The Gleiwitz incident (Überfall auf den Sender Gleiwitz; Prowokacja gliwicka) was a false flag attack on the radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz (then Germany and now Gliwice, Poland) staged by Nazi Germany on the night of 31 August 1939. Along with some two dozen similar incidents, the attack was manufactured by Germany as a casus belli to justify the invasion of Poland. Prior to the invasion, Adolf Hitler gave a radio address condemning the acts and announcing German plans to attack Poland, which began the next morning. Despite the German government using the attack as a justification to go to war with Poland, the Gleiwitz assailants were not Polish but were German SS officers wearing Polish uniforms.
During his declaration of war, Hitler did not mention the Gleiwitz incident but grouped all provocations staged by the SS as an alleged "Polish assault" on Germany. The Gleiwitz incident is the best-known action of Operation Himmler, a series of special operations undertaken by the Schutzstaffel (SS) to serve German propaganda at the outbreak of war. The operation was intended to create the appearance of a Polish aggression against Germany to justify the invasion of Poland. On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany, and the European theatre of World War II had begun. Manufactured evidence for the Gleiwitz attack by the SS was provided by the German SS officer Alfred Naujocks in 1945.
Much of what is known about the Gleiwitz incident comes from the affidavit of SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremberg Trials. In his testimony, he stated that he organised the incident under orders from Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo. On the night of 31 August, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The operation was named "Grossmutter gestorben" (Grandmother died).
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The Abwehr (German for resistance or defence, though the word usually means counterintelligence in a military context; ˈapveːɐ̯) was the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1945. Although the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited the Weimar Republic from establishing an intelligence organization of their own, they formed an espionage group in 1920 within the Ministry of Defence, calling it the Abwehr.
The Gleiwitz incident (Überfall auf den Sender Gleiwitz; Prowokacja gliwicka) was a false flag attack on the radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz (then Germany and now Gliwice, Poland) staged by Nazi Germany on the night of 31 August 1939. Along with some two dozen similar incidents, the attack was manufactured by Germany as a casus belli to justify the invasion of Poland. Prior to the invasion, Adolf Hitler gave a radio address condemning the acts and announcing German plans to attack Poland, which began the next morning.
The European theater of World War II was one of the two main theaters of combat during World War II. It saw heavy fighting across Europe for almost six years, starting with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and ending with the Western Allies conquering most of Western Europe, the Soviet Union conquering most of Eastern Europe including the German capital Berlin and Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 although fighting continued elsewhere in Europe until 25 May.