Broken barometer for sale.
No pressure.
*.*
Son: “Mom, can I have $20?”
Mom: “Does it look like I am made of money?”
Son: “Isn't that what M-O-M stands for?”
*.*
My 5-year-old nephew, Felix, wanted to caddy for my brother's golf game.
"You have to count my strokes," my brother told him. "How much is six plus nine plus eight?"
"Five," answered Felix.
"Okay," my brother said, "let's go."
*.*
Progresso has introduced soup-flavored lollipops called "Soup Drops."
Or as the guys in the development lab like to call them, "Suckers!"
*.*
It takes 42 muscles in the human body to make a frown.
Basically, my morning exercise routine.
Quote of the Times;
“It’s rapidly becoming abundantly clear why every civilized society for thousands of years didn’t tolerate sexual deviants of any kind.” - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
As if I hadn't fried my brain with pizzagate:
https://www.x.com/DiscoOrpheus/status/1971637319472955796
Issue of the Times;
Gleiwitz - The False Flag That Never Was by Gerhard Grasruck
The Gleiwitz incident on 31. August 1939 on the eve of the German offensive against Poland is a key propagandistic trope supposed to show German responsibility for the start of World War 2. Allegedly, the brief occupation of the radio transmitter in Gleiwitz by Polish insurgents was in reality a ‘false flag’ set up by the Germans to justify the invasion of Poland.
First, it has to be pointed out that the notoriety of the Gleiwitz incident is purely a post World War 2 phenomenon. At the time, it received little attention and any mention in the press was only a short blip that was almost instantly displaced by war events. Which, of course, is just what you would expect – which begs the question of why you would time such an operation literally only hours before the start of the war it is supposed to sell instead of leaving some time to propagandistically exploit it? This even more so as the start of the war was initially planned for 26. August and only was delayed on short notice because of a last diplomatic effort to avoid war.
The Gleiwitz incident most certainly played no noticeable part in the German justification for going to war against Poland. For instance, Hitler did not mention it at all in his Reichstag speech on 1. September 1939;[1] in the Whitebook published by the German Foreign Ministry about the prehistory of the war, Gleiwitz is only mentioned in a few lines in a list of violent incidents instigated by Polish troops and insurgents in the week before the start of the war.[2]
There has never been any documentary evidence presented that would indicate that the Gleiwitz raid – or any of the other border incidents in the time before the war – was a German ‘false flag’. Which seems quite peculiar, since obviously such operations could not be carried out without authorization from the highest echelons and it seems quite inconceivable that this would not leave any documentary trace. Essentially the only evidence is the testimony of Alfred Naujocks, a member of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) secret service who had defected to the Allies on 19. October 1944 in Belgium and later declared at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg to have directed the supposed ‘false flag’ action in Gleiwitz.
Fortunately, much of the relevant paper trail – in particular the protocols of Naujocks allied interrogators as well as the files of West German public prosecutors – is now publicly available, so we can trace the evolution of the Gleiwitz ‘false flag’ narrative and check it for consistency, both internally and with reality. However, before judging the evidence for the alleged ‘false flag’, it is useful as a first step to ascertain as exactly as possible the sequence of events on that day.
There was a brief report by the news agency Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, dispatched when interrogations of the Gleiwitz transmitter personnel by the police were still going on, that was reproduced in many German newspapers on 1. September 1939.[3]
According to this report, a group of Polish insurgents intruded into the building of the Gleiwitz transmitter facility shortly after 8 pm. There was only a small security force in the building, since the Gleiwitz facility had no program of its own, but merely relayed the broadcasts of the Breslau radio station. They knocked down the guard and immediately stormed into the broadcasting room. The small number of broadcasting staff present there were also beaten to the ground with steel rods and clubs. They then cut off the Breslau station, and, using a hand–held microphone they had brought with them, read out a prepared statement, partly in Polish and partly also in German. The insurgents announced themselves as the “Polish Volunteer Corps of Upper Silesian Insurgents” and declared that the town and transmitter of Gleiwitz were in Polish hands, adding anti–German diatribes and spoke of a Polish Breslau and a Polish Danzig. Alerted by radio listeners, the Gleiwitz police arrived on the scene on short notice, sealed off the building, forced their way into the broadcasting room and switched off the transmitter. There was a brief firefight with the insurgents in which one of them was killed and the rest arrested. Another insurgent, who had been left behind as a guard, was arrested in front of the building.
