Stalin’s objective was to pit Germany and the western allies against each other and let them fight each other to the death and thereafter, he would conquer a weakened, war-torn Europe. On February 9, 1940, during a courier flight from Britain to the Soviet Union, with the war strategy plans, the German Luftwaffe forced the plane to land. They searched, found and photographed the incriminating documents. Thus, Hitler knew exactly what Churchill and Stalin had concocted but they did not realize what he knew. He had planned and prepared a preventive attack strategy in Norway. On July 9, 1941, Stalin would issue a cover order, after Hitler had demanded a reason for Stalin’s attack on Finland. Hitler was prepared to function as a protectorate for Finland and relieve Marshal Mannerheim from his obligations to Stalin who was intent on occupying Finland. Those included a promise not to counter attack and advance towards Leningrad or deter the Soviet’s use of the railroad leading from Sorkka. 789
In March 1940, when Sumner Welles visited officials in Italy, Germany, France and Britain, they told him that certain people forced these countries to engage in war rather than negotiate, which would have been a much more rational option. This is particularly true of Poland who received direct orders. Because of Poland’s actions, Germany had no choice but to attack in order to protect German nationals living there. One also has to consider the unjust terms of the Versailles Treaty, relative to Germany, in order to understand the entire situation. 790
The Soviets, with their 1939 non-aggression pact, had already won the war before it began. Marshal Georgy Zhukov recalled that Stalin was “convinced that the Pact would enable him to wrap Hitler around his little finger.” According to Khrushchev, Stalin believed, “We have tricked Hitler for the moment.” 791 Hitler’s armies were inferior to Stalin’s military forces, despite what court historians claim. Hitler’s only chance was a lightning war, a blitzkrieg. However, the Soviet Union stretched for ten thousand kilometers; it was almost an impossibility to consider. 792 On July 14, 1940, Moscow officials sent a telegram to their ambassadors in Japan and China which read, “We would agree to any treaty that brought about a collision between Japan and the United States.” The telegram also mentioned the Japanese-American War in addition to a continuing war in Europe. 793
By the summer of 1940, Hitler realized that others had manipulated him, and had already removed his troops from Germany’s eastern border in the spring of 1940. He had invaded Poland in 1939, bringing unexpected declarations of war against Germany. The only hope he had was to execute some extraordinary tactical moves. Germany’s location, situated between the Soviets and Britain was ill fated. He focused on the war with Britain and France. Stalin, the West’s ally, attempted to interrupt Germany’s source of oil while preparing for an attack on Germany. 794
Hitler sent Ribbentrop to negotiate a new treaty with Japan. On September 25, 1940, Ribbentrop informed Molotov that Italy, Germany, and Japan were about to sign a military alliance. Ribbentrop, trying to reassure Molotov, told him that they were directing the alliance towards those attempting to bring the United States into the war, and not the Soviet Union, which Molotov found very acceptable. German, Japanese and Italian officials signed the Tripartite Pact or Axis Pact on September 27, creating the Axis Powers, a ten-year agreement. Other countries joined the Tripartite Pact—Hungary (November 20), Romania (November 23), Slovakia (November 24), Bulgaria (March 1, 1941, before German troops arrived), Yugoslavia (March 25, 1941), and Croatia (June 15). On November 25, 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they would renew the Anti-Comintern Pact for another five years. Other countries then joined the Axis—Turkey, Denmark, Finland, and Manchukuo.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ensured the nonparticipation of the Soviet Union in a European War. It also separated Germany and Japan from creating a military alliance, which allowed Stalin to concentrate on Japan in the battles of Khalkhin Gol (May 11-September 16, 1939), part of a series of border conflicts between the Soviet Union and Japan beginning in 1932, which decimated the Japanese Sixth Army. As a result of the Japanese loss, on April 13, 1941, Japan would be compelled to sign the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, similar to the German-Soviet pact. On the evening of August 8, 1945, in per the Yalta agreements, of February 4, the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan, in violation of their neutrality pact. Just after midnight on August 9, the Soviet Union invaded Manchukuo.
