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battle
after the
THE GLEIWITZ
INCIDENT
Number 142
4 2
9
770306
154080
£3.95
NUMBER 142
© Copyright
After the Battle
2008
Editor-in-Chief: Winston G. Ramsey
Managing Editor: Gordon Ramsey
Editor: Karel Margry
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DANZIG
BERNAU
BERLIN
PITSCHEN
GLEIWITZ
HOCHLINDEN
CONTENTS
THE GLEIWITZ INCIDENT
FROM THE EDITOR
IT HAPPENED HERE
US Marines at Camp Balcombe
READERS’ INVESTIGATION
Faking Monte Cassino
PRESERVATION
Poteau Revisited
2
24
32
40
49
‘FALL WEISS’
Since coming to power in 1933, Adolf
Hitler had set his course upon two political
objectives: recovery of lands lost by the 1919
Versailles Treaty and conquest in the name
of Lebensraum. Professing peace at every
occasion, behind the scenes Hitler was build-
ing the Nazi war machine. Meanwhile, world
leaders were adeptly kept off balance with
his chicanery.
The 1936 seizure of the Rhineland was car-
ried out against little resistance as the French
stood by powerless and her allies silent. Two
years later, German troops marched into
Austria for a bloodless takeover. Plans were
next conceived for the invasion of Czechoslo-
vakia — known as ‘Fall Grün’ (Case Green),
Hitler’s pretext for the protection of the
Sudeten Germans against their Czech-Slovak
usurpers, and German troops marched into
the Sudetenland on October 1, 1938 with the
tacit approval of the infamous Munich
Agreement (see
After the Battle
No. 62).
That same month, Hitler began to press
for the return of the Free City of Danzig. The
League of Nations held oversight of the port
Front Cover:
The Gleiwitz radio station – site of one of
the fake frontier incidents created by the German
Sicherheitsdienst on the night of August 31/September
1, 1939 to provide Nazi Germany with an excuse to
invade Poland. Today Gleiwitz is Gliwice in Poland
and the former radio station is the Gliwice Museum of
Radio History and Media Art. (Karel Margry)
Centre Pages:
Wrecks of American Sherman tanks
and M-10 tank destroyers spotted at a dump outside
Grandhan near Durbuy in the Belgian Ardennes.
Taken over by the Belgian Army after the war, they
were used as practice targets on the Elsenborn firing
range until 2007. Given up for scrap, they will soon
end up in the melting pot. (Dirk van Ooteghem)
Back Cover:
A perfect recreation by members of the
Fallschirmpioniere re-enactment group of one of the
photos taken by an SS war photographer at Poteau
during the Battle of the Bulge on December 18,
1944. During the Nazi occupation of Belgium, the
Reich re-annexed its German-speaking eastern
province, making Poteau a frontier village like it had
been in the 19th century. (USNA/Frank Hübner)
Acknowledgements:
For their help with the Gleiwitz
story, the Editor would like to thank Andrzej
Jarczewski, director of the Gleiwitz Museum of
Radio History and Media Art; Marek Panek and, in
particular, Okko Luursema, without whose know-
ledge of Polish we would not have been able to find
some of the locations connected with this story.
Photo Credits:
ATL – Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington; AWM – Australian War Memorial,
Canberra; BA – Bundesarchiv; IWM – Imperial War
Museum, London; USMC – US Marine Corps; USNA
– US National Archives.
city while economic control was awarded to
Poland as part of the Versailles Treaty, giv-
ing the country access to the sea. Danzig
stood as a gross injustice to the German peo-
ple, as well as the majority German-speaking
population.
In March 1939, as Czechoslovakia disinte-
grated and German troops marched into
Prague, Hitler ordered the military high
command to draw up the plans to take care
of the ‘Poland problem’ militarily. On May 1,
‘Fall Weiss’ (Case White) was presented as
part of ‘Instructions for Operations in the
East’ designed for the invasion of Poland.
Rebuffed in his demand for the immediate
return of Danzig, Hitler rescinded Ger-
many’s 1934 Non-Aggression Treaty with
Poland on April 28, 1939. German troops
massed along the border. Poland mobilised
1.5 million, then 2.5 million into military ser-
vice. Atrocity stories heated up tensions on
both sides. British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain, embarrassed by the result of
the Munich pact, publicly committed his
nation to the protection of Poland against
Nazi aggression.
2
On the night of August 31/September 1, 1939, the German
Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) staged a series of fake bor-
der incidents along the German-Polish frontier in Upper Silesia
designed to give Nazi Germany an excuse for invading Poland.
The most prominent of these provocations was the seizure of
the German radio station in the town of Gleiwitz
(above),
five
kilometres from the border, by a band of seven ‘Polish rebels’
who proceeded to broadcast a message of Polish insurrection.