As already said, there was no further reporting on the Gleiwitz incident after the start of the war.[4] Under these circumstances, the logical place to look for more information would normally be the files of the German police and other authorities concerned with the incident (In particular the Reichspost, which operated the Gleiwitz facility). There is one such document, a short report of the events to the Reichspost authorities that was communicated by the superintendent of the Gleiwitz facility via telephone on 9.40 pm the same day while police interrogations were still in progress:[5]
At 7.40 pm, 8 Polish insurgents intruded into the transmitter building via the machine room. They overpowered and tied up the staff present – the machine operator, the operations officer and an officer of the auxiliary police (The auxiliary police was responsible for the protection of the transmitter, having taken over from the Postschutz). All three were locked up in the cellar room. They then demanded from the operations officer to hand over and to connect the emergency microphone, which is used for announcements in case of a thunderstorm. The official, named Nawroth, refused to do so. During the discussion with Nawroth, one of the insurgents appeared with the microphone, which he had found in the cupboard where it was kept. The insurgents then connected the microphone themselves to the amplifier and made their speech as follows: “Attention! Attention! This is the Polish Insurgents Unit. The Gleiwitz radio station is in our hands. The hour of freedom has arrived.” A transmitter staff member (mechanic) living in the residential building next to the transmitter heard this announcement and immediately ran over to the transmitter building to see what was going on there. There he was threatened by the insurgents with their pistols. He fled back into the apartment and from there informed the police and the head of the telephone office in Gleiwitz. At 8.20 p.m., the riot squad appeared on the scene, surprising the insurgents, which took flight. One of the insurgents was shot dead.
Other than this short report, there is a strange silence regarding actual contemporary official documents in the files, there is no mention of such even in a negative sense i.e. that they cannot be found or have been destroyed. The closest are interviews and statements by people that were ins some way involved in the reaction to the attack, done many years after the event.
The most detailed of such accounts is by Erich Nittritz, who was operation manager of the Gleiwitz facility until June 1939 when he was transferred to Oppeln.[6]
His wife still lived at the Gleiwitz facility at the time of the attack and he returned there on weekends. He says that he was phoned both by his wife as well as his successor Klose in the same night after the attack happened. Two days later on the following weekend he had another talk in person with Klose as well as two other employees at the Gleiwitz transmitter, Kotz and Foitzik. He also received information about the event in several meetings he had in his position as an administrative official in the Reichspost. In 1949 he wrote down an essay about the radio system of Upper Silesia, which contained an account of what he had been told about the Gleiwitz raid:
At around 7 p.m., the operations officer on duty, TWF (Telegrafenwerkführer) Nawroth, was in the station’s operation room when the security guard supervisor came to him to find out about the local conditions (He and his three men had been newly assigned to the Gleiwitz facility, replacing another security team). Later, the machine operator on duty, TLA (Telegrafenleitungsaufseher) Kotz, and the caretaker and antenna maintenance technician, Pfa (Postfacharbeiter) Foitzik, arrived in the operation room in anticipation of the news program.
Shortly before 8 pm, five men in civilian clothes entered the machine room and came up the stairs to the operation room, when they were noticed by Foitzik. He opened the door and asked the strangers what they wanted. They answered: ‘Hands up!’ and threatened them with pistols. The intruders tied the hands of the entire staff and the security guard behind their backs with a thin cord; they then took their prisoners through the machine room into the cellar. One of the men acted as guard with his pistol drawn. Another man then brought Nawroth back upstairs. He was requested to explain the technical equipment and how to connect a microphone, but he (according to his own account) steadfastly refused to do so, even though they beat him and threatened him with their pistols. He claimed that the input to the transmitter could only be supplied via the external line. Next came Kotz and then Foitzik, who were also beaten. Both stated that as a machine operator and caretaker respectively, they knew nothing about operating the transmitter. When Nawroth was brought back into the broadcasting room a second time, the intruders had just found the emergency microphone (Used to announce when the antenna had to be disconnected and grounded because of a thunderstorm), which was kept in the equipment cupboard. Nawroth still vigorously denied that he knew how to connect the microphone, and he was chased back into the cellar with kicks and punches. Nevertheless, the intruders managed to connect the microphone and read their statement.
