You may have heard that the Gleiwitz incident - a false flag attack on a German radio station
on the 31st of August 1939 - was the spark that ignited the Second World War.
What you might not have heard is that this incident … may not have even happened. So
today, we’re going to take a look at the “official” narrative, and then ask the
question: But is this really the case?
Today’s question comes from my Patron, Vinny Siracusa, who pretty much explains why we
should be suspicious of this story, so I’m going to read his comment in full.
Hey TIK, can you talk about the "Gleiwitz incident" which was the German false flag
attack on the Polish radio station that started WW2? I was looking into where the story that
it was a false flag attack came from and it seemed very odd to me.
It seemed odd to me because from what I could find the story apparently came after the war
from a single SS officer named Alfred Naujocks captured by the USA. He was being charged
for war crimes and agreed to testify that he was told by Heydrick and Muller to plan
and carry out the attack. Then after he testified that he planned and led the attack he then
escaped imprisonment, was then never tried for his war crimes and then wrote a book about
the event called "The Man who Started the War". He then died a few years after that
(how was he not tried at that point after writing the book?). What is also weird to
me about this is that apparently he had just joined the SS a few months before the war
started. For an operation so important I would think Heydrich and Muller would pick someone
with more experience not a new low ranking officer to plan and carry out the attack.
For something so important (it is the event that the war started off) I see little to
no research on this event and can find no further proof that the Germans did carry out
a false flag attack on the Polish radio station beyond this one SS man being tried for war
crimes testimony.
I want to make clear also I am not saying the Germans did not attack the Polish radio
station in a false flag attack. I would just like to know more about this event and if
there is further proof that it happened as is the unquestioned story that it did, in
all stories of the war that I have heard.
Great question. So much so that Richard Stokes replied to you, and brought up some more information,
so I’ll read his response as well.
This is a valid question. I also became somewhat suspicious of this story. As you say, the
details are usually passed on without any primary research. In one version, the code
word given was Operation Canned Goods. Quite a cynical exercise in fabricating a 'casus
belli'. I seem to remember photos of the alleged victims were handed out to the foreign press
by Goebbels. I also think the incident came up at the Nuremberg trials. There is an out
of print book "The True Story of the Man Who Started the War" by Gunter Peis which claims
to tell the story of Alfred Naujocks. It may well be sensationalist populist journalism
rather than authentic history.
Yeah, I have my suspicions too. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the pictures that were handed
out to the foreign press, and Goebbels’ diary entries for this period were “lost”.
So Goebbels isn’t going to be any help to us.
But according to the accepted version of events, the Gleiwitz Incident was part of Operation
Himmler, a series of false flag attacks designed to give Hitler an excuse to go to war.
As part of this plan, concentration camp prisoners were to be given lethal injections, shot,
and then brought to the Polish border areas. This is supposedly why the code-words “canned
goods” were used.
Photographs would then be taken of them lying about, as “proof” that the Polish were
raiding across the border into Germany.
In 1945, Naujocks explained -
“The incident at Gleiwitz in which I participated was carried out on the evening preceding the
German attack on Poland. As I recall, war broke out on the 1st of September 1939. At
noon on the 31st of August I received by telephone from Heydrich the code word for the attack
which was to take place at 8 o'clock that evening. Heydrich said, 'In order to carry
out this attack, report to Muller for "Canned Goods."”
And Hitler’s speech on the 1st of September 1939 does mention these incidents, although
doesn’t say they were false flag attacks.
“These proposals for mediation have failed because in the meanwhile there, first of all,
came as an answer, the sudden Polish general mobilization, followed by more Polish atrocities.
These were again repeated last night. Recently in one night there were as many as twenty-one
frontier incidents: last night there were fourteen, of which three were quite serious.
I have, therefore, resolved to speak to Poland in the same language that Poland for months
past has used toward us. This attitude on the part of the Reich will not change.”
But here’s the thing to note: the Gleiwitz incident was part of a wider operation that
took place throughout the August of 1939. And according to Hitler’s speech that we’ve
just read out, he doesn’t specifically say that the Gleiwitz incident was the one and
only incident that caused him to go to war.
Instead, in the full-speech (which I’m not going to read because it would take too long)
he lists numerous reasons as to why he went to war, and didn’t once mention a radio
tower at Gleiwitz.
Plus, we know from Mein Kampf and his Second Book, that he was going East to conquer the
Living Space he needed to create his thousand year Reich.
“Therefore we National Socialists have purposely drawn a line through the line of conduct followed
by pre-War Germany in foreign policy. We put an end to the perpetual Germanic march towards
the South and West of Europe and turn our eyes towards the lands of the East.”
So, regardless whether the Gleiwitz incident or other local border actions did or didn’t
happen, Hitler was going East. Operation Himmler, Gleiwitz, and all the other things that Hitler
lists, are just the immediate excuse for why he “had” to declare war.
The point being that: this takes a bit of weight off of our shoulders. From a purely
history-theory point of view, it doesn’t really matter if the Gleiwitz incident did
or didn’t happen in the way that Alfred Naujocks says it did.
If it did happen, Hitler goes to war. If it didn’t happen, Hitler still goes to war.
Nothing changes.
But, of course, we want to be as accurate as possible, and so now we turn to the accounts
of Alfred Naujocks to hear from our primary source of information on this particular event.
Naujocks was first captured by the American 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Group on the
19th of October, 1944. He was interrogated by them several times, and then given to the
British for further interrogation later that year, and in 1945.
According to the account he gave them, Naujocks joined the SS on August 1st, 1931. He worked
in various roles, including as a clerk, working closely with Reinhard Heydrich. He participated
in several spy, kidnapping and assassination operations between then and the start of the
war. Some of these were botched, others were successful, and, in at least one case, he
killed a man. Naujocks rose through the ranks, and became a Hauptsturmführer in 1937, and
a Sturmbannführer in 1938.
So, going back to the original question by Vinny, Naujocks didn’t join the SS just
a few months before the Gleiwitz incident. Adrian Weale points out that Naujocks was
a bumbler who, like many of the men under Heydrich, was an amateur at intelligence work.
But even still, he was an experienced member of the SS by this point.
Because the British report is the closest account to the event that was written, it’s
probably the one that we can trust the most. That’s not to say that it’s entirely correct,
or that the later accounts don’t have any merit to them, but it does reveal some interesting
information.
On the 10th of August, 1939, NAUJOCKS was summoned into HEYDRICH’s presence and told
that, as the Führer was determined to attack Poland within a month, it would be necessary
to stage some “frontier incidents” which would lead the world to believe that the first
aggressive move had been made by the Poles and not by the Germans. For this purpose,
it was proposed to take selected life-term prisoners from the concentration camps, kill
them by means of hypodermic injections, dress them in Polish army uniforms and, having riddled
the bodies with bullets, place them in carefully chosen positions in German frontier villages
of Upper Silesia, so that it would appear, to the casual observer, that small parties
of Polish troops had been carrying out abortive raids on Reich territory.
This plan was immediately put into effect, and NAUJOCKS states that the bodies were forwarded
to the villages where they were required in packing cases labelled “preserves”. Some
of the victims arrived at their destinations only half-dead, having been given inadequate
injections, and these had to be put out of their misery before they could be used. The
part played by NAUJOCKS in the affair was as follows: - In order to lend colour to the
“frontier incidents”, HEYDRICH and his friends decided to publish a story to the
effect that the Gleiwitz broadcasting station had been attacked by Polish insurgents, and
he (NAUJOCKS) was accordingly sent to that town with five or six men to make the necessary
arrangements. On his arrival there, he arranged for a Polish-speaking German to take possession
of the microphone “by force” and to begin broadcasting an appeal to his “countrymen”
urging them to rise against the Germans. The broadcast was then abruptly broken off, shots
were fired in the studio, and finally a corpse, with which NAUJOCKS had previously been provided,
was left lying on the floor close to the microphone, riddled with bullets.
NAUJOCKS had to remain for more than [a] fortnight in Gleiwitz before he was ordered back to
Berlin, and when he did eventually leave and passed all the German troops and army equipment
en route for the Polish frontier, he realised for the first time that it was now merely
a matter of days before war broke out. In this way Germany prepared for her unprovoked
attack on the Polish people, and NAUJOCKS says that when Hitler made his radio speech
on 1st September, 1939, in which he expressed his anger at the “Polish frontier outrages”
and assured his listeners that such insults could only be answered by the sword, he (NAUJOCKS)
began for the first time to lose faith in the Führer. He maintains that HITLER himself
must have planned the frontier incident scheme and given orders for the murder of prisoners
from the concentration camps, since no other Nazi leader would have dared to take such
a step on his own initiative. He points out, however, that even the Führer himself could
not have carried out such a dastardly plan without the assistance of utterly unscrupulous
men such as HEYDRICH and Gruppenleiter MUELLER, who rivalled the former for his cruelty and
callousness. On his return to Berlin NAUJOCKS was, as usual,
bitterly reprimanded by HEYDRICH, who had been unable to pick up the faked broadcast
from Gleiwitz Radio Station and was inclined to suggest that it had never taken place at
all because NAUJOCKS had, as usual, lost his nerve at the last moment.
It’s interesting that Heydrich couldn’t pick up the faked broadcast. If he couldn’t
pick it up, perhaps nobody else did either. And this comes back to what we said earlier
about whether this event did or didn’t take place or not. Even if it did happen, it may
not have had any impact because the broadcast probably didn’t go out and nobody heard
it. So, at best, we could say this was a failed false flag attempt, which is further proof
that Naujocks was a bumbler.
But I’m curious to know if you noticed the main contradiction? Write in the comments
below if you did. It’s very subtle, but it’s there. And shout-out to Adrian Weale
and his book “The SS: A New History”, because if he hadn’t pointed it out, I probably
would have missed the main contradiction as well.
As a note to this incident, Weale writes:
“Most accounts (e.g. Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head) suggest that the attack
at Gleiwitz took place at the end of August and that it was a more or less unique attempt
to give Hitler a casus belli. But in his interrogation in late 1944, Naujocks clearly indicated that
this was one of several attacks, and that it took place in mid-August at the latest.”
Yes, let’s look at this interrogation again.
NAUJOCKS had to remain for more than [a] fortnight in Gleiwitz before he was ordered back to
Berlin…
So after the incident, Naujocks is in Gleiwitz for at least two weeks. Then -
when he did eventually leave and passed all the German troops and army equipment en route
for the Polish frontier, he realised for the first time that it was now merely a matter
of days before war broke out.
So the war hadn’t started yet. Naujock was in Gleiwitz, did the false flag attack, then
at least two weeks later, he then makes his way back to Berlin, where he passes the German
army, and then says that he realized for the first time that it was only a matter of time
before the war actually starts.
This means that the Gleiwitz false flag attack happened in mid or early August, not on the
31st of August. It means that this was not the spark that started World War Two.
But later in 1945, Naujocks says it did happen on the 31st of August, and it was this account
of the incident that was used at the Nuremberg Trials.
“The incident at Gleiwitz in which I participated was carried out on the evening preceding the
German attack on Poland. As I recall, war broke out on the 1st of September 1939. At
noon on the 31st of August I received by telephone from Heydrich the code word for the attack
which was to take place at 8 o'clock that evening. Heydrich said, 'In order to carry
out this attack, report to Muller for "Canned Goods."'”
Earlier he says this -
I went to Gleiwitz and waited there a fortnight. Then I requested permission of Heydrich to
return to Berlin but was told to stay in Gleiwitz. Between the 25th and 31st of August I went
to see Heinrich Muller, head of the Gestapo… In my presence Muller discussed with a man
named Mehlhorn plans for another border incident, in which it should be made to appear that
Polish soldiers were attacking German troops ....
So, our primary witness and source of information for this particular incident either doesn’t
know when it actually happened. Or, knows it happened in mid-August, but later changed
his story to say it happened on the eve of war. The implication is that, by changing
the date to the 31st, he could claim he was the man who started the war. This doesn’t
exactly inspire confidence.
And in Hitler’s speech on the 1st of September, Hitler claims that Poland was committing atrocities
across the border on at least two occasions, and implies there were more such occasions.
He says that in one night there were 21 frontier incidents. And on the last day of August 1939
- the eve of war - there were 14.
What he doesn’t say is that the Gleiwitz incident happened on the 31st of August, and
because he says more incidents were happening earlier, the Gleiwitz incident could have
happened earlier.
So really, the Gleiwitz incident may or may not have happened, and if it did happen, it
may or may not have taken place on the eve of the war.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any further concrete evidence that suggested that this
event happened, other than Hitler’s speech, and even that doesn’t say that the Gleiwitz
incident itself actually happened.
However, I think it did happen - because why would Naujocks admit that he messed up and
(possibly) failed to send the transmission (or, at least, admit that his boss thought
he had failed)? If this was a totally made up event, you’d think he’d boast about
how much praise he got from Heydrich. So the fact that he admits that it was a failure,
adds a bit of weight to the argument that it happened.
On the other hand, I’m inclined to believe that the Gleiwitz incident didn’t happen
on the 31st of August 1939, and actually happened earlier. In general, primary sources that
are closer in time to the events in question are more valuable than primary sources that
come later. That’s because the author has a fresher memory of the events, and has less
opportunity to come up with excuses or lies to cover up their mistakes.
This is in contrast to secondary sources (written by historians) that are more valuable the
closer to the present they are as possible. This is because historians have more time
to gather evidence, weigh up the various interpretations, and argue over what’s happened. So, paradoxically,
the further in time away from the events our history books are, the closer to the truth
about the events we become.
Well, in this case, the closest primary source document says that it didn’t take place
on the 31st of August 1939, and I’m inclined to believe it.
Naujock’s first account of the event has a glaringly obvious flaw in it which contradicts
all his subsequent narratives. This, to me, suggests that he was later trying to make
out that he was the man who started the war, to gain fame or infamy.
Why he wasn’t shot or hanged for what he himself admits he did, is probably due more
to the start of the Cold War and the idea of propping up West Germany.
I’ll be doing another video soon about Poland and the start of World War Two, so make sure
you’re subscribed to the channel for that. In the meantime, you may be interested to
in a video I did talking about the Polish Resistance and the Warsaw Uprising. Thanks
for watching, bye for now.