80 years ago today in 1939, in the dead of night, a small team of German operatives clad in Polish operatives led by SS man Alfred Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz Radio Station

80 years ago today in 1939, in the dead of night, a small team of German operatives clad in Polish operatives led by SS man Alfred Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz Radio Station and made a short anti-German broadcast in Poland before leaving a number of corpses on the scene dressed in uniforms. 

Though there were many orchestrated incidents taking place along the German-Polish border, this was the one which was to be remembered for it was the one which Hitler was to use to claim that Poland had fired the first shot. 

A day later the Wehrmacht would cross the border and the Second World War would begin (Alfred Naujocks, the man who fired the first shot, pictured before and after the war).

A year ago in Munich Hitler had carved up Czechoslovakia on the condition that it would be his last territorial acquisition, the leaders of the West taking him at his word as though he were any other European statesman. 

The Nazi leader however was anything but conventional and over the year which followed he had continued to push his luck again and again, the focus of his attention now fixated on Poland. 

Just like the Sudetenland a year before, the Nazi propaganda machine was put to work displaying fabricated testimonies of ethnic Germans claiming to be living under oppression in the Polish state. 

Though Poland was hardly a democracy, being ruled by a military junta for the past decade, it was a much tamer dimension of dictatorship to that exercised in Berlin and Moscow, its main crime being its discrimination not of ethnic Germans, but Jews. 

Ever since they had carved out their fledgling nation-state in the aftermath of the Great War, Poland had been of a militarist character, prepared for attack on all sides by powers who viewed her independence as intrinsically illegitimate, a mere expression of Allied force in 1919. The Polish army thus, rather surprisingly, was not much smaller than the German army. 

They understood however that they could not defeat Germany – the city of Berlin alone possessing the same gross domestic product as the whole of the Polish nation – and faced the possibility of war in the hope that France and Britain would come to their aid. 

Guarantees of Polish independence uttered by French and British diplomats however turned out to be as hollow as Hitler’s promises to restrain himself from further territorial expansion. 

Neither Britain nor France were in a position to enforce them at short notice – the French telling the Warsaw leadership that in the event of war they would attack the Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. These were gestures without substance designed to reassure the Poles and to deter Hitler. 

The Poles, to their detriment, chose to believe them. The Nazi leadership meanwhile, far from being deterred, was willing to keep pushing the limits regardless of the threats and assurances of consequences voiced by the Western democracies. 

Nevertheless, as the regime became dead-set upon starting a war, they still wished to confuse their Western counterparts and give the impression that they had the moral high ground through their protracted propaganda campaign that would make the Poles look like the aggressors. 

In so doing they hoped to at least delay or possibly even stop a British or French declaration of war. It was under these circumstances that the SS began planning Operation Himmler.

The operation was originally planned for the 26th of August but was postponed by a week in the wake of Mussolini’s unwillingness to commit to a European war. 

With the signing of the neutrality pact with Stalin however the Nazi leadership once again became comfortable with committing themselves to open war. The plan was simple. 

Men of the SS would dress up in Polish uniforms, storm a number of buildings and facilities, intimidate the locals, fire a few random shots and then leave some corpses in their wake dressed in Polish uniforms so that the incident could be pinned on Poland. 

The dead bodies were prisoners from the concentration camps, given lethal injections before being shot to mimic death in combat and then having their faces mutilated so that they could not be identified. 

The Nazis described these cadavers as ‘Konserve’ or Canned Goods, which has led the Operation to be known by some as Operation Canned Goods. Alfred Naujocks, the man who led the staged attack at Gleiwitz, was an old hand at covert acts of sabotage for the Nazis and had been involved in similar undercover attacks in Czechoslovakia. 

To make the attack at Gleiwitz seem more convincing, the Gestapo had kidnapped and murdered a local unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer whom was known to have had Polish sympathies. 

The farmer’s body was dressed in the clothes of a saboteur, shot repeatedly and then left inside the radio station as proof for the American journalists invited to investigate the scene the following day.

The next day saw the Nazi Führer appear before the Reichstag and announce that in light of these ‘incidents’ that Poland clearly was no longer willing to negotiate and that shots were now being fired back across the border. 

With crushing finality then he declared that “I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.” For all his lies and deceptions to make Germany appear the victim however, the events were received with the greatest scepticism by the world at large. 

By then however Hitler did not care much for international public opinion, telling his generals that “The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.” Nevertheless, Berlin’s narrative did not convince the world and shortly after the panzers had crossed into Poland, the British and French governments declared war. 

As before however, their declarations were nought but words and even some of the staunchest anti-Nazis in Paris and London recognised that declaring war was ultimately futile when there was neither the intention nor the capabilities to take the fight to the enemy. 

As such, Poland was left to its fate. Within less than a month she would be devoured by the twin totalitarian powers of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. 

As for Naujocks, the man who started the war managed to survive the war. Being taken captive by the Americans he pinned responsibility for the Gleiwitz incident on his SS superiors and then somehow managed to escape custody. 

Being a veteran of covert operations and sabotage he eluded justice for the rest of his days and worked in tandem with Otto Skorzeny in providing protection and safe passage for Nazi war criminals to Latin America. 

He died of a heart attack in 1966 in Hamburg, having made a name for himself in the media as ‘The Man who Started the War.’