template:Lang-pl) was a false flag operation by Nazi Germans posing as Poles on 31 August 1939, against the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany (today Gliwice, Poland) on the eve of World War II in Europe. The goal was to use the staged attack as a pretext for invading Poland. This provocation was the best-known of several actions in Operation Himmler, a series of unconventional operations undertaken by the SS in order to serve specific propaganda goals of Nazi Germany at the outbreak of the war. It was intended to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany in order to justify the subsequent invasion of Poland.

Events at Gleiwitz

Alfred Naujocks, who organized and led the Gleiwitz operation on the orders of the Gestapo

Much of what is known about the Gleiwitz incident comes from the affidavit of SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremberg Trials. In his testimony, he stated that he organized the incident under orders from Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo.

On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The whole operation was named "Grossmutter gestorben" ("Grandmother died"). The Germans' goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.

Heydrich (left) with Karl Hermann Frank at Prague Castle in 1941

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.

In addition to Honiok, several prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were drugged, shot dead on the site, and their faces disfigured to make identification impossible. The Germans referred to them by the code phrase "Konserve" ("canned goods"). For this reason, some sources incorrectly refer to the incident as "Operation Canned Goods". In an oral testimony at the trials, Erwin von Lahousen stated that his division of the Abwehr was one of two that were given the task of providing Polish uniforms, equipment, and identification cards, and that he was later told by Wilhelm Canaris that people from concentration camps had been disguised in these uniforms and ordered to attack the radio stations.

Context

Plaque on site commemorating the incident

The Gleiwitz incident was a part of a larger operation carried out by Abwehr and SS forces. There were other incidents orchestrated by Germany along the Polish-German border at the same time as the Gleiwitz attack, such as a house torching in the Polish Corridor and spurious propaganda output. The entire project was dubbed Operation Himmler and comprised a number of incidents intended to give the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany.

German newspapers and politicians, including Adolf Hitler, accused Polish authorities for months before the 1939 invasion of organizing or tolerating violent ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans living in Poland.

On 1 September 1939, the day following the Gleiwitz attack, Germany launched the Fall Weiss operation – the invasion of Poland – initiating World War II in Europe. Hitler cited the border incidents in a speech in the Reichstag on the same day, with three of them called very serious, as justification for Germany's invasion of Poland. He had told his generals on 22 August, just a few days earlier, "I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn't matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth."

International reactions

American correspondents were summoned to the scene the next day but no neutral parties were allowed to investigate the incident in detail and the international public was skeptical of the German version of the incident.

In popular culture

There have been several adaptations of the incident in cinema. Der Fall Gleiwitz (1961), directed by Gerhard Klein, DEFA studios (The Gleiwitz Case; English subtitles), is an East German film that reconstructs the events.

Operacja Himmler (1979) is a Polish film that covers the events.

Both Die Blechtrommel (1979), directed by Volker Schlöndorff, and Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil (1985), directed by Jim Goddard, briefly include the incident.

It was also mentioned in a video game; Codename: Panzers (2004), which stirred up controversy in Poland where the game was briefly discussed in Polish media as anti-Polish falsification of history, before the issue was cleared up as a case of poor reporting.

See also

• Jablunkov Incident
• Mukden Incident, a similar false flag operation that started the Japanese invasion of Manchuria
• 1939 in Poland
• 1939 Tarnow rail station bomb attack
• Operation Greif
• Shelling of Mainila

Further reading

• John Toland, Adolf Hitler : The Definitive Biography, ISBN 0-385-42053-6.
• Dennis Whitehead, "The Gleiwitz Incident", After the Battle Magazine Number 142 (March 2009)
• Stanley S. Seidner, Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz Rydz and the Defense of Poland, New York, 1978.
• Spieß / Lichtenstein Unternehmen Tannenberg. Der Anlass zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, Wiesbaden und München 1979.
• Polak-Springer, Peter (April 2013). "'Jammin' with Karlik': The German-Polish 'Radio War' and the Gleiwitz 'Provocation', 1925–1939". European History Quarterly. 43 (2). SagePub: 279–300. doi:10.1177/0265691413478095. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |layurl= ignored (help)

External links

• "Blitzkrieg September 1, 1939: a new kind of warfare engulfs Poland". Time. 28 August 1989. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
• Radio Tower Museum in Gliwice: Gliwice provocation. Broadcasting station.
• Template:Ru icon Мой сайт@Mail.Ru – Сервис бесплатного хостинга
• Template:De icon Museum der Rundfunkgeschichte und der Medienkunst – Rundfunksender Gliwice
• Template:Pl icon 65 lat temu wybuchła wojna: