Everything about The Gleiwitz Incident totally explained
The
Gleiwitz incident was
a staged attack on
31 August,
1939 against the
German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in
Gleiwitz,
Upper Silesia,
Germany (since 1945:
Gliwice,
Republic of Poland) on the eve of
World War II in Europe.
This provocation was one of several actions in
Operation Himmler, a
Nazi Germany SS project to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany, which would be used to justify the subsequent
invasion of Poland.
Events at Gleiwitz
Much of what is known about the Gleiwitz incident comes from the sworn affidavit of
Alfred Naujocks at the
Nuremberg Trials. According to his testimony, the incident was organized by Naujocks under orders from
Reinhard Heydrich and
Heinrich Müller, the chief of the
Gestapo.
On the night of
August 31,
1939 a small group of German operatives, dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short
anti-German message in
Polish (sources vary on the content on the message). The Germans' goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish
saboteurs.
In addition to Honiok, several other convicts from the
Dachau concentration camp
For months prior to the 1939 invasion German newspapers and politicians like
Adolf Hitler accused Polish authorities of organizing or tolerating violent
ethnic cleansing of
ethnic Germans living in Poland.
On the day following the Gleiwitz attack,
1 September 1939, Germany launched the
Fall Weiss operation — the invasion of
Poland — initiating World War II in Europe. On the same day, in a speech in the
Reichstag,
Adolf Hitler cited the 21 border incidents, with three of them called very serious, as justification for Germany's "defensive" action against Poland. Just a few days earlier, on 22 August, he told his generals "I shall give a propaganda reason for starting the war; whether it's plausible or not. The victor won't be asked whether he told the truth." A few days after the Invasion of Poland, the international public and
press realized the huge scale of the German "defensive action" in the days immediately after the Gleiwitz incident meant that the operation had to be planned months in advance.
Treatment in film
- Der Fall Gleiwitz, direction: Gerhard Klein (1961), DEFA studios (The Gleiwitz Case; English subtitles), an East German film that reconstructs the events, pronounced in West Germany the best DEFA film.
- Operacja Himmler - Polart (Polish)
- Hitler's SS: A Portrait In Evil, direction: Jim Goddard (1985); An American (English language) film which shows part of the Gleiwitz Incident.
- Die Blechtrommel briefly includes the incident as a part of the film's plot.
- Codename Panzers is a video game, not a film. It stirred up controversy in Poland because the intro video showed the Gleiwitz incident as real, and not staged.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Gleiwitz Incident'.
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