Gleiwitz incident

On the evening of August 31, 1939, a small team of SS and security service men led by Alfred Naujocks burst into the radio station at Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland), then a German town near the Polish border. Dressed in civilian clothes to pass as Polish rebels, they broadcast a brief message in Polish urging resistance against Germany. To make the scene look real they left behind the body of Franciszek Honiok, a local man with Polish sympathies who had been drugged and shot, along with concentration camp prisoners killed for other staged attacks. The SS code word for such bodies was canned goods.¹²

Gleiwitz was the best known of several incidents staged along the border under the plan later called Operation Himmler. Hitler had already decided to invade, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23 removed his fear of a two-front war. The next morning German forces crossed into Poland, and Hitler told the Reichstag that Polish troops had fired on German territory. Few foreign observers believed it. Naujocks later described the operation in a sworn statement presented at the Nuremberg trials in 1945, and the incident became a textbook example of a false flag attack.¹