Far less known are two other incidents staged that same night:
an attack by ‘Polish soldiers and rebels’ on the German
custom-house at Hochlinden, 20 kilometres south of Gleiwitz,
and the other by ‘Polish terrorists’ on the forestry station near
Pitschen, some 100 kilometres to the north-west. The follow-
ing morning, with the German press headlining these three
‘acts of Polish aggression’. Hitler declared war on Poland, thus
unleashing the Second World War.
THE GLEIWITZ INCIDENT
On August 11, Hitler met with Professor
Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations high
commissioner in Danzig. He did not mince
his words: ‘If there’s the slightest provoca-
tion, I shall shatter Poland without warning
into so many pieces that there will be nothing
left to pick up.’ He added that where his gen-
erals may have been hesitant in the past, he
was now having difficulty holding them back.
German preparations for aggression were
stepped up. The Nazi party ‘Rally of Peace’,
scheduled to begin in Nuremberg on August
15, was cancelled. The Wehrmacht mobilised
an additional 250,000 troops and its head-
quarters were moved to Zossen. The aging
battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
sailed into the
port of Danzig to a cheering crowd on a
‘goodwill visit’ (see
After the Battle
No. 65).
On August 22 Hitler gathered his armed
forces commanders on the Obersalzberg to
announce his plans for the invasion of
Poland: ‘I will give propagandistic cause for
the release of the war, indifferently whether
convincing. The winner is not asked later
whether he said the truth or not.’ Assured of
Russian neutrality and confident of Western
Right:
Today, Gleiwitz is Gliwice in Poland
— the result of the westward shift of that
country as a consequence of the Potsdam
Agreement of 1945 — but the town’s
radio station has remained exactly the
same . . . except for the swastika eagle on
the forecourt pole which has been
replaced by a Polish eagle.
3
weakness, Hitler decided that ‘Fall Weiss’
would proceed on August 26.
Hope for peace between Germany and
Poland faded as the world’s attention turned
to the ratification of the Molotov-Ribben-
trop Pact on August 23/24. Within 12 hours
of signing, Germany was only thinly veiling
By Dennis Whitehead
its plans for a partition of Poland between
herself and the Soviet Union. A mobilisation
order was issued across England. The world
would be at war.
ATB
ULLSTEIN 642581
The mastermind behind the staged border incidents: SS-Grup-
penführer Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheits-
polizei and Sicherheitsdienst. Two months after the fake
provocations, Heydrich’s two security organisations, one a
state organisation, the other a Nazi party body, would be com-
bined into the all-powerful Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA,
Reich Main Security Department), of which Heydrich would
remain the head until his assassination by Czech secret agents
in Prague in June 1942 (see
After the Battle
No. 24).
OPERATION ‘TANNENBERG’
Determined to wage war on Poland, Hitler
needed a pretext that would allow him to
start it. If Germany could provide proof of
Polish aggression against Germany, this
would leave England and France without
grounds for a declaration of war against her.
Hitler decided to fabricate these acts by stag-
ing a series of fake incidents along the Ger-
man-Polish border on the night directly pre-
ceding his invasion of Poland.
While he had briefed his military chiefs on
the operation, Hitler turned to Reichsführer-
SS Heinrich Himmler for action. In early
August, he had ordered Himmler to begin
preparations for war with Poland. Himmler,
in turn, assigned SS-Gruppenführer Rein-
hard Heydrich, the 35-year-old head of the
both the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo, State Secu-
rity Police) and of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD,
the Nazi party’s intelligence service), the task
of implementing the plans.
Heydrich was pleased with the job. In fact,
the idea to stage counterfeit border incidents
had come from himself. He and Himmler
had been prompting it to Hitler and the
Führer — the only one who could approve of
such provocations — had latched on to the
idea. Equally important for the ambitious
Heydrich, Hitler’s order gave his rapacious
security apparatus total command over the
operation and relegated the Wehrmacht and
its intelligence branch, the Abwehr headed
by Heydrich’s rival, Admiral Wilhelm
Canaris, to minor supporting roles.
Heydrich lost no time in getting plans into
motion. Together with his principal subordi-
nate, SS-Oberführer Heinrich Müller, the
chief of the Gestapo (Secret State Police), he
selected a group of SS officers that would be
involved in the covert operation. They were:
SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Hellwig,
4
Heydrich’s main associate in planning and executing the
‘Tannenberg’ provocations was SS-Oberführer Heinrich Müller,
the chief of the Gestapo. Müller was also the driving force
behind the scheme to plant dead bodies — referred to as ‘Kon-
serven’ (‘canned goods’) — which were to be dressed up as
Polish soldiers or Polish insurgents and left behind at the scene
of the provocations as additional evidence of Polish aggres-
sion. (This picture shows him in his later rank of SS-Gruppen-
führer.)
