The Gleiwitz incident, 1939: the staged attack that opened the war

Upper Silesia had been divided between Poland and Germany in 1922, and Gleiwitz, today Gliwice, ended up on the German side a few kilometers from the border. Between the wars the two states fought a propaganda battle on the airwaves. Gleiwitz had a German relay station from 1925, and in 1927 Polish Radio opened a stronger station in Katowice aimed at listeners on both sides of the border; by the end of the decade both sides spoke of a "war on the airwaves". In 1935 a new German transmitter was opened on the edge of Gleiwitz with a 111-meter wooden tower, five kilometers from the studios, as Bogusław Tracz describes on Przystanek Historia, a history portal of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).²

A pretext made to order

In the spring of 1939 Hitler decided to attack Poland, and the German press was filled with stories of Polish persecution of Germans. That was not enough to silence foreign opinion, Tracz writes, so a pretext was to be manufactured. The task went to Heinrich Himmler and his subordinates Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS security service (SD), and Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo. On 8 August, he adds, a meeting at SD headquarters agreed on several fake attacks from Polish soil before the war began, and Heydrich toured the border to approve three targets: a forester's lodge at Pitschen, the customs post at Hochlinden and the Gleiwitz radio station.³

Hitler spelled out the logic to his military commanders on 22 August 1939. In the record of that meeting used at Nuremberg as document 1014-PS, he says: "I shall give a propagandistic cause for starting the war, never mind whether it be plausible or not. The victor shall not be asked, later on, whether we told the truth or not."⁴

Heydrich gave the Gleiwitz job to Alfred Naujocks, who, Tracz writes, was a 28-year-old SD officer and had already taken part in the killing of an anti-Nazi radio amateur in Prague in 1935. Naujocks later stated under oath that Heydrich gave him the order in person on or about 10 August: he was to seize the station, make the attackers look like Poles, and hold it long enough for a Polish-speaking German to broadcast a speech calling on Poles to fight the Germans. "Actual proof of these attacks of the Poles is needed for the foreign press, as well as for German propaganda purposes," Heydrich told him, in Naujocks's account. In mid-August Naujocks and six men, among them a radio technician and a fluent Polish speaker, checked into two Gleiwitz hotels posing as businessmen and waited.⁵

Operation Himmler: the other staged incidents

Gleiwitz was one part of a wider plan. According to Tracz, the scenario for Hochlinden, today Stodoły in Rybnik, was a mock attack by a uniformed "Polish" unit that would fight a duel with the German border guards; at Pitschen, today Byczyna, SS men posing as Polish insurgents in civilian clothes were to raid the forester's lodge where the forester lived with his family. The Gestapo office in Oppeln, he adds, coordinated all three. The Polish Press Agency, citing historians of the Museum in Gliwice, describes the whole operation as run by the SD with help from the Abwehr, German military intelligence.⁶

Two Nuremberg statements describe how the props were gathered. Erwin Lahousen, an Abwehr division chief, testified on 30 November 1945 that in mid-August his division and another were ordered to provide Polish uniforms and equipment such as identity papers for what his division's diary called "Undertaking Himmler". Naujocks stated that in the last days of August he heard Müller, at Oppeln, discuss another incident in which 12 or 13 condemned criminals would be dressed in Polish uniforms, killed, and left at the scene for the press to see. Müller's code name for these men, Naujocks said, was "Canned Goods", and one of them was to be handed to him for Gleiwitz.⁷

Even inside the German services few knew the details. Lahousen recalled that when the first Wehrmacht communiqué reported Polish attacks on German territory, a fellow officer read it aloud and remarked that now they knew why the uniforms had been needed. The Abwehr chief, Canaris, he said, then told them that concentration camp inmates in those uniforms had attacked the Gleiwitz radio station, which does not match Tracz's account (IPN), in which the raiders at Gleiwitz were SD men in civilian clothes.⁸

"Grandmother is dead"

The Gestapo also needed a body. It chose Franz Honiok, a 40-year-old bachelor from the village of Łubie, born in 1899 into a Polish-speaking family. He was a German citizen who had sided with Poland in the plebiscite, fought in the Third Silesian Uprising and remained active in the Polish minority: a man, Tracz writes, whom no one would search for. He was arrested in a village inn on 30 August and, according to Tracz, taken first to Oppeln and then to the police jail in Gleiwitz.⁹