Ambassador Joseph Grew learned about the secret Yalta boundary-changing agreements and warned the State Department. The numerous communists who now staffed the State Department immediately concealed his communications. He concluded that as soon as the Soviet Union entered the war, after the American bombing of Nagasaki, against Japan, that Japan, China and Korea would fall to communism. Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had also reformatted the map of Europe and decided the future of millions of people in Asia who were unaware of these decisions. 795
Major Erkki Hautamäki, a reservist in the Finnish army, author of Finland in the Eye of the Storm, evaluated many of the source materials and found information in File S-32, suppressed for fifty years. Even though the Soviet Union destroyed or sequestered that file in closed archives, Hautamäki had access to the material that Marshal Mannerheim and his trusted aide, Vilho Tahvanainen left to future generations. Hautamäki studied the documents in File S-32many times, covering the period from 1932 to 1949. Although the archives were incomplete, he began to seek other materials to flesh out the information such as Mannerheim’s private letters to his friends, colleagues and enemies in the Soviet Union. Hautamäki sent a team to Sweden while he traveled to the Soviet Union, Germany, and Estonia, where he bought documents and talked with people who had information unknown to researchers in Finland. 796
At the conclusion of World War II, the Americans shot down and obliterated the last plane to leave Berlin, the one carrying Hitler’s secret archives which probably contained copies of documents from File S-32. Bystanders remarked that his face turned ashen when someone informed him of this and he responded, “There went all the possibilities to witness that the things are otherwise than the winners will insist.” According to the stipulations of the peace treaty, Finland could not expose any of the details of File S-32. Officials also closed Churchill’s archives until 2017 or beyond, possibly dependent on world conditions then. In as much as Nuremberg constituted a military trial, officials prohibited Germans from presenting any of the Churchill-Stalin materials. The prosecutors knew nothing of this information and if they did, they no doubt would have concealed such exculpatory evidence. 797
As he was packing to leave Germany, Charles F. Wennerstrum, a judge at some of the trials, said, “If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never have come here.” Further, he said, “The victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt.” The prosecution selectively chose the evidence from captured records. “The defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case.” 798
Establishing Guilt: The Gleiwitz Incident
Udo Walendy refers to the operation as the “fairytale of the Gleiwitz radio station episode” which he says the propagandists concocted before anything took place. 799 People base their entire “story” of the false flag incident at Gleiwitz on the testimony of just one man, Alfred Naujocks, perpetuated by court historians such as William L. Shirer.
Alfred Naujocks
Gleiwitz had been part of Germany for two centuries. On March 20, 1921, via the Upper Silesia plebiscite, per the Versailles Treaty, Gleiwitz residents voted to remain in Germany rather than join Poland. During the civil war in Silesia (1921), Polish insurgents invaded Gleiwitz and attempted to starve the residents into surrendering. In 1930, the Gleiwitz radio station was broadcasting to the German minority in Poland while Polish radio stations countered with opposing views. The two nations settled their rhetorical battle with a treaty. Given the history of Gleiwitz and the two nation’s “mutual antagonism,” Gleiwitz was an a
ppropriate place to incite an assault. 800
Polish leaders “constantly” provoked and initiated any crisis “in every conceivable sphere,” whether in their foreign relations, their collaboration with France, the treatment of the minorities, or in their propaganda operations on radio and elsewhere. They were especially intent on discriminatory actions against the Germans in Danzig. 801 William C. Bullitt, FDR’s European operative, urged Polish authorities to harass Danzig’s Germans to ignite a reaction from Hitler. 802 Poland engaged in “frequent border violations,” and was “on stand-by for attack” against Germany. Polish military units competed to see who could demolish and/or confiscate Wehrmacht equipment just across the German border. Officials warned Ambassador Jozef Lipski not to negotiate. 803