Oberführer Mehlhorn. His objections were
not quite unexpected for his nickname within
the SD was ‘Bedenkenrat’ (Councillor of
Worries, i.e. one who always raises concerns
about everything). At this first meeting,
Mehlhorn lived up to his reputation by
immediately voicing doubts about the opera-
tion. He stated that it would create a respon-
sibility for Germany that would be hard to
bear in the face of history; and, on a more
practical level, that such operations were the
responsibility of the Wehrmacht, not of the
SS. Mehlhorn’s trepidation caused Heydrich
to ponder eliminating him from the planning
team but in the end he kept him on board.
Discussing the force needed to stage the
provocations, it was decided to set up a com-
pany-size force of about 250 men, all SS
members, of middle age, militarily trained
and capable of speaking Polish. The task of
getting together this force was given to Hell-
wig. Orders immediately went out to the SS
districts along the Silesian border seeking
recruits for special duty requiring knowledge
of Polish language and customs.
So far, Heydrich had not yet decided on
the exact locations where the border inci-
dents would take place, but he knew some-
one would be able to give him good advice:
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Emanuel Schaefer,
chief of the Gestapo in the Upper Silesian
town of Oppeln. Schaefer, an old friend of
Heydrich, knew the border region like the
back of his hand. He had grown up in the
area and had taken part in the German-Pol-
ish frontier battles in the 1920s. On August 8,
Schaefer received a phone call from Hey-
drich’s adjutant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Neu-
mann, requesting him to come to the airstrip
at Neustadt the following day — alone and in
civilian clothes. He was asked not to inform
anyone as it concerned a top secret matter.
the commander of the Sicherheitspolizei-
Schule (Security Police School) at Berlin-
Charlottenburg;
SS-Standartenführer Hans Trummler,
commander of the Grenzpolizei-Schule
(Border Police School) at Pretsch an der
Elbe;
SS-Oberführer Otto Rasch, chief of the
Sicherheitspolizei and SD in Upper Austria
based at Linz; and.
SS-Oberführer Herbert Mehlhorn, for-
merly with the SD-Hauptamt, but now
assigned to assorted SS missions abroad and
currently based at Pressburg (Bratislava) in
occupied Slovakia.
The selection of Mehlhorn was remark-
able for Heydrich did not at all get on with
him. Totally different in character, the two
men had fought out many conflicts in the
past, so much so that Heydrich himself had
been behind Mehlhorn’s transfer out of the
SD. However, Mehlhorn was an excellent
organiser, and so Heydrich wanted him in on
the team.
On August 8, Heydrich and Müller called
Hellwig, Trummler, Rasch and Mehlhorn to
a first meeting in Heydrich’s office at No. 102
Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. Heydrich’s chief
adjutant SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt Pomme
and some other SD functionaries were also
present.
Welcoming his subordinates with the
words ‘Gentlemen, you will by now have
become aware yourselves that a war with
Poland is inevitable’, Heydrich proceeded to
disclose his plans for the subterfuge. Stress-
ing the need for absolute secrecy, he
announced that the fake border incidents
would run under the code-name Operation
‘Tannenberg’.
The proposed scheme elicited little protest
from the SS officers, with one exception: SS-
On August 9, Heydrich, Hellwig and Neu-
mann flew to Neustadt in a Junkers Ju 52 air-
craft and met up with Schaefer. As he
alighted from the plane, Heydrich told an
astonished Schaefer: ‘The Führer needs a
reason for war’. Schaefer took Heydrich and
the others to the Haus Oberschlesien, a
grand hotel in the centre of Gleiwitz, where
Heydrich explained the plan for the upcom-
ing operation. Schaefer, who was also in
charge of the district’s frontier police, was
instructed to see to it that this force would be
withdrawn for the duration of the provoca-
tions.
The following day, August 10, Schaefer
took his guests on a reconnaissance along the
frontier. After a long search, they had found
two sites that suited Heydrich’s plans: the
German customs office outside the village of
Hochlinden, some 20 kilometres south of
Gleiwitz (on the main road from Gleiwitz to
Ratibor), and the lone forestry station near
the town of Pitschen, some 100 kilometres to
the north-west of Gleiwitz.
Both sites had a topography that was ideal
for the intended fake border incidents. The
frontier at Hochlinden ran partly over open
fields, partly along the Ruda creek. A narrow
strip of German territory extended into
Poland in such a way that the German cus-
tom-house could be fired at over Polish land
without having to leave Germany. The cus-
tom-house itself lay in a fold of the land, with
the result that the inhabitants of Hochlinden
would be unable to see what was happening
there. The Polish custom-house lay a few
hundred yards distant from the German one
and the nearest Polish village, Chwalecice
(Chwallentzitz), a little further up the road,
lay too far away for its inhabitants to inter-
fere with the provocation.
