Alfred Naujocks: The Man Who Started the Second World War
The Gleiwitz incident, and the mystery of Alfred Naujocks. By Roger Moorhouse.
At eight o'clock on the evening of 31 August 1939, a team of six SS agents stormed a radio station in the German town of Gleiwitz, close to the Polish border. They were led by Alfred Naujocks: a Sturmbannführer in the SS, and an agent of the SS intelligence corps; the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). He and his men fired a few shots and handcuffed the startled station personnel. One of them then broadcast a stirring speech in Polish, full of anti-German rhetoric, calling on the Poles to rise up against their historic enemy: ‘The hour of freedom has arrived’, he concluded, ‘Long Live Poland!’ “Outside, meanwhile, a local activist – a Pole – was delivered to the site. Drugged but alive, he was taken into the radio station building and was shot. His bloodied corpse left as spurious “proof” that the Poles had been the authors of the atrocity.”
The world awoke to the astonishing news that Poland had launched an unprovoked attack on Hitler’s Germany, and that German forces were ‘returning fire’. The Second World War had begun.
Just over five years later, as the war that Naujocks had started ground on to its gruesome conclusion, Naujocks decided to end his part in it. On 19th October 1944, he surrendered to troops of the 102nd American Cavalry Reconnaissance Group close to the front line near Wirtzfeld on the German-Belgian border. He gave his name as Alfred Bonsen, made no attempt to resist and immediately asked to be taken to a commanding officer. He carried a kit bag containing a change of clothes, a large sum of money in three currencies and a letter addressed to an official in the Foreign Office in London.
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