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The Gleiwitz incident is commonly described as a German false-flag attack on a radio station on 31 August 1939, used as the spark that ignited World War II. However, this narrative rests largely on the testimony of a single SS officer, Alfred Naujocks, raising questions about its reliability.
After the war, Naujocks claimed that Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller ordered him to stage the attack as part of Operation Himmler, a series of fabricated border incidents meant to justify war against Poland. According to accepted accounts, concentration camp prisoners were killed, dressed as Polish soldiers, and displayed as evidence of Polish aggression. Naujocks testified that he led a small team to Gleiwitz, briefly broadcast a Polish-language message, fired shots, and left a corpse in the station.
Yet inconsistencies emerge when examining his earlier interrogations. In late 1944, Naujocks stated that he carried out the Gleiwitz operation in mid-August 1939 and then remained in the town for over two weeks before returning to Berlin at which point he realized war was still days away. This timeline contradicts his later claim that the incident occurred on the evening of 31 August, immediately before the invasion. The earlier account suggests Gleiwitz was just one of several minor border provocations, not the decisive trigger for war.
Hitler’s speech on 1 September 1939 supports this broader context: he cited numerous frontier incidents but never specifically mentioned Gleiwitz or a radio station. Moreover, Hitler’s long-standing intention to expand eastward, expressed clearly in Mein Kampf and his Second Book, indicates that war was planned regardless of any single incident.
The contradiction in Naujocks’ accounts undermines confidence in the standard narrative. While the incident likely did occur in some form his admission of failure lends it credibility, it probably did not happen on 31 August and was not the decisive spark for war. Instead, Gleiwitz appears to have been one of several manufactured pretexts used to justify an already-planned invasion of Poland.