The other target, the forestry office at
Pitschen, stood on the edge of a forest, the
Schlüsselwald, some three kilometres to the
north of the town. A solitary stone building,
at one time it had been the main house of an
old farming estate known locally as Kluczow.
The German-Polish frontier ran along the
Prosna river, just to the north of it, so a force
approaching through the wood could easily
pose as Polish.
Heydrich’s excursion to Upper Silesia had
caused him to think up yet a third provoca-
tion: a raid by ‘Polish rebels’ on the German
radio station at Gleiwitz to broadcast a mes-
sage of Polish insurrection. Heydrich was
sure such a provocation would have a wide
impact. A Polish-language radio broadcast
from a German radio transmitter violently
overrun by Polish terrorists would give the
world clear evidence of Polish aggression
The radio station in question stood along
Tarnowitzer Landstrasse, on a hill in the
town’s north-eastern outskirts, five kilome-
tres from the German-Polish border, its 118-
metre-high wooden aerial tower being the
most prominent landmark in Gleiwitz. A
regional transmitter, it broadcast music and
German-language programming for the peo-
ple of the Gleiwitz area.
The special task of staging the raid on the
Reichssender Gleiwitz was given to SS-
Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks, an old
fighter and party faithful, and sabotage spe-
cialist on the staff of the SD-Hauptamt. On
August 10, Naujocks was summoned into
Heydrich’s office. Heydrich informed him of
his special mission, which he said would be of
the highest profile. He instructed Naujocks
to put together a team of five or six men and
travel to Gleiwitz, there to await the coded
signal to launch the attack. He was not to get
in touch with or inform any official authority
in the town and his men should not carry
anything that could identify them as belong-
ing to the SS, SD, police or show their Ger-
man nationality. The code signal for the
attack was ‘Grossmutter gestorben’ (Grand-
mother died) and would be telephoned from
Berlin by Heydrich himself.
PITSCHEN
OPPELN
EHRENFORST
GLEIWITZ
HOCHLINDEN
Oberschlesien (Upper Silesia), the region of the German Reich where the border incidents
were planned, had a rather erratic frontier with Poland which allowed easy transgres-
sions by fake insurgents. This map is from 1920 but the frontier in the south-eastern tip of
Silesia, between Beuthen and Ratibor, was re-aligned in 1922 following the 1921
plebiscite and subsequent insurgent battles. We have drawn the border as it ran in 1939.
Within the next 48 hours, Naujocks put
together a team of six men. He personally
selected four from his own SD unit and Hey-
drich assigned the other two. One was a
‘radio expert’ from Radio Berlin, the other
an announcer who spoke Polish. (This latter
man, a Polish bank clerk and Gestapo
informer from Oppeln, actually did not join
the team until later, arriving only one hour
before the actual raid.) Naujocks trusted nei-
ther.
On August 12, Naujocks and his band of
five motored to Gleiwitz in two cars and took
up residence in the Haus Oberschlesien and
one other hotel. They registered under false
identifications under the pretence of engi-
neers and geologists surveying the local land-
scape, particularly that around the looming
radio tower. Naujocks made one reconnais-
sance of the station site, presenting himself at
the gate as a street-hawker. Then he and his
men settled in in their hotel rooms, awaiting
the coded call from Berlin.
Meanwhile, on August 11, Heydrich had
convened another planning conference with
the four ‘Tannenberg’ commanders, Mehl-
horn, Hellwig, Trummler and Rasch. At this
meeting Mehlhorn again raised questions,
which he apparently presented to Heydrich
in writing, but Heydrich was quick to extin-
guish all doubts by declaring the operation a
Führerbefehl (Hitler order) and that he
would not listen to any more objections. He
wanted to get down to business.
By now plans had become more crys-
tallised. There would be three staged border
incidents: an assault by ‘Polish Army soldiers
and insurgents’ on the German custom-
house at Hochlinden; an attack by ‘Polish
insurgents’ upon the Pitschen forestry sta-
tion; and a raid by ‘Polish rebels’ on the Ger-
man radio station at Gleiwitz to broadcast a
message of Polish insurrection.
The mock attack at Hochlinden was
designed to draw the attention of the Polish
frontier troops and, so it was hoped, even
lure Polish soldiers across the border into
Germany, allowing the Germans to take real
Polish prisoners. The ‘German defenders’
would consist of SS men in Grenzpolizei
(Border Police) uniforms and real Grenz-
polizei cadets supplied by Trummler’s regu-
lar command, the Grenzpolizei-Schule in
Pretsch an der Elbe.
5

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