The interruption when switching off the modulation line from the transmitter amplifier was noticed in the amplifier office; in response to a phone call about this, one of the intruders briefly replied ‘interruption’ before hanging up again. Mrs. Klose, the wife of the operations manager, who was listening to the news, also noticed crackling noises. She told her husband that ‘nonsense was being made’ in the broadcasting room. Klose immediately went over to the transmitter building. He entered through the south entrance, but when he noticed the strange men, one of whom immediately threatened him with a gun, he quickly ran back to his flat, slamming the door behind him. From here he alerted the police and informed the head of the telephone exchange. The intruders ended their speech, hurriedly left the station through the open entrance gate and drove off in a waiting car. It seems that in their haste they forgot about the guard who was watching over the staff in the basement.
A member of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), who was passing by on Tarnowitzer Straße, found the behaviour of the people storming out of the transmitter building conspicuous. He ran onto the site, entered the transmitter building and in the machine room came across the guard who had left his post after noticing that his comrades had disappeared. The SD man asked him to put his hands up and when he didn’t follow this order, he shot him.
After the guard had left, Kotz did break away from the other prisoners and ran out of the building through the other exit and into the operations manager’s flat. He told him that the intruders had disappeared. Klose immediately ran to the operations room and met the SD man, who threatened him with his pistol. The operations manager identified himself and the other prisoners were now freed from their shackles and everybody gathered in the operations room. The arriving police immediately started to question the attendants; Two of the guards had been patrolling the grounds and had not noticed the incident, the third one had remained in the guard room. A proposal by Klose to reconnect the signal was rejected and so the transmitter only resumed regular operations when the interrogations had been finished at about 11 pm. The day after, on 1.9.1939 there was another interrogation of the Gleiwitz transmitter workforce by the leader of the Postschutz, Heinrich Kersten, on behalf of the RPD (Reichspostdirektion) Oppeln.
Foitzik died in 1940 because of a thrombosis, Kotz of anemia in 1945 and Klose, who as a Sonderführer was heading a radio station in Italy, was killed by partisans, also in 1945. Nawroth was last seen in Neiße in February 1945. There are rumors that he might have been still alive and living (as of 1968) in Gleiwitz or Kattowitz.
In the files of West German public prosecutors you can also find a large number of interviews with police officers and other persons that had some connection to the event, carried out both by the prosecutors themselves as well as by historian Jürgen Runzheimer. In general, their statements are consistent with the reconstruction by Nittritz, even though, as will be no surprise to anyone familiar with such accounts, there is a fair share of contradictions and outright weirdness, clearly demonstrating why such testimonies have to be taken with caution.
For instance, there is a chief commissioner Egon Noack, that claimed to have been socially acquainted with Alfred Naujocks during his stay in Gleiwitz and that Naujocks had no qualms about telling him about his planned top–secret mission. He really spoils his story when he recounts how emotionally moved he was when he heard Hitler in his 1. September 1939 Reichstag speech denouncing the Gleiwitz attack as a heinous Polish violation that he, Noack, knew to be fake. In reality of course, as already mentioned, Hitler did not bring up the Gleiwitz raid at all in his speech.[7]
An even more egregious example is Wilhelm Hetzer, who had issued a complaint that accused a former colleague of having participated in the Gleiwitz attack (He previously had accused him of various other crimes, for instance being a concentration camp guard mistreating prisoners). Even though Hetzer was clearly mentally ill, the prosecutors happily went along, until the fact that the accused had only been 13 years old at the time of the Gleiwitz incident at last was too obvious even for them.[8]
This should be enough orientation to take a closer look on the claims of Alfred Naujocks. A good starting point is the so–called Liquidation Report on Naujocks dated 14.1.1945 that was written in the interrogation center Camp 020 in London (The term ‘liquidation’ here simply means that this report was supposed to be a concluding summarization of earlier interrogations – it is not a code word for killings, as would be undoubtedly suspected if the term were to appear in a German document).[9]
Naujocks alleges that there was a scheme to kill concentration camp prisoners by giving them lethal injections, dress them up in Polish uniforms, and, after riddling these bodies with bullets, place them around German villages near the border with Poland as fake evidence of Polish incursions. He gives no explanation what sense it could possibly make to first kill the prisoners with injections and then shooting them. The dead bodies were transported to their intended deposition places in packing cases labeled „Canned Goods“.
