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In the ripe eventide of Thursday, August 31, 1939, German subterraneous operatives dissembling to be Polish terrorists confiscated the Gleiwitz energy facility in the German/Poland bounds zone of Silesia.

The station's auditory communication program came to an offhand halt, followed by turbulent German voices announcing that Polish formations were march toward town; Germany was man invaded by Poland!

Then, like a bad imitation of the aforementioned year's disreputable War of the Worlds broadcast, the transference went d.o.a. for a twinkling of dramatic status.

Word of Gleiwitz Reaches Rest of World

Soon, the airwaves popped and crackled to duration again, and this circumstance Polish voices (clever lesser devils, those Germans...) called for all Poles in the tv show specialism to appropriate up missiles and overcome Germany.

In no time, radio devotion intersecting greater Europe picked up the message. The BBC declare this statement:

There have been reports of an march into on a radio facility in Gleiwitz, which is fair decussate the Polish line in Silesia. The German News Agency reports that the harangue came at active 8.00pm this daytime when the Poles move their way into the studio and began broadcasting a content in Polish. Within twenty-five percent of an hour, says reports, the Poles were engulfed by German police, who round-eyed occurrence on them. Several of the Poles were reported killed, but the numbers are not yet famous.

And thus, Hitler fabricated an defense to assail Poland, which he did the subsequent day: September 1, 1939. The day World War II began.

Alfred Naujocks: The Man Who Started World War II

Alfred Helmut Naujocks was an educated person go-to brave man. It was Naujocks who normative the commands from Heinrich Müller, of import of the Gestapo, to put the artificial violent denunciation equally at the Gleiwitz station.

At Naujock's powerfulness were what the Germans had codenamed "canned goods," which were dissenters and criminals kept live in custody camps until the Gestapo needful a hot nonviable article. To add cogency to the Gleiwitz attack, Naujocks brought along one specified canned good: Franciszek Honiok.

Honiok, a German from the Silesian region, was a set Polish communicator. Before incoming at the station, the Gestapo gave him a poisonous injection. Then, they garmented him up close to a Polish terrorist, and brought him to the frontmost of the energy facility. Naujocks next testified that the man was unconscious, but not stillborn yet, when he was iridescent untouched of handgun rounds. When the police and compress saved Honiok's body, they taken for granted he'd been one of the fictional Polish terrorists that attacked the facility.

Operation Himmler

In all, in attendance were 21 fix fear travels on the frontier that self night, many another of them victimization "canned goods" from German prisons so near would be generous of bodies in the morning-evidence of Polish attackers that had been changeable in self defense. The arrangements were all cut of a larger plan, titled Operation Himmler.

The side by side day, after a extended time period complete near phony terror, Hitler gave a lecture to the German Army, perform next to semisynthetic anger:

The Polish State has refused the nonaggressive city state of people which I desired, and has appealed to weapons. Germans in Poland are persecuted near homicidal alarm and involuntary from their houses. A series of violations of the frontier, insupportable to a remarkable Power, prove that Poland is no long willing and able to esteem the frontier of the Reich.

In command to put an end to this lunacy, I have no some other assessment than to meet impulsion near propel from now on. The German Army will quarrel the military action for the grace and the key rights of reborn Germany next to awkward drive. I wait for that both soldier, vigilant of the large traditions of ceaseless German soldiery, will of all time be intended that he is a representing of the National-Socialist Greater Germany. Long have your home our population and our Reich!

Thus, the citizens of Germany believed it was all Poland's breakdown. With the windfall of hindsight, we should larn how war was started nether the assumption of defending the state. And we should cram how a psychopath seems look-alike a redeemer to the dupes he claims to be protecting. And we should pay focus to the too-often frequent programme of precedent...

Where Are They Now?

Had it not been for the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the indisputable message behind the Gleiwitz spring at power have never been denuded. It was within that the operation's leader, Alfred Naujocks, spilled the beans in a printed instrument.

After that fateful night, Naujocks had individual more age of adventures beside the Nazis. Then he wild Germany and upset himself all over to Allied forces in 1944. He was held as a war criminal until the war was over and done with. After testifying at the Nuremberg Trials, he became a bourgeois in Hamburg, and may have helped more than a few Nazis evade to South America on the line-up. He died in 1966.

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