On August 28, 1939, German officials at the Head Customs-House at Gleiwitz reported that, at about 10:45 p.m., Polish soldiers, using machine guns, fired on them. The Poles retreated after they encountered German border guards. On August 29, according to the Report of the Head Customs House at Gleiwitz, a Polish formation opened fire on German customs agents and frontier guards near Neubersteich. The Poles continued shooting until 1:15 a.m. The Poles attacked the Customs House at Neubersteich again on August 31 at 2 a.m. On the same evening, at about 8 p.m., a troop of “Polish Insurgents” attacked the German broadcasting Station at Gleiwitz and temporarily occupied it. German frontier police officers drove them off, fatally injuring one of the insurgents. 804 On the night of August 31-September 1, the Polish military assaulted the German town of Beuthen, apparently part of a “chain of events” that included the incident on the Gleiwitz transmitting station. 805
Historians, like Shirer, regularly accuse Hitler of starting World War II with a false flag attack, called Operation Himmler, against the German Radio station at Gleiwitz. Shirer wrote, “Early in August Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr Section of OKW, had received an order from Hitler himself to deliver to Himmler and Heydrich 150 Polish uniforms and some Polish small arms.” 806 Some notable past and present historians Leon Degrelle, Charles Tansill, Guido Preparata, John V. Denson, F. William Engdahl, Frederick Veale and Adolf Hitler, in his Table Talk, do not mention the Gleiwitz incident. Udo Walendy and David Hoggan barely mention it. David Irving, in Hitler’s War supports the Allied or Alfred Naujocks’s version of the event. 807 Jim Marrs, in The Rise of the Fourth Reich, supports Naujocks’s version. 808 The primary source for the Gleiwitz incident is Naujocks; there are no documents, or any other “evidence” except his story.
According to the media-popularized version, Germany, a nation that had never utilized such a tactic, initiated warfare with a false flag event. There were several other incidents along the border that night which many historians attribute to Germany. 809 They claim that several Germans, dressed like Poles, whatever that might entail, attacked the station and killed at least one person. Further, these court historians argue that Hitler referred to this attack the next morning during his speech before the Reichstag, in an attempt to justify his invasion of Poland later that morning.
German authorities allowed Poland’s Bank Ludowy (People’s Bank) to retain a branch in Gleiwitz. The bank’s personnel sought to foment a rebellion within the minority Polish community in West Upper Silesia hoping that the Polish military would cross into Germany. At the time of the incident, the bank employees fled into Poland, leaving the Gleiwitz residents thinking that the bank’s employees took over of the radio station. 810 The history-rewriting propagandists exploited and expanded what may have been a Polish-generated operation completely out of proportion and then attributed the event to Germany.
The next day, the Völkischer Beobachter published a story, Raiders attack Radio Gleiwitz. It reported that “A troop of Polish insurgents rushed last night, shortly before eight o’clock, the building of Gleiwitz Radio. At that time there was only the usual skeleton staff on duty; it is obvious that the Polish hoodlums must have had an exceptional knowledge of the lay-out of the place.” With few exceptions, newspapers ignored the whole incident during the war and only resurrected the story later, at the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal, to accuse Germany of using subterfuge as justification for the invasion of Poland. If Germany had orchestrated the event, they certainly would have exploited it during the war to get maximum benefit. Alternatively, if the Poles engineered the attack, then the Allies, who intended to place total blame on Germany, would conceal it until they could manipulate the details and impose their own perspective.