As for Naujocks own part in the scheme, though his description of the Gleiwitz operation is very brief, he nevertheless manages to insert several massive errors: He claims that he and his subordinates took over the microphone to read out their message after storming the radio building. The problem is, of course, that the Gleiwitz installation was not a real radio station, but merely a transmitter that served to propagate the signal of the Breslau radio station. So there was simply no studio with microphones to take over.
But there is an even more egregious error: Naujocks claimed to have been told about the staged border incidents and received instructions for the Gleiwitz operation from Reinhardt Heydrich in Berlin on 10. August. He then immediately went to Gleiwitz and carried out the operation. After that he waited there for more than two weeks before he was called back to Berlin and it is still a few days before the war starts! That Naujocks made this massive timeline error and that no one noticed it, is really a testament of how little, contrary to the postwar depiction, the Gleiwitz incident was propagandized by the Germans.
This „Liquidation Report“ in somewhat shortened form is reproduced in two documents from 12.4.1945 and 1.5.1945.[10][11] They bear a note that the statements by Naujocks in regard to the Gleiwitz operation had been „confirmed“ by the Polish Government. This seems to be referring to the London based Polish Government in Exile, that was responsible for a lot of Anti–German atrocity propaganda like „The Black Book of Poland“.
On 31. March 1945 Naujocks was interrogated by Czech representatives. This concerned his first major operation in service with the SD in 1935, which had targeted Rudolf Formis – an engineer associated with Nazi renegade Otto Strasser – who had operated an illegal opposition radio transmitter from Czechoslovakia. Naujocks together with a partner, Werner Göttsch, were to destroy the transmitter and, if possible, kidnap Formis and bring him back to Germany. It came to a shootout, in which Formis was killed and Naujocks was wounded. Naujocks and Göttsch managed to escape back to Germany.
However, the Polish Border incidents were also mentioned.[12] In contrast to the Liquidation Report Naujocks here claims that not only he knew about, but was actually in charge of organizing the other frontier incidents besides Gleiwitz. Also, the hapless victims laid out were now supposed to be dressed in German instead of Polish uniforms.
According to another protocol[13] from 2. April 1945 with additional questioning of Naujocks he now adds a visit to Herbert Mehlhorn, an SD official, at the Gleiwitz barracks. Mehlhorn is supposed to be in charge of organizing ‘false flag’ actions in the Gleiwitz area. Also, Heinrich Müller (“Gestapo–Müller”) is introduced to be as coordinating the operations from Oppeln. The ignorance of Naujocks and his interrogators about when the Gleiwitz incident actually took place is here really rubbed in – Naujocks explains the reason that he stayed in Gleiwitz for two weeks after having carried out his mission with "the failure of the plot to provoke immediate conflict“.
On 12. October 1945 Naujocks is interrogated at the IMT at Nuremberg.[14] Here Naujocks is finally for the first time aware of the correct date for the Gleiwitz attack and that the Gleiwitz installation was only a transmitter. So it must be some time between 1. May 1945 and 12. October 1945 that someone finally bothered to look up this obscure Gleiwitz event – an obscurity that is again demonstrated when the American interrogator, Col. Brundage, when told about it, at first assumes that the raid was only planned, but never executed.
Naujocks now no longer claims to have met Mehlhorn at the Gleiwitz Barracks. Instead, he visits Müller in Oppeln and overhears a discussion between Mehlhorn and Müller there. However, he is not quite sure that the person Müller was talking with was really Mehlhorn. This seems to be motivated by a desire of Naujocks to exclude any identifiable witnesses who might contradict his narrative. In particular, he asserts that his organisation had nothing to do with the Gleiwitz operation and that it was organised solely by Heydrich (Who had been assassinated in 1942) and Müller (Who had disappeared at the end of the war, likely killed during the final battle for Berlin). Mehlhorn however was still alive (He died in 1968) and could have potentially contradicted Naujocks story.
