World War Two began with a single death; a death that Hitler would use as the justification for going to war and invading Poland. The victim’s name, largely forgotten to history, was Franciszek (or Franz) Honiok.
Eastward ambition
The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939 had been the penultimate piece in Hitler’s grand jigsaw. With the Soviet Union safely out of the way, Hitler was now free to pursue his ambitions.
Three days later, on 26 August, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland. Troops had begun to mobilize only for Hitler, nervous of Britain’s response, to rescind the order. He knew he couldn’t simply march in – he needed a pretext. In the event, he made one up.
On 28 August, Hitler revoked the German-Polish Non-Aggression Treaty of 1934. The Poles knew what was coming.
On the nights leading up to 31 August / 1 September, there were no less than twenty-one incidences along the German-Polish border faked by the Germans which, to a gullible world, would seem like acts of Polish aggression for which retaliation was perfectly justifiable.
Operation Himmler
These acts of farce, codenamed Operation Himmler, were organised by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. The most notorious was the Gleiwitz Incident, the faked attack on the radio transmitting station, a few miles inside Germany, near the border town of Gleiwitz in the Silesia region (pictured).
Early evening on 31 August 1939, SS soldiers, dressed up as Polish partisans and led by a notorious Nazi thug, Major Alfred Naujocks, ‘attacked’ the German transmitter and its German guards (more SS men dressed up), and broadcast in Polish a brief anti-German message.
To make the attack look more authentic, the Germans had brought along an inmate from the Dachau concentration camp, the forty-three-year-old Franciszek Honiok, a farmer and a known Polish sympathizer, arrested by the Gestapo just the day before. The unfortunate Honiok was, what the Germans called, ‘canned goods’, kept alive until the Gestapo had need for a dead but still warm body.
Having dressed Honiok as a Polish bandit, they drugged him unconscious, shot him at the scene and then left his body there as evidence of the supposed attack. Local police and press found the body and the news spread across Europe. ‘There have been reports of an attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz,’ reported the BBC. ‘Several of the Poles were reported killed, but the numbers are not yet known.’ The attack made the New York Times the following day.
Hitler knew that the falsehood of Operation Himmler was highly transparent but, as he lectured his staff the week before, ‘I need a propagandistic cause for declaring war, whether convincing or not. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth’.
4.45 a.m. World War Two starts
The following morning, 1 September, at 4.45 German troops attacked Poland. Hours later Hitler spoke to the nation, referring to the ‘Polish atrocities’. He continued, ‘This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. This group of Polish Army hooligans has finally exhausted our patience. Since 5.45 a. m. we have been returning the fire… I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.’ Whether by accident or design, Hitler was an hour out.
Rudolph Hess, getting carried away in hyperbole, declared, ‘There is bloodshed, Herr Chamberlain! There are dead! Innocent people have died. The responsibility for this, however, lives with England, which talks of peace while fanning the flames of war. England that has point blank refused all the Fuhrer’s proposals for peace throughout the years.’
Technically, Franciszek Honiok had been killed during peacetime but his death can be considered the first in a conflict that would, over the ensuing six years, claim over fifty million victims.
The Second World War had begun.
Rupert Colley.
Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.
