August 31, 1939

Gleiwitz incident

SS and SD operatives stage the Gleiwitz false-flag attack

The "Polish" seizure of a German radio station was carried out by German security operatives, inside Germany.

31 August 1939: a raid on a German station, by Germans

On the evening of 31 August 1939, acting on Reinhard Heydrich's order, Alfred Naujocks and a small SD party seized the German radio facility at Gleiwitz and pretended that Polish attackers were responsible.

In a sworn affidavit of November 1945, Naujocks said the group — himself plus five or six other SD men — delivered a Polish-language address through an emergency transmitter, fired pistol shots and departed.

Heydrich, he testified, had told him that tangible-looking evidence of Polish attacks was needed for foreign journalists and German propaganda.

The man left behind as proof

A drugged or unconscious man in civilian clothes was delivered to the station and left there as supposed evidence of the attack. Later historical research identifies him as Franz, or Franciszek, Honiok — a pro-Polish Upper Silesian arrested before the operation and killed to lend it credibility.

Naujocks's affidavit did not name the victim. It did record that Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller arranged the human "canned goods" intended as bodies for staged border incidents, describing 12 or 13 condemned criminals earmarked for a separate operation.

A broadcast almost nobody heard

Museum research in Gliwice concludes that technical problems reduced the supposed broadcast to only a few audible words in the immediate area, although the perpetrators believed they had succeeded. Naujocks had claimed a speech of three to four minutes.

German radio and the press nevertheless reported the supposed Polish attack. In his Reichstag address on 1 September, Hitler cited 14 alleged incidents during the preceding night and 21 during an earlier night; he did not name Gleiwitz.

The staged incidents supplied propaganda rather than a cause: Hitler had already decided on the invasion, which began that morning.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The date and the basic false-flag operation are securely attested, especially by Naujocks’s sworn affidavit and subsequent local research.
Many operational details depend heavily on Naujocks’s postwar testimony; his affidavit did not identify the victim as Honiok.
Naujocks claimed a three-to-four-minute speech, while the Gliwice Museum says technical failure probably limited reception to a few words locally.
“Operation Himmler” and “Operation Konserve” are labels used inconsistently in later accounts. Naujocks’s affidavit uses “canned goods” as a code name for intended corpses, not clearly as the formal name of the whole operation.