At around eight o'clock on the evening of August 31, 1939, in Gleiwitz, a German border city in Upper Silesia (today Gliwice, Poland), the program on some radios suddenly cut out.

First came a few clicks. Then a voice: "Attention! This is Gleiwitz. The station is in Polish hands..." Then noise, and then nothing.

That night German radio announced that Polish "insurgents" had attacked the Gleiwitz transmitter. The next morning Hitler told the Reichstag that Polish regular soldiers had fired on German territory for the first time.

Who was speaking into the microphone? And who was the dead man left at the station? The answers surfaced only after the war, piece by piece. And everyone who supplied an answer told it a little differently.

I. Plausible or Not

On August 22, 1939, Hitler addressed his senior commanders at Obersalzberg. At Nuremberg the prosecution produced a record of that speech found in the files of the Wehrmacht High Command, document 1014-PS. One passage runs: he would provide a propaganda reason for starting the war, never mind whether it was plausible; the victor would not be asked afterward whether he had told the truth.

Five days earlier, on August 17, the Army Chief of Staff, Franz Halder, made a terse note in his diary: Canaris; Himmler, Heydrich, Obersalzberg; 150 Polish uniforms with accessories; Upper Silesia.

Admiral Canaris headed the Wehrmacht's intelligence service, the Abwehr. Erwin Lahousen, chief of its Division II, testified at Nuremberg that around the middle of August Division I and his own division were ordered to supply Polish uniforms and equipment, down to identification papers, for an "Undertaking Himmler." Once everything was ready, a man from the SS or the SD came one day and took it away.

Lahousen said the division chiefs had misgivings from the start, without knowing what it was all for. But the name Himmler spoke for itself.

II. Two Weeks in a Hotel

Alfred Naujocks was an officer of the SS security service, the SD. According to the affidavit he signed at Nuremberg on November 20, 1945, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police and the SD, personally ordered him on or about August 10 to simulate an attack on the radio station near Gleiwitz and make it look as if the attackers were Poles.

Heydrich told him that actual proof of Polish attacks was needed, for the foreign press and for German propaganda.

The assignment: go to Gleiwitz with five or six SD men and wait for a code word. When it came, seize the station and hold it long enough for a Polish-speaking German to read a speech in Polish. The speech was to say that the time had come for the showdown between Germans and Poles, and that Poles should band together and strike down any German who resisted.

Heydrich also told him that Germany would attack Poland within a few days.

Naujocks went to Gleiwitz and waited two weeks. He asked to return to Berlin and was told to stay. As he later told a researcher, he lodged at the Haus Oberschlesien hotel in town and once walked into the station posing as a peddler to learn the layout. On August 25 the attack was briefly set for the next morning and called off that evening; he recalled that he was only put on alert that day and not allowed to leave the hotel.

Sometime between August 25 and 31 he went to nearby Oppeln to see the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller. The affidavit says he was present while Müller discussed another "border incident" with a man named Mehlhorn: Germans in about company strength would pose as Polish soldiers attacking German troops. Müller said he had twelve or thirteen condemned criminals who would be dressed in Polish uniforms and left dead at the scene, as men killed in the attack. A doctor working for Heydrich would give them fatal injections; they would then be given gunshot wounds. Afterward the press would be brought to the spot, and a police report would be written.

Müller added that Heydrich had ordered him to make one of these men available to Naujocks for Gleiwitz.

His name for them was "Canned Goods."

III. The Guard Is Withdrawn

The station stood on the Tarnowitz road on the northwestern edge of town, about five kilometers from the nearest point of the border. Inside a two-meter wire fence were the transmitter building, two staff apartment blocks and a wooden transmitter tower.

The fullest account of those days at the station is a report written in 1949 by its former manager, from what the staff told him; researchers call it "Report N." According to it, from about August 20 the postal authorities posted a guard of one leader and twelve men; the gates were locked and only a small wicket stayed open. On August 28 the police took over.

On the afternoon of August 31 the commander of the Gleiwitz police sector got a telephone order: withdraw the guard from the station; the Security Police would take over at once. The order came from Berlin. The acting police president, Wilhelm Schade, at first refused, because he had nothing in writing; only after confirmation came from the office of the Chief of the German Police did he pass the order on.

