What was the Gleiwitz incident?
It was a staged attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, today Gliwice in Poland, on the evening of 31 August 1939. A team of SS security service men under Alfred Naujocks, dressed as civilians and posing as Polish insurgents, seized the transmitter building and tried to broadcast an appeal in Polish. The Gestapo brought in Franz Honiok, a Silesian with Polish sympathies, and he was shot so his body could be shown as one of the attackers. Hours later Germany invaded Poland.1
Upper Silesia had been divided between Poland and Germany in 1922, and Gleiwitz, today Gliwice, ended up on the German side a few kilometers from the border. Between the wars the two states fought a propaganda battle on the airwaves. Gleiwitz had a German relay station from 1925, and in 1935 a new transmitter was opened on the edge of town with a 111-meter wooden tower, five kilometers from the studios, as Bogusław Tracz describes in the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) journal.2
A pretext made to order
In the spring of 1939 Hitler decided to attack Poland, and the German press was filled with stories of Polish persecution of Germans. That was not enough to silence foreign opinion, Tracz writes, so a pretext was to be manufactured. The task went to Heinrich Himmler and his subordinates Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS security service (SD), and Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo. On 8 August a meeting at SD headquarters agreed on several fake attacks from Polish soil before the war began, and Heydrich toured the border to approve three targets: a forester's lodge at Pitschen, the customs post at Hochlinden and the Gleiwitz radio station.3
Heydrich gave the Gleiwitz job to Alfred Naujocks, a 28-year-old SD officer who had already taken part in the killing of an anti-Nazi radio amateur in Prague in 1935. On 15 August Naujocks and six men, among them a radio technician and a fluent Polish speaker, checked into two Gleiwitz hotels posing as businessmen and waited.4
"Grandmother is dead"
The Gestapo also needed a body. It chose Franz Honiok, a 40-year-old bachelor from the village of Łubie, born into a Polish-speaking family, who had sided with Poland in the plebiscite and the Silesian uprisings: a man, Tracz writes, whom no one would search for. He was arrested in a village inn on 30 August and taken first to Oppeln and then to the police jail in Gleiwitz.5
Shortly after midnight on 31 August Hitler signed the order to attack Poland at 4:45 the next morning. That afternoon Heydrich telephoned Naujocks at his hotel with the password: the grandmother is dead. At about 7:40 pm the team drove to the transmitter, where the police guard had been reduced for the evening. Two men stood watch while the rest burst in, shouting and swearing in Polish, and locked the four staff members in the basement.6
The broadcast that failed
Then things went wrong. The raiders could not find a studio, because there was none: the transmitter building held only the relay and amplifier equipment, and the studios were in the old station five kilometers away. They tried to read their Polish appeal over the so-called storm microphone used for weather warnings. In Tracz's account, nothing was heard in Berlin, where their superiors were listening.7
How much went out on air is still disputed. Andrzej Jarczewski, head of the radio station museum, told the Polish Press Agency in 2014 that only nine words of the prepared text were read, beginning "Attention, this is Gliwice. The radio station is in Polish hands", before the transmission was cut, and that research showed they went out at the station's full range. The Museum in Gliwice itself describes a few words, probably heard only in the immediate area.8
Meanwhile Gestapo officers brought Honiok, drugged and barely conscious. Naujocks's men carried him into the building and shot him there to make it look as if he had died in the fight; it is not certain who fired. His body has never been found.9
"We are blowing it up enormously"
At 10:30 pm the German news agency reported that Polish insurgents had stormed the Gleiwitz station and broadcast that the city was in Polish hands, and that one attacker had been killed. Radio Berlin carried a long report two hours after the raid, Jarczewski noted, adding claims that Polish troops with heavy artillery were following. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that night that the Nazis were blowing the story up enormously.10
Before midnight soldiers of the Gleiwitz infantry regiment moved up to the border, and at 4:45 on 1 September they attacked. In his speech that day Hitler justified the war by border provocations supposedly committed by Poland. Once Britain and France declared war, Tracz notes, the Gleiwitz story stopped mattering even as propaganda. The truth came out only at the Nuremberg trials.11
Remembering Franz Honiok
Today the station is a branch of the Museum in Gliwice, and its larch-wood tower still stands. Honiok is remembered there each year on 31 August as one of the first victims of the Second World War, and since 2021 the square around the tower has carried his name.12
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”; PAP, “Prowokacja gliwicka - Niemcy nadali tylko 9 słów po polsku”; Muzeum w Gliwicach, “86 rocznica prowokacji gliwickiej i zabójstwa Franza Honioka”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”; Muzeum w Gliwicach, “86 rocznica prowokacji gliwickiej i zabójstwa Franza Honioka”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”. ↩
- PAP, “Prowokacja gliwicka - Niemcy nadali tylko 9 słów po polsku”; Muzeum w Gliwicach, “86 rocznica prowokacji gliwickiej i zabójstwa Franza Honioka”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”; Muzeum w Gliwicach, “86 rocznica prowokacji gliwickiej i zabójstwa Franza Honioka”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”; PAP, “Prowokacja gliwicka - Niemcy nadali tylko 9 słów po polsku”. ↩
- Bogusław Tracz, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”; PAP, “Prowokacja gliwicka - Niemcy nadali tylko 9 słów po polsku”. ↩
- PAP, “Prowokacja gliwicka - Niemcy nadali tylko 9 słów po polsku”; Muzeum w Gliwicach, “86 rocznica prowokacji gliwickiej i zabójstwa Franza Honioka”. ↩
Sources
- Bogusław Tracz, Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Przystanek Historia, “Nieudana operacja pod fałszywą flagą. Kulisy i przebieg prowokacji gliwickiej 31 sierpnia 1939 roku”
- PAP, dzieje.pl (Museum of Polish History), “Prowokacja gliwicka - Niemcy nadali tylko 9 słów po polsku”
- Muzeum w Gliwicach, “86 rocznica prowokacji gliwickiej i zabójstwa Franza Honioka”
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