People accuse Hitler of using Gleiwitz for invading Poland. Yet, in his speech to the Reichstag the next morning, he defined the motives for the invasion, with no mention of Gleiwitz. In his speech, he referred to recent border incidents, not Gleiwitz specifically. He stated, “For the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory.” Hitler blames the fourteen border incidents on the previous night on the Poles, saying three of them were “quite serious.” Certainly, he would have been more emphatic if he were going to use these incidents to invade Poland. Further, the German News Agency or the Völkischer Beobachter made no mention of these incidents or the “Polish regular soldiers” on August 31. 811
Hitler’s justification for Germany’s invasion of Poland, according to his speech, was that Polish officials were unwilling to negotiate the issues regarding the German minority in the Corridor and in Danzig. On September 2, The Times, in London, reported the key points of Hitler’s speech yet failed to mention any attack on Gleiwitz but talked about Poland’s mobilization. The newspaper apparently felt that the numerous border incidents were insignificant. 812 People may read Hitler’s speech online to understand Germany’s view of Bolshevism and of the Versailles Treaty. 813 The architects of the treaty intended to permanently deindustrialize, demilitarize and decrease Germany’s size. Their treaty carved Germany into two parts and awarded Poland the area they called the Polish Corridor and Danzig. That treaty placed over one million Germans under Polish jurisdiction in Danzig as well as those who lived in the former Russian and Austrian areas of Poland, which now had control of the customs and the river and railway systems.
The situation for German minorities in Poland deteriorated. By August 1939, 70,000 German refugees were in “holding camps” along the border and Polish authorities were demanding that all Germans had to leave Poland. 814 After twenty years of irreconcilable differences and with no other options after years of attempted negotiations, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The treaty, Article 93, the Minorities Protection Treaty, stipulated that Poland was to grant minority rights to the Germans. Instead, they violently persecuted and discriminated against them, boycotted them, attempted to economically destabilize them in addition to challenging the legitimacy of their institutions such as schools and churches. By 1934, Polish officials had totally abandoned any semblance of abiding by the Minorities Protection Treaty. 815
Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador to Germany (1937-1939) understood that Hitler and other German leaders sought friendship with Britain and conveyed that fact to Lord Halifax. Göring discussed some of the principal provocations that led to the eruption of the German-Polish war but omitted any reference to the Gleiwitz incident. According to David Hoggan, the Nuremberg prosecutors unsuccessfully attempted to use the Gleiwitz episode against key German leaders to shift the war blame away from Poland and onto Germany. 816
Otto Strasser, after his expulsion from the NSDAP in 1930, had formed the Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists, known as the Black Front, to oppose the NSDAP. Thereafter, Strasser went to Czechoslovakia where he met and recruited Rudolf Formis, a radio pioneer. Together, they set up an Anti-Nazi radio station in the Hotel Záhoří, near Slapy, Czechoslovakia. On January 23, 1935, Alfred Naujocks led an undercover attack on that radio station during which Formis died. In 1941, his superiors dismissed Naujocks from the SD, considered a Gestapo subsidiary, after he disputed one of Reinhard Heydrich’s orders. They demoted him and he then went to
the eastern front with the Waffen-SS. Presumably, Naujocks harbored resentment towards Heydrich. Two British-trained agents of the exiled Czechoslovakian government, Jan Kubiš and Joze Gabčík headed the team that assassinated Heydrich who died on June 4, 1942. Ernst Kaltenbrunner then became Chief of the Reich Main Security Office.
On October 19, 1944, Naujocks surrendered or perhaps deserted to the American forces. While in custody, Naujocks told the Americans about the incident in 1935 involving Formis and his death. The British Secret Service questioned him at Latchmere House. He stated that, on or about August 10, 1939, Heydrich ordered him to “simulate an attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border” and, commanding a small group of SS (never named), to make it look like a bunch of Poles had perpetrated the attack. He implied that this was not a SD-approved operation. No official records substantiate his claims. Naujocks, via his affidavit, would provide everything that the Nuremberg judges knew about the event. 817 818
Naujocks states that Heydrich called him on noon on August 31, and gave him the code word for the operation. Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo’s operations chief, was to deliver an unconscious, bloodied wounded man, dressed in civilian clothes, to the radio station. Naujocks then stated that he and his men were to broadcast for three to four minutes via the emergency transmitter, fire a few shots, and then leave the station. Naujocks does not say how the “raiders” were dressed. A British historian, Michael Burleigh, claimed that the SS men, the attackers, had Polish-style moustaches and sideburns.
The Ruling Elite Page 29