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In the postponed daylight of Thursday, August 31, 1939, German ulterior operatives dissembling to be Polish terrorists seized the Gleiwitz radio installation in the German/Poland margin locale of Silesia.

The station's music system came to an brief halt, followed by phrenetic German voices announcing that Polish formations were walk toward town; Germany was human being invaded by Poland!

Then, like a bad fake of the past year's dishonourable War of the Worlds broadcast, the transmission went dead for a second of exaggerated gag.

Word of Gleiwitz Reaches Rest of World

Soon, the airwaves popped and crackled to beingness again, and this time Polish voices (clever unimportant devils, those Germans...) called for all Poles in the emit state to pilfer up arsenal and assault Germany.

In no time, energy stations crossed greater Europe picked up the tale. The BBC put on the air this statement:

There have been reports of an occupy on a energy installation in Gleiwitz, which is fitting cross-town the Polish border in Silesia. The German News Agency reports that the robbery came at astir 8.00pm this daylight when the Poles move their way into the studio and began medium a broadcast in Polish. Within quartern of an hour, says reports, the Poles were overpowered by German police, who round-eyed fire on them. Several of the Poles were reportable killed, but the book of numbers are not yet famous.

And thus, Hitler invented an defense to occupy Poland, which he did the next day: September 1, 1939. The day World War II began.

Alfred Naujocks: The Man Who Started World War II

Alfred Helmut Naujocks was an clever go-to chewy man. It was Naujocks who received the directives from Heinrich Müller, important of the Gestapo, to put the artificial violent convulsion both at the Gleiwitz station.

At Naujock's power were what the Germans had codenamed "canned goods," which were dissenters and criminals kept alive in confinement camps until the Gestapo needed a tepid unconscious physical structure. To add relevancy to the Gleiwitz attack, Naujocks brought along one such canned good: Franciszek Honiok.

Honiok, a German from the Silesian region, was a certain Polish sympathiser. Before inbound at the station, the Gestapo gave him a fatal immunisation. Then, they clad him up like a Polish terrorist, and brought him to the fore of the energy facility. Naujocks future testified that the man was unconscious, but not asleep yet, when he was colorful untasted of small arm rounds. When the police and pinch saved Honiok's body, they acknowledged he'd been one of the mythical Polish terrorists that attacked the station.

Operation Himmler

In all, in attendance were 21 fake horror actions along the leading edge that very night, many an of them mistreatment "canned goods" from German prisons so near would be heaps of bodies in the morning-evidence of Polish attackers that had been colourful in same defense. The arrangements were all subdivision of a larger plan, named Operation Himmler.

The side by side day, after a long darkness packed beside rig terror, Hitler gave a sermon to the German Army, realised near synthetic anger:

The Polish State has refused the quiet settlement of people which I desired, and has appealed to aggregation. Germans in Poland are persecuted with sanguinary trepidation and goaded from their houses. A rotation of violations of the frontier, unacceptable to a remarkable Power, turn up that Poland is no long liable to wonder the wild of the Reich.

In demand to put an end to this lunacy, I have no some other superior than to bump into bulldoze beside press-gang from now on. The German Army will scuffle the fight for the standing and the critical rights of born-again Germany with rock-solid force. I judge that both soldier, heedful of the super traditions of lasting German soldiery, will ever remain responsive that he is a courier of the National-Socialist Greater Germany. Long in concert our folks and our Reich!

Thus, the citizens of Germany believed it was all Poland's reprimand. With the lead of hindsight, we should revise how war was started underneath the premiss of defensive the fatherland. And we should cram how a neurotic seems similar a the nazarene to the dupes he claims to be protective. And we should pay renown to the too-often perennial module of past times...

Where Are They Now?

Had it not been for the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the echt content bringing up the rear the Gleiwitz overcome may well have never been bald. It was in attendance that the operation's leader, Alfred Naujocks, spilled the beans in a typewritten legal instrument.

After that fatal night, Naujocks had various more geezerhood of adventures near the Nazis. Then he cast off Germany and reversed himself completed to Allied forces in 1944. He was held as a war robber until the war was over. After testifying at the Nuremberg Trials, he became a businessman in Hamburg, and may have helped one Nazis dodge to South America on the broadside. He died in 1966.

As for the Gleiwitz energy station, it stagnant boasts a 38-story tower, nicknamed the Bavarian Eiffel Tower, that's the tallest wooden tower in the global. In 2004, the installation became home to the Museum on Radio History and Visual Arts.