It is from overhearing the discussion between Müller and Mehlhorn that he now claims to know about the other staged ‘false flag’ incident (It is now down again to a single incident from multiple ones). He claims that he can’t recall the name of the place where the border incident was supposed to take place, but declares confidently, that he will immediately “remember” it, when told a name. Brundage obliges, and mentions a claim about a ‘false flag’ in a place called Hohenlinden on 30. August 1939 and Naujocks eagerly snaps this up. Ironically, Naujocks then immediately goes on to point out apparent errors in this story. It is not clear what this might refer to. There is a newspaper note about an incident in the village of Hochlinden (northeast of Ratibor) on August 31.[15]
Naujocks then proposes a similar guessing game with the name of the doctor that administered the deadly injections, but it seems Brundage had no story available and so the evil Nazi doctor remained nameless. The packing cases labeled “Canned Goods” for transporting the bodies disappear from the narrative – instead “Canned Goods” is now supposed to be a code word for the bodies.
In another interrogation document from 2. November 1945 it is mentioned that Naujocks had already signed an affidavit concerning the Gleiwitz incident.[16] However, the actual affidavit deposited at the Nuremberg IMT is dated 20. November 1945. It is not clear what the changes were between the different iterations of the affidavit.
Naujocks furthermore declares that he is”almost convinced“ that the doctor giving the deadly injections was Dr. Straßburger. He also claims that participants in the ‘false flag’ operations, including Heinrich Müller and Dr. Straßburger, had received Iron Crosses for this.
The affidavit by Naujocks from 20. November 1945 for the Nuremberg IMT can be considered as “canonical“ for the official version of the story of the Gleiwitz incident: While there is no longer talk of seizing a studio, Naujocks still manages to mess up by making the nonsensical claim of using an “emergency transmitter” to make the broadcast. Likely this was supposed to mean “emergency microphone”. It is interesting to note how the elements are swapped around to “fix” the timeline – the “only days until war breaks out” is now put into the mouth of Heydrich right at the start on 10. August. The two weeks of waiting come next, then the visit to Heinrich Müller in Oppeln. To bridge the time gap until 31. August, then another week long wait period is inserted.[17]
In contrast to the preceding IMT hearing, Naujocks now again has no doubts about Mehlhorn’s identity – did his handlers feel that any indication of doubt and indecision would weaken the propagandistic effect? Instead of depositing the „Canned Goods“ victim near the studio microphone – which Naujocks now is aware did not exist – it is now placed outside the building entrance; whereas it was previously dead and riddled with bullets it is now only unconscious and no bullet wounds are visible.
Naujocks made another official statement regarding the Gleiwitz operation on 23.11.1960 at a Hamburg police department.[18] It was given voluntarily under the condition that he would be allowed to dictate the text of the statement. When requested to give more details about events, he mostly refused, claiming that his recollection was hazy; he points out, that in general his statements are made under the caveat that after such a long time he might be remembering wrong.
He explicitly withdraws the claim in his Nuremberg IMT affidavit that the person Müller was discussing the other border incident plan with was Mehlhorn – it might as well have been Dr. Otto Rasch. Confusingly, at one point he now indicates that he himself was a participant in the discussion, not merely a spectator. He points out that he had already been voicing his doubts earlier at the Nuremberg IMT hearing, but lies that he already had put forward Rasch as an alternative at that time. The reason for this deception seems quite clear: Rasch died in 1948 and therefore, similar to Heydrich and Müller, conveniently could not contradict his story any longer (but very much could have in 1945).
He is now also back to claiming more ‘false flag’ operations besides the Hohenlinden one (The interviewer notes that Naujocks several times said instead „Dreilinden“ before correcting himself). However, he insists that they all were strictly separated from the Gleiwitz operation, so everything he knows about them is unreliable hearsay and being “responsible” he won’t say anything about them at all.