According to Tracz, shortly after midnight on 31 August Hitler signed the order to attack Poland at 4:45 the next morning. That afternoon Heydrich telephoned Naujocks at his hotel with the password: the grandmother is dead. The IPN puts the call at about 4 pm; Naujocks himself remembered it as noon, with the attack set for 8 pm. At about 7:40 pm the team drove to the transmitter, where the police guard had been reduced for the evening. Two men stood watch while the rest burst in, shouting and swearing in Polish, and locked the four staff members in the basement.¹⁰

The broadcast that failed

Then things went wrong. The raiders could not find a studio, because there was none: the transmitter building held only the relay and amplifier equipment, and the studios were in the old station across town. They tried to read their Polish appeal over the so-called storm microphone used for weather warnings. In the IPN's account, nothing was heard in Berlin, where their superiors were listening.¹¹

How much went out on air is still disputed. Andrzej Jarczewski, head of the radio station museum, told the Polish Press Agency in 2014 that only nine words of the prepared text were read: "Attention, this is Gliwice. The radio station is in Polish hands...", before the transmission was cut, and that research showed they went out at the station's full range. The Museum in Gliwice itself describes a few words, probably heard only in the immediate area, and later Polish Press Agency reports give the view of historians today that only the first words were heard, and only near the station. Naujocks claimed much more: a speech of three to four minutes over an emergency transmitter.¹²

Meanwhile Gestapo officers brought Honiok, drugged and barely conscious. Naujocks recalled a man in civilian clothes, alive but completely unconscious, his face smeared with blood; he never named him. Naujocks's men carried him into the building, where he was most probably shot to make it look as if he had died in the fight; Naujocks's affidavit does not say who fired. His body has never been found.¹³

Blowing it up enormously

At 10:30 pm, Tracz writes, the German news agency reported that Polish insurgents had stormed the Gleiwitz station and broadcast that the city was in Polish hands, and that one attacker had been killed. Radio Berlin carried a long report two hours after the raid, Jarczewski noted, adding claims that Polish troops with heavy artillery were following, and the newspapers carried the story on 1 September. Tracz also quotes Joseph Goebbels's diary for that night: the Nazis were blowing the story up enormously.¹⁴

How Hitler used it

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum sums up the purpose: the SS staged a phony attack on a German radio station, Germany falsely blamed the Poles, and Hitler used it to launch a "retaliatory" campaign. In his speech to the Reichstag on 1 September Hitler did not name Gleiwitz. He spoke of a wave of "Polish atrocities" and border incidents, "last night there were fourteen, of which three were quite serious", and declared: "This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5.45 A.M. we have been returning the fire." In fact the attack had been ordered for 4:45: before midnight soldiers of the Gleiwitz infantry regiment had moved up to the border, and at 4:45 they went forward as the German invasion of Poland began along the whole frontier. For the first days of the fighting, see Westerplatte and the battle of Mokra.¹⁵

Did anyone believe it?

The incidents were meant to blame Poland in the eyes of the world, give Hitler an alibi and hand Poland's allies an excuse not to honor their guarantees. None of that worked. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September, and after that, Tracz notes, the Gleiwitz story stopped mattering even as propaganda. Local papers printed short reports of a "Polish attack on the radio station in Gleiwitz", but they were soon lost among the war news.¹⁶

How the truth came out

The plan was exposed only after Germany's defeat. In court, Lahousen's testimony about the uniforms came first, on 30 November 1945. Naujocks's affidavit was dated 20 November, and on 20 December the American prosecutor Colonel Storey read it into the record of the International Military Tribunal as document 2751-PS, exhibit USA-482. His statement differs from the IPN historians' account on points such as the time of the call and the length of the broadcast.¹⁷

Remembering Franz Honiok

Today the station is a branch of the Museum in Gliwice, and its larch-wood tower still stands. In 2017 the President of Poland made the radio station a Historic Monument (Pomnik Historii), as the site of the Gleiwitz provocation and for its wooden lattice tower, a unique example of interwar engineering. Honiok is remembered there each year on 31 August as one of the first victims of World War II, and since 2021 the square around the tower has carried his name.¹⁸