At around four in the afternoon a new guard arrived: one leader and three men.

All of these details come from memories recorded more than twenty years later: Schade's widow, the former sector commander, officers from the local precinct. They could not even agree on who the new guard were; some said police, some said army. On one thing they agreed: on the 31st, the guard at the station changed.

IV. Just Before Eight

This is how Report N tells it.

At around seven in the evening the duty operator, Nawroth, was in the transmitter room when the leader of the new guard came in to get his bearings. The machinist Kotz and the caretaker Foitzik, who also looked after the antenna, came in as well to hear the evening news.

Just before eight, five men in civilian clothes came through the machine room and up the stairs. Foitzik opened the door and asked what they wanted.

The answer was: "Hands up!"

They tied the hands of the staff and the guard leader behind their backs with thin cord, took them down to the cellar, and left one man there with a pistol.

Then they brought Nawroth back upstairs and demanded that he show them how to broadcast. He refused, and was beaten and threatened with a gun. He told them the station could not be used to broadcast directly; it could only carry what came over the telephone exchange lines.

The Gleiwitz station did in fact have no program of its own. Everything it transmitted came from the broadcasting amplifier station in Breslau.

Kotz and Foitzik were beaten too, and both said they did not know how to operate the equipment. By the time Nawroth was brought up again, the men had found a microphone in a small equipment cabinet. It was used during thunderstorms, to tell listeners that the program was being interrupted before the antenna was grounded.

They connected it.

The amplifier station in Breslau noticed the break in the line and telephoned. One of the intruders picked up the receiver, said "Fault," and hung up.

The station's operations manager, Klose, lived in the staff housing. His wife was listening to the news, heard the clicks, and told him someone was making mischief in the transmitter room. Klose ran over, ran into the strangers, and found a pistol pointed at him. He turned, ran home, and called the police.

The men hurriedly wound up, went out through the open gate, got into a waiting car, and drove off.

Report N says that in their haste they forgot the man guarding the cellar.

V. The Man on the Floor

The most important part of the story is also the murkiest: the body left behind. Who he was and how he died comes down to us in three versions.

The first is in Naujocks's affidavit. At noon on August 31, Heydrich gave him the code word by telephone; the attack was set for eight that evening. Heydrich told him to get "Canned Goods" from Müller. He did so and had Müller deliver the man near the station. When the man arrived, Naujocks had him laid at the entrance. He was alive but completely unconscious. Naujocks tried to open his eyes and could not tell from them that he was alive, only from his breathing. He saw no bullet wounds, but the man's face was smeared with blood. He was in civilian clothes.

The second is in Report N. After the intruders fled, an SD man happened to be passing on the street, found the behavior of the men running out suspicious, went into the station, and ran into the guard who had been left behind. He told him to put his hands up; the man did not react and was shot. The staff did not see the shooting. They saw him run past their window and then heard a shot. Kotz and Foitzik later recognized the dead man as that guard.

In 1962 the researcher Jürgen Runzheimer published his investigation in the quarterly of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. He accepted Report N and judged Naujocks's account of the dead man not credible: the grounds were floodlit after dusk, and the gate opened directly onto the sidewalk beside one of the staff blocks, so leaving a body there would have risked being seen. Max Schliwa, one of the policemen who came to the scene, told him that the dead man wore civilian clothes and lay curled up inside the building in the machine room, with blood only on the floor in front of his chest.

The third version appeared in 1979. Alfred Spiess, a senior prosecutor who had investigated the case for years, and the journalist Heiner Lichtenstein published the testimony they had gathered, serialized first in Der Spiegel. According to their material, the dead man was Franz Honiok (in Polish, Franciszek Honiok), born in 1898, a farm-machinery salesman from Hohenlieben, north of Gleiwitz, who made no secret of his sympathy for Poland. On August 30 he was arrested in Hohenlieben.

