On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of SS men in civilian and Polish clothing entered the German radio station at Gleiwitz, in Upper Silesia. The building was a relay station, not a studio: it carried programmes on from elsewhere, and its only means of speaking directly to listeners was an emergency microphone kept for interrupting broadcasts with storm warnings. That is what the attackers used, to put out a short announcement in Polish. Very few people are thought to have heard it. Its purpose was never really the audience; it was the record.
A local man, Franciszek Honiok, was brought there to be found. He was a Silesian in his forties who had sided with Poland in the disputes of the previous decades, arrested the day before, killed and left at the scene so that a body in the wrong clothes would answer for the story. He was not a soldier and had no part in what was staged around him.
Gleiwitz was one of roughly two dozen such incidents arranged in those days. The invasion of Poland began the following morning. The transmitter and its spare microphone were ordinary pieces of equipment, built to carry weather warnings to farmers. It is worth remembering the man whose name was taken along with his life.
Wendell, thank you for naming him. Much of what is known about how these incidents were arranged came out in evidence at Nuremberg six years later, when one of the officers involved described the planning in an affidavit; without that testimony the record the staging was built for might have stood.
The mast at Gleiwitz is still standing — about 118 metres of larch, jointed with brass, one of the tallest wooden structures anywhere. The carpenters who raised it in the early 1930s were building a thing for weather warnings, and it long outlasted what was done beneath it.