First to Fight Read online

  Others were on hand to give help and advice as I travelled across Poland to visit archives, museums and the sites where the events I was describing took place, such as Mokra, Wizna, the Bzura battlefields or Mława. They include Krzysztof Mroczkowski and Jakub Link-Lenczowski at the Muzeum Lotnictwa Polskiego in Kraków, Katarzyna Tomiczek of the Ośrodek Promocji Gminy Węgierska Górka, Emil Makles of the Izba Pamięci Bitwy pod Mokrą, Kazimierz Śwircz at the Muzeum Bitwy nad Bzurą in Kutno, Marcin Sochoń and Dariusz Szymanowski of the Stowarzyszenie ‘Wizna 1939’, Ludwik Zalewski in Nowogród, Wojciech Śleszyński and Łukasz Radulski in Białystok, Katarzyna Myszkowska and Krzysztof Bojarczuk in Sulejów, Andrzej Jarczewski and Mikołaj Ratka at the Radiostacja Gliwice in Gliwice, Tomasz Chinciński at the Muzeum II Wojny Światowej in Gdańsk, Karol Szejko at the Muzeum Westerplatte i Wojny 1939 r. in Gdańsk, Marek Adamkowicz at the Muzeum Poczty Polskiej in Gdańsk, Jan Tymiński and Jacek Waryszak at the Muzeum Marynarki Wojennej in Gdynia, Radosław Wiecki in Tczew, Wojciech Krajewski and Janusz Wesołowski at the Muzeum Wojska Polskiego in Warsaw, Władysław Szarski at the Muzeum Obrony Wybrzeża on Hel, Marcin Owsiński at the Muzeum Stutthof in Sztutowo and Jacek Wilamowski and Katarzyna Skorupa-Malińska at the Muzeum Ziemi Zawkrzeńskiej in Mława.

  In addition, a few people generously gave their linguistic or research help, including Olivia Bailey, Jess Bennett, Will Hobden, Bartek Pietrzyk, Philipp Rauh, Saskia Smellie, Alex Standen, Lyuba Vinogradova, Axel von Wittenberg and Jadwiga Kowalska at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London. Thanks, too, to Bill Donohoe for the cartography. My agent, Georgina Capel, was as stoic and supportive as a writer could wish, notwithstanding the myriad crises that I inflicted upon her. My UK editor, Jörg Hensgen, was similarly brilliant, as insightful and deft of editorial touch as ever. Special thanks must also go to my outrageously gifted and indefatigable research assistant Anastazja Pindor, without whom this book would scarcely have been possible. For everything else, I must thank my wife Melissa, and my children Oscar and Amelia, and their daily reminders of what really matters.

  Lastly, I would like to dedicate this book to someone whose passion for the subject inspired my interest in Polish history nearly three decades ago – my former professor, co-author and most esteemed colleague, Norman Davies.

  Tring, 2019

  PROLOGUE

  An Unremarkable Man

  There is only one surviving picture of Franciszek Honiok. It was taken for a family occasion, perhaps, or a court visit and shows him in a suit and tie, his dark blond hair beginning to recede at the temples, his pale eyes betraying a determined look. At 158 cm (5 feet 2 inches), he was a little shorter than average, and possessed of a slightly dishevelled air, but other than that he was very ordinary, almost entirely unremarkable. Perhaps that was what determined his fate.

  As the 41-year-old bachelor was escorted away that day, it was said that he looked bewildered, doubtless wondering about the reason he had been picked up, but did not say a word.1 He had most likely been selected from a file in Gestapo headquarters, far away on Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin, where an ethnic Pole with a history of anti-German agitation was urgently required for an undisclosed purpose. If anything, Honiok was rather too well qualified. Born in the German province of Upper Silesia in 1898, he had fought on the Polish side during the Silesian Uprisings that had followed the First World War. After a brief spell living in Poland, he then returned to Germany in 1925, whereupon he was forced to fight deportation back to Poland: a case which he successfully pursued all the way to the League of Nations in Geneva. Though his firebrand days were perhaps over by 1939, Honiok was still well known in his home village of Hohenlieben (Łubie) as a staunch advocate of the Polish cause.

  As he was taken away on the afternoon of 30 August 1939, Honiok had little idea of what his Gestapo captors had in store for him. He was driven first to the barracks at Beuthen (Bytom), where he was given food and water, and then to the Gestapo headquarters at Oppeln (Opole), where he spent an uncomfortable night locked in a file room. Throughout, his captors noted, he was ‘apathetic, his head constantly bowed’.2 He never spoke, and no one spoke to him except for a few words of instruction from his Gestapo escort. Moreover, despite the German obsession with paperwork, he was not registered in any of the locations through which he passed; his guards were under orders that he was to remain anonymous.3 The following morning, 31 August, Honiok was taken to the police station at Gleiwitz (Gliwice), where he was placed in solitary confinement, again with no records taken.4 It would be the last day of his life.

  Later that afternoon, across town in the Haus Oberschlesien Hotel, SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Helmut Naujocks delivered a final briefing to his team of six SS and policemen. Naujocks – a 27-year-old from Kiel on Germany’s Baltic coast – had been an early convert to Nazism, joining the SS in 1931, after briefly attending university and having his nose broken by a Communist with an iron bar. Described by one contemporary as ‘an intellectual gangster’,5 he swiftly fell under the patronage of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the German police network and one of the darkest figures in the Nazi hierarchy. It was on Heydrich’s instruction that Naujocks and his team had arrived in Gleiwitz two days earlier, posing as mining engineers. Their real task, however, was to engineer a ‘false flag’ operation: to make it look as though Polish irregulars had attacked German territory.

  Tensions between Germany and Poland – which had been strained at best for some two decades – had spiked over the preceding few months. The ostensible reason for the froideur were Germany’s territorial losses to Poland from the Versailles Treaty – primarily Upper Silesia, Posen and the so-called Polish Corridor – all of which had been viewed as a profound humiliation in Germany and had contributed to a gradual poisoning of German–Polish relations. Hitler’s ire, however, went deeper, stoked by his racial prejudices and his belief that Germany’s national destiny lay in expansion to the east. As he had become more reckless in his sabre-rattling, eager to capitalise on what he saw as Western weakness and anxious for the war that he thought would define him and his ‘Third Reich’, Hitler had begun to target Poland more specifically, ramping up the rhetoric and complaining vociferously of Polish barbarism and bad faith.

  By the summer of 1939, therefore, territorial concessions by the Poles – even had they been offered – would no longer be enough: Hitler wanted his war. He faced two problems, however. For one thing, Poland had allies in Britain and France, both of whom had pledged to stand by that nation in the event of foreign aggression. For another, the vast majority of the German people, though they supported the Nazis wholeheartedly, had no stomach for another world war. Hitler, then, had to dress up his belligerent intentions to make them appear defensive: he needed to show Poland as the aggressor and Germany as the innocent victim. In this way, he reasoned, the German people might be persuaded to support the war, and Poland might even be detached from its international alliances. Hitler summed up his attitude in a speech to his senior military commanders at his Alpine residence near Berchtesgaden on 22 August. ‘The destruction of Poland has priority,’ he said, adding that ‘the aim is to eliminate active forces, not to reach a definite line. Even if war breaks out in the West, the destruction of Poland remains the primary objective.’ When it came to public opinion, he assured the commanders: ‘I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth.’6

  That summer, the world saw much of Hitler’s propaganda offensive. Though the SS took the lead, German military intelligence, the Abwehr, also involved itself in the task of undermining Poland. In the last week of August, it engineered a spate of incidents across the country, which were often intended to look as though they were inspired by anti-German sentiment: a bomb attack was carried out on a war memorial in Cieszyn, another targeted a German book shop in Poznań, yet another damaged a railway bridge in Nowy Sącz.7

  Its most inf
amous operation took place on the night of 28 August, when one of its agents – an unemployed metalworker of German extraction by the name of Antoni Guzy – left a large bomb, contained in two suitcases, in the left-luggage hall of Tarnów railway station, in the south of the country. When the bomb exploded shortly after 11 p.m., it destroyed a section of the station building and killed twenty-four people, including a two-year-old girl.8 Guzy was arrested at the scene, and under interrogation he provided investigators with chapter and verse on the subversive methods of the Abwehr. He explained that he had been recruited via a German trade union organisation and had received cursory training in Germany before being assigned to a cell operating out of the town of Skoczów in southern Poland. After receiving his orders in a coded message broadcast by Radio Breslau (Wrocław), he had travelled from Bielsko first to Kraków, where he had collected the cases, and then on to Tarnów, where he had deposited them in the left-luggage hall. Guzy, who claimed not to have known that the cases contained explosives, told his interrogators that he had done what he did because he ‘felt German’.9

  Guzy was little more than a pawn, but his interrogation would have made it clear to the Poles – if they were not aware of it already – that the Abwehr was behind the attacks. What was less clear was the precise motivation: the bombing in Tarnów had little discernible military rationale, beyond a wanton destruction of Polish infrastructure – and Guzy gave no hint of a wider goal or plan. It seemed most likely that his masters intended to provoke some sort of retaliation by the Poles against the German minority, thereby adding weight to Hitler’s propaganda narrative of ethnic persecution and perhaps providing him with grounds for a military intervention.10

  While the Abwehr recklessly blundered, and Hitler railed about Polish intransigence, the agents of the SS were silently working to drive relations between Berlin and Warsaw to breaking point. Already that summer, Heydrich had ordered that all ‘politically unreliable elements’ were to be removed from a prohibited area along the German side of the Polish frontier.11 Within that zone, isolated properties, barns and farmsteads were identified and earmarked for arson attacks, which could then be blamed on the Poles.12 Through the summer of 1939, therefore, German newspapers carried countless lurid reports on what they called ‘Polish Terror’, complaining of ‘Polish bandits’, ‘growing nervousness’ and the ‘frightful suffering of German refugees’. By the end of August, they would claim that some sixty-six Germans had been murdered.13

  At the same time as the German media was busy slandering the Poles, a training centre was established at Bernau, north of Berlin, at which over 300 SS volunteers, mostly from Upper Silesia, were prepared for infiltration operations against Poland. They were trained using Polish weapons and uniforms, and taught the essentials of the Polish language. By late August, they were ready for action and on the night of the 31st were deployed in ‘raids’ on the German customs post at Hochlinden (Stodoły), near Rybnik, and the foresters’ lodge near Pitschen (Byczyna).14 By smashing windows, firing into the air and singing and swearing in broken Polish, they were to simulate border incursions by Polish forces.15 Were it not for the bodies of six concentration camp inmates, who were dressed in Polish uniforms and then shot and left at Hochlinden to add bloody authenticity to the scene, it would all have been rather comical.

  Given the orgy of murderous pretence that the Germans engineered on the eve of the war, it is perhaps understandable that generations of historians have persistently got the story of the Gleiwitz Incident wrong; conflating it with other actions – such as Hochlinden – and speaking erroneously of assailants in Polish uniforms and of multiple Polish victims. Such misconceptions, persistent though they are, are cured by referring to the original sources, which clearly show that the assailants at Gleiwitz were not in uniform, and that there was only one victim.

  Beyond that correction, the action held another special significance. By accident or design, it was only there that the attackers – posing, of course, as Polish insurgents – were required to speak, to give voice to their ‘mission’ and broadcast their intentions to the wider world. To this end, Naujocks believed that he had developed the perfect plan. From his earlier reconnaissance, he had identified the Gleiwitz radio transmitting station, with its 111-metre wooden tower, as an ideal target. He and his men could easily take control of the site, lock up the station staff, fire a few shots into the ceiling and broadcast an incendiary message in Polish over the airwaves before fleeing into the darkness. He had concluded that 8.00 p.m. would be the best time for the assault, reckoning that his men would be aided by the cover of dusk. It would also be a time when most people would be at home listening to their radios.16

  Initially, Naujocks’ plan for Gleiwitz was to go ahead without bloodshed. But, his superiors decided that the attack required the addition of a clinching piece of evidence. Naujocks was informed by the head of the Gestapo himself, Heinrich Müller, that a Pole would be supplied whose bloodied corpse was to be left at the radio station as irrefutable ‘proof’ of Polish responsibility for the attack.17 For this reason, it was not enough to use one of the concentration camp inmates killed at Hochlinden; it had to be someone with a proven history of anti-German agitation. This, then, was the fate that the SS had in store for Franciszek Honiok.