Karl Nowak, then a criminal secretary with the Gestapo office in Oppeln, testified that on the 31st he was driven to the police prison in Gleiwitz. He saw an SS officer in a white coat, looking like a doctor, go into the prison. After a while he came out, followed by an inspector holding a man by the arm. The man seemed dazed; when he was put in the car his head dropped forward, and he sagged further as they drove. Nowak supposed the "doctor" had given him an injection. The car stopped on a track beside the station, and the inspector came back, lifted the man out from behind, and carried him toward the station. Nowak said he did not think the man was dead at that point.

Afterward a police identification officer was ordered to photograph the body, and took ten to twelve flash pictures. Before he had finished developing them, the Gestapo made him pack up everything and hand it over, saying it had to go to Berlin at once.

Three versions, three origins: an affidavit signed at Nuremberg in 1945, a report written in 1949 from the staff's recollections, and testimony gathered by investigators years later. None was written down that night.

VI. "Insurgents" in the Press

The broadcast that night and the papers the next day carried the story forward.

On September 1 the Völkischer Beobachter said the attackers belonged to a "Polish Volunteer Corps of Upper Silesian Insurgents," and called the raid on its front page "obviously the signal for an attack by Polish irregulars on German territory." Another paper put it more bluntly: Polish madmen had broken into German territory. The main official report said all the insurgents had been captured and one of them killed.

The German Foreign Office compiled a list of "serious frontier incidents" on the German-Polish border, dated Berlin, September 1, 1939, and later printed in its White Book for foreign readers. For Gleiwitz it cited a report of the chief constable there: toward 8 p.m. the German broadcasting station at Gleiwitz had been attacked by a troop of Polish insurgents and temporarily occupied; the insurgents had been driven off by German frontier police officers, and one of them had been fatally injured.

"All captured" had become "driven off."

By October 17 a Berlin reference monthly, Das Archiv, went one step further: the Gleiwitz station had been attacked by "Polish insurgents and soldiers."

No trial of prisoners, no photograph of the dead man, and no name for him were ever published.

VII. The Place Hitler Did Not Name

On the morning of September 1 Hitler spoke to the Reichstag. Recently, he said, there had been as many as twenty-one frontier incidents in a single night; last night there had been fourteen, three of them quite serious. Last night, he said, Polish regular soldiers had fired on German territory for the first time, and since 5:45 a.m. Germany had been returning the fire.

He did not mention Gleiwitz.

The day before, August 31, Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War had gone out in the name of the Supreme Commander, dated Berlin: date of attack, September 1, 1939; time of attack, 4:45 a.m. The same timing applied to the operations at Gdynia, the Bay of Danzig and the Dirschau bridge. The directive also said that in the West the responsibility for opening hostilities must rest squarely on England and France.

When the hour of attack was fixed in Berlin, no one in Gleiwitz had yet found that microphone.

On September 1 the Swede Birger Dahlerus saw Göring at his headquarters. According to Dahlerus's testimony at Nuremberg, Göring hesitated and then told him that the war had broken out because the Poles had attacked the radio station at Gleiwitz and blown up a bridge near Dirschau.

The Dirschau bridge was one of the targets the previous day's directive had named for 4:45 a.m.

VIII. Nuremberg: Two Testimonies

On November 30, 1945, Lahousen told the International Military Tribunal what he knew.

When the first Wehrmacht communiqué spoke of Polish units attacking German territory, he said, Colonel Piekenbrock, chief of Abwehr Division I, read it aloud with the paper in his hand and remarked that now they knew what the uniforms had been for. That day or a few days later, Canaris told them that people from concentration camps had been put into those uniforms and ordered to make a military attack on the Gleiwitz radio station.

He added that even now he could not say exactly what had happened. After the war, in a hospital, an SS captain had told him that as far as he knew all the SD men who took part had been done away with.

Three weeks later, on December 20, the American prosecutor Colonel Robert Storey put Naujocks's affidavit into evidence as exhibit USA-482, saying he believed it was the incident Lahousen had referred to.

But the two accounts did not match. Lahousen spoke of concentration-camp prisoners in Polish uniforms; Naujocks spoke of five or six SD men and a dead man in civilian clothes. Lahousen called it "Undertaking Himmler"; the name does not appear in Naujocks's affidavit. The Polish uniforms in the affidavit belong to the other incident Müller and Mehlhorn discussed.