Despite having it read to him to refresh his memory before making his statement, there are various other contradictions to his Nuremberg affidavit: Instead of Naujocks calling Müller to request a victim, Müller now calls him. The victim is now delivered and placed by Müller during the operation instead of being handed over to Naujocks beforehand. He highly implausibly claims that he is, despite having selected them himself, unable to recall the name of any of the other five participants in the mission. He supplies one new detail: There were supposed to be 8 people present at the broadcast control room.
Meanwhile, in an article published in 1962, the historian Jürgen Runzheimer had “merged” the narratives of Naujocks and that of Erich Nittritz, which was possible in general because of the few details that Naujocks provided.[19] He also used statements of former police officers interviewed by him that had participated in the reaction to the Gleiwitz raid. Runzheimer admits the lack of documentary evidence for a Gleiwitz “false flag” operation and that, in view of the meagre amount of information in Naujock’s affidavit, it was therefore necessary to find other evidence for the veracity of the story.
Runzheimer therefore tries to come up with some circumstantial evidence. He speculates that the changeover in the site guard force on the day of the attack (It had already been previously changed a few days before) might have been a deliberate ploy ordered from higher up to weaken the site protection in order to facilitate the raid. But he has no evidence for this speculation and frequent changes in the security disposition do not seem unusual given the tense situation on the eve of the war.
Equally unconvincing is his second hypothesis. Supposedly, Gestapo officers were the first to arrive at the crime scene before the regular police and took charge of questioning the facility staff; Runzheimer asserts that this must have been motivated by a desire to prevent the regular police from discovering evidence that this was a ‘false flag’ operation. But if this was the case, why were others like Kersten and Nittritz also allowed to question the staff? Even more irreconcilable with Runzheimers conspiracy theory is the fact that the body of the dead attacker was examined and removed by the regular police – if the Gestapo cover up claim was correct, this should have been the very first thing for them to disappear.
An important part of the story could not be made to fit at all. Naujocks claims concerning the concentration camp supplied victim left behind are refuted: Kotz and Foitzig had seen through a window their former guard shot in the machine room (Even though they could not see the shooter) and both unambiguously identified the body; no one had seen a body at the entrance. Runzheimer is forced to admit that Naujocks is lying about the dead man (He suggests that it was Naujocks or one of his men that killed him), but simply shrugs it off and – surprise – declares his story otherwise as confirmed.
Naujocks made a lucrative business out of marketing himself to a media eager to get the propagandistic message out. For instance, in 1957 he received for his collaboration the sum of 2,500 Marks from Austrian journalist Günter Peis, a lot of money at the time.[20] Peis had already met Naujocks during the Nuremberg trials and tracked him down again in 1952. Ironically, Peis at first had doubts about Naujocks Gleiwitz narrative, suspecting it to be an allied propaganda lie. But it seems that in the end, he preferred for the sake of his career to better go along with the official narrative.[21] In 1960 he published in England “The Man Who Started The War”, a biography of Naujocks. The depiction of the Gleiwitz story in this book – replete with sometimes outright comical melodramatic outbursts – contains several elements different from any other variant and even brazenly reintroduces errors that were already known to Naujocks at this time:
The initial meeting with Heydrich takes place on 5. August, Naujocks and six subordinates go to Gleiwitz on 10. August, however they return to Berlin only two days later and don’t return to Gleiwitz until three days before the operation. The visit to Müller in Oppeln takes place, but there is no Mehlhorn. Naujocks and his men are wearing Polish uniforms during the raid. It is claimed that Gleiwitz only propagated the Breslau radio program part of the time and that there was a local studio which was used for news broadcasts and weather reports. The – technically wildly implausible – plan was to propagate, with the help of two accomplices at the Breslau radio station, the broadcast from the Gleiwitz studio over the entire German radio network. However, radio technician Karl failed to make the necessary adjustments and so the announcer Heinrich had to be content with the reach of the local transmitter. The book chapter ends with the familiar false claim that Hitler highlighted the Gleiwitz incident in his 1. September 1939 Reichstag speech.[22]
In 1964 an article series about Naujocks by Peis appeared in the boulevard magazine “Quick” under the title “Der Mann der den Krieg begann”, a translation of the book title into German. However, the section about the Gleiwitz incident was now mostly oriented on the new “standard narrative” set by Runzheimer and quite different from the book version.[23]
It seems that Peis and Naujocks considered the fact that the book was never published in German sufficient to prevent awkward comparisons. But even disregarding the book, they certainly didn’t let boring consistency get the upper hand. For instance, the initial meeting with Heydrich is on 8. August and instead of Naujocks alone there are two more participants, Heinrich Müller and Arthur Nebe, head of the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (Reich Criminal Police Office). Together they thrash out a series of ‘false flag’ attacks, including the Gleiwitz raid. Naujocks now certainly remembers the names of at least some of his henchmen (There is, however, no more mention of Karl and Heinrich from the book): We learn about his driver Fedor Janisch and the radio technician Dr. Fred Schmitthenner – the former is even interviewed together with Naujocks.