  So, while Honiok spent his final hours in Gleiwitz police station, Naujocks waited in his hotel room to receive the code words that would launch his mission. At 4 p.m., the phone rang and, on answering, Naujocks heard Heydrich’s nasal, high-pitched voice demanding that he call back immediately. On doing so, he heard Heydrich give the code: ‘Grossmutter gestorben’ (Grandmother has died).18 With that, he called his men together for a final briefing, reiterating their objectives and respective tasks. Later, he and his men changed into their scruffy, civilian clothes and climbed into two cars for the short journey north-east to the transmitter station. Arriving precisely at 8 p.m., as planned, and with dusk rapidly falling, they rushed into the building. Pushing past the station manager, who rose to meet them, Naujocks’ men overpowered the staff before taking them to the basement, where they were ordered to face the wall as their hands were tied behind their backs. Naujocks and his radio technician, meanwhile, were trying to work out how to make their incendiary broadcast.

  One of the problems that Naujocks had needed to solve in his planning was ensuring that the proclamation would be heard. He had considered targeting the main radio station in Gleiwitz – a much larger facility closer to the city centre – but had decided against it, not only because of the logistical challenge, but also because of the likelihood that its broadcasts would be cut off by the transmitter station. Consequently, he decided to stage his attack on the transmitter station itself, where there was only a ‘storm microphone’ – used to interrupt local programmes to warn of extreme weather – but also a much-reduced possibility that the broadcast would be monitored and interrupted.19

  Having dealt with the station staff, Naujocks now had to locate the storm microphone and work out how to patch it into the main broadcast. Finding the microphone in a cupboard, but unable to connect it, he hauled the staff from the basement at gunpoint, one by one, until one of them obliged and told him what to do.20 With that, the group’s Polish speaker, Karl Hornack, pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and stepped forward. As a pistol was fired into the air to provide an appropriately martial atmosphere, he read:

  UWAGA! TU GLIWICE! RADIOSTACJA ZNAJDUJE SIĘ W POLSKICH RĘKACH!21 (Attention! Here is Gleiwitz! The radio station is in Polish hands!)

  What followed was supposed to be a call to arms from a fictional ‘Polish Freedom Committee’, demanding that the Polish population in Germany rise up to resist the authorities and conduct sabotage operations, and promising that the Polish army would soon march in as a liberator.22 However, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, only the first nine words were broadcast, and those were only audible in the district of Gleiwitz itself; the remainder was lost in a cacophony o
f static. Heydrich, listening in Berlin, heard nothing at all.23

  While Naujocks had been busying himself with his broadcast, Franciszek Honiok was delivered to the building. Shortly before 8 p.m., he had been visited in his cell in Gleiwitz police station by an SS man in a white coat, purporting to be a doctor, who had given him an injection.24 Unconscious, he was then driven the short distance to the transmitter station, where two of Naujocks’ men carried him into the building, laying him down close to the rear entrance. It is not clear who shot Honiok, or precisely when he was killed, but as Naujocks left the radio station, he stopped briefly to examine the dead man, slumped close to the door, his face smeared with his own blood. He would maintain, to his death in 1966, that neither he nor his men had shot Franciszek Honiok. He knew nothing about the man, Naujocks told prosecutors, not even his name: ‘I was not responsible for him,’ he said.25

  So, with barely a thought, Franciszek Honiok was murdered to provide the gloss on Heydrich’s nefarious propaganda coup. He was expendable, disposable, anonymous; collateral damage in Nazi Germany’s headlong drive to war. He would become a footnote to history, his murder demonstrating the sneering contemptuous brutality of the Nazi regime, and giving a grim foretaste of the fate that would befall Poland. His was a single death that prefaced at least fifty million others; an individual tragedy presaging a collective slaughter.

  It didn’t matter that the ruse to which Honiok’s body had given spurious credence failed: the German media were already primed and ready to run the story regardless. Within hours the radios were blaring and the newspaper presses were rolling, bearing banner headlines about the Polish ‘attack’ on Gleiwitz and the inevitability of a German response.26 By the time most Germans heard or read those words, the following morning, Hitler’s tanks were already advancing into Poland. The Second World War had begun.