Runzheimer later pointed out that Lahousen's link between the uniforms and Gleiwitz rested on inference and hearsay, not on anything he saw, and that he and some later memoirs had transferred details of the staged raid on the customs house at Hochlinden, not far away, to Gleiwitz. As for all the participants being killed, Naujocks himself was alive, and he told Runzheimer his men had not been done away with.

IX. The Witness Revises

Runzheimer tracked Naujocks down, corresponded with him and spoke with him. Naujocks said he could no longer vouch for the details of his affidavit but still stood by it in general. He said he had never heard of an "Undertaking Himmler" at the time; the Gleiwitz action had no code name, because it required no paperwork and the men all came from his own office. He would not name the members of his team who were still alive.

In the testimony Spiess and Lichtenstein gathered, Naujocks's account gained some things and changed others. The code word now came not at noon but at around four in the afternoon, when Heydrich said only: "Grandmother has died." Müller had originally wanted the "canned goods" in a Polish uniform; Naujocks insisted that Gleiwitz was meant to look like insurgents, so the man should be in civilian clothes. It took about thirteen minutes from entering the building to cutting the program, and the broadcast itself lasted about four minutes.

As Spiess and Lichtenstein tell it, when Naujocks hurried back to the hotel to report success to Heydrich, Heydrich flew at him: "You're lying!" Heydrich had been sitting by his radio, tuned to Gleiwitz, and heard only the Breslau program. Naujocks himself said the affair got him into serious trouble with Heydrich.

At Gleiwitz police headquarters, people did hear the broadcast, and calls from around town came pouring in. What Heydrich's radio picked up, we have only one side's word for.

Runzheimer's conclusion was that all the facts pointed to the SD, and that Naujocks had carried out the raid; apart from what it said about the dead man, the affidavit was essentially true. Seventeen years later, the testimony gathered by Spiess and Lichtenstein suggested that on the dead man, of all points, Naujocks may not have been wrong.

Naujocks died in Hamburg in 1966.

Epilogue

Back to those few minutes on the radio on the evening of August 31.

No script of the speech survives, and no recording. All the staff remembered was one line: "The station is in Polish hands." They recalled it as German with some Polish; Naujocks said the speech was in Polish.

Runzheimer opened his article by saying that the raid did not start the war, and did not persuade foreign powers that Poland had begun the fighting.

The hour of attack had been written into an order before the men ever climbed the station stairs. The microphone at Gleiwitz only gave a decision already made a few minutes of sound.