Naujocks, however, was reluctant to let Fedor Janisch make statements to the authorities. The public prosecution office nevertheless tracked Janisch down and interrogated him a couple of times.[24]
It is in one of these interrogations that Janisch provides the information about the payment of Peis to Naujocks – it is obvious that Naujocks telling him about such things only makes sense in the context of discussing Janischs own payment for his supporting statements. It seems that Janisch was insufficiently coached by Naujocks, because he makes a really bad timeline error, claiming that they had only arrived in Gleiwitz 6 – 8 days before carrying out the operation, whereas according to Naujocks version of events at this point it had been three weeks.
There is yet another “official” testimony by Naujocks concerning the Gleiwitz incident from 1964.[25] It is short, so Naujocks manages without further major inconsistencies; given his statements in the press, he now at least admits to remembering the names of a few of his subordinates, but he still claims that he is not sure, so he refuses to spell them out in an official statement. In regards to the left behind dead body, he contradicts Nittritz and Runzheimer and sticks with his story of a dropped off victim. He now seems to be more confident to name still living persons as possible fellow conspirators and, dropping any pretense of his earlier claim that the Gleiwitz operation was totally separate from the SD, asserts that two figures in his organisation, Heinz Jost and his deputy Dr. Alfred Filbert, should know something about the dead body.
However, Jost already had earlier stated that he had never heard anything about a Gleiwitz operation during his service, a claim that, as the prosecution had to admit “cannot be refuted”.[26] Filbert, on the other hand, indeed was eager to amplify the Gleiwitz and “Canned Goods” story of Naujocks, even though unsurprisingly he denied to have personally participated in it.[27] The reason for Filberts behaviour is not hard to find – he was imprisoned because of alleged war crimes he had been involved with. Obviously he hoped to pander to the authorities by playing along with the official narrative. Like Naujocks had done in several iterations of his testimony, he implicates Herbert Mehlhorn as a participant.
Mehlhorn himself was several times interrogated until his death in 1968. Up to 1962 he did not mention anything at all about any ‘false flag’ operation in his career description.[28]
But after that he included the claim that Heydrich asked him to participate in such operations, even though he refused this order.
Naujocks served a prison sentence in Denmark from 1947 to 1950 for allegedly participating in a clandestine campaign of assassination and sabotage as revenge for attacks by the Danish Resistance. For instance, he is alleged to have been responsible for the bombing of a glass factory in the port town of Korsør on 26. 4. 1944. Supposedly this was in preparation for further bombings in Kopenhagen which would have shattered windows – to prevent them from being replaced with new windows.[30] It is difficult to decide what to make of weird stories like this.
But even though Naujocks according to his own statements participated in several operations in which people were killed and no less than five separate investigations were conducted against him, the West German authorities, otherwise always eager to hound supposed “Nazi War Criminals” for far less evidence, never put him on trial until his death in 1966. In 1963 an investigation was launched by the Hamburg public prosecutors office against Naujocks for murder in connection with the Gleiwitz attack. After the death of Naujocks in 1966 the case was transferred to the Düsseldorf public prosecutors office, now against his henchmen, “Janisch and others”. However, it seems that it was realised that opening a trial against those would lead to similar risks as a trial against Naujocks would have, with Janisch renouncing his statements, thereby blowing up the Gleiwitz narrative. So the “Janisch and others” was crossed out on the file cover and replaced with Heinrich Müller as a reliable evil Nazi bogeyman. This made