The next morning, the speech in the Reichstag did not even need the name Gleiwitz.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Nuremberg records (Avalon Project texts of Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression and the IMT proceedings, read in full): affidavit of Alfred Helmut Naujocks, November 20, 1945, document 2751-PS (exhibit USA-482), read into the record by Col. Storey on December 20, 1945 (IMT vol. IV, pp. 242–243): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/12-20-45.asp ; testimony of Erwin Lahousen, November 30, 1945 (IMT vol. II, pp. 449–450): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/11-30-45.asp ; testimony of Birger Dahlerus, March 19, 1946 (IMT vol. IX), on what Göring told him on September 1: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/03-19-46.asp ; Hitler's address of August 22, 1939, document 1014-PS, as quoted in English translation in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression vol. I, ch. IX (which explains that 1014-PS and 798-PS were found in the OKW files, and that L-3, passed on through an American journalist, was not relied on): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/chap_09.asp . 2. German official texts of the time: Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War (Berlin, August 31, 1939; time of attack 4:45 a.m.; the Dirschau bridge; responsibility in the West to rest on England and France): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wardir1.asp ; Hitler's Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939, in English: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/gp2.asp ; German Foreign Office, Documents on the Events Preceding the Outbreak of the War (Berlin 1939 / New York 1940), No. 470, "List of Officially Reported Serious Frontier Incidents on the German-Polish Frontier Between August 25 and 31, 1939" (dated Berlin, September 1, 1939; the "Report of the Chief Constable at Gleiwitz"), and No. 471 (the Reichstag speech), read in the Internet Archive full text: https://archive.org/details/documents-of-events-preceding-the-outbreak-of-the-war . 3. Research and postwar testimony: Jürgen Runzheimer, "Der Überfall auf den Sender Gleiwitz im Jahre 1939," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 10 (1962), no. 4, pp. 408–426, read in full: https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1962_4_3_runzheimer.pdf . The layout of the station, the postal guard from about August 20, the changes of guard on August 28 and 31, Schade's refusal of an unwritten order, the course of the raid (Nawroth, Kotz, Foitzik, Klose, the "Fault" call, the thunderstorm microphone), Report N's account of the dead man, what Schliwa saw, Naujocks's written and oral statements to Runzheimer, the wording of the German press (Völkischer Beobachter, Munich ed., Sept. 1, 1939; Rhein-Front, Sept. 1, 1939; Das Archiv, Oct. 17, 1939), Halder's diary for August 17, 1939 (Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. I, 1962, p. 19) and Canaris's diary (795-PS) are all taken from this article; the two diaries and the newspapers are cited at second hand and were not read in the original. The testimony collected by Alfred Spiess and Heiner Lichtenstein (Das Unternehmen Tannenberg, 1979) is used as serialized in Der Spiegel 34/1979, "Unternehmen Tannenberg": https://www.spiegel.de/politik/unternehmen-tannenberg-a-589d8665-0002-0001-0000-000039908700 ; and 32/1979 (Halder diary quotation): https://www.spiegel.de/politik/unternehmen-tannenberg-a-269bd89d-0002-0001-0000-000040348981 . Honiok's identity, his arrest and transport (Nowak's testimony), the photographs and the confiscated plates, the code word "Grandmother has died" at about 4 p.m., the thirteen and four minutes, and Heydrich's "You're lying!" all come from this serialization; the book itself was not read. 4. Boundaries: almost every detail of how the raid was planned and carried out comes from postwar testimony; no internal document written that night has been found in the sources read. Naujocks's affidavit was made by a prisoner at Nuremberg; he does not appear as a witness under questioning in the trial records read here. He later told Runzheimer he could no longer vouch for details, and his account to Spiess and others (about 4 p.m., the wording of the code word, Müller's wish for a uniform) differs from the affidavit (noon, no code word given); both are set side by side without a ruling. Lahousen's statements about camp prisoners and the killing of participants repeat what Canaris and an SS captain told him; he said himself that he did not know what happened. Report N was written in 1949 from the staff's recollections; no one on the staff saw the shot fired. Runzheimer's suggestion that the cellar guard was left behind deliberately is not adopted here. The three versions of the dead man are kept apart: the name Honiok comes from the 1979 material by Spiess and others and was unknown to Runzheimer in 1962; Naujocks put the body at the entrance, Schliwa and others inside the building, and this is not reconciled. The postponed attack of August 25 follows Runzheimer's note 77; Naujocks's being only on alert that day follows his statement to Runzheimer. The time the directive went out is given in the Spiegel serialization as a few minutes before 1 p.m. on August 31; the directive's own text carries only the date. Dahlerus's "8 o'clock" does not say morning or evening, so no hour is given. There is no script or recording of the broadcast; "The station is in Polish hands" comes from Report N; Runzheimer says the appeal was read in German and partly in Polish, while Naujocks's affidavit says Polish, and both are given. "Frontier police" and "one fatally injured" in White Book No. 470 are Nazi official claims, not findings of fact. The staged raids at Hochlinden and Pitschen the same night are mentioned only where necessary. The difference between "5:45" in the speech and "4:45" in the directive is stated, not explained. There is no invented dialogue, inner thought or sensory embellishment; everything in quotation marks comes from the documents above, quoted or paraphrased. 5. Naujocks's dates (born Kiel, September 20, 1911; died Hamburg, April 4, 1966) follow Wikidata Q76635: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q76635 . The 10:30 p.m. German radio report that night follows the Spiegel serialization (34/1979). 6. Rights: the Nuremberg records and German wartime government publications are public documents; Runzheimer's article and the Spiegel serialization are used for facts and brief quotation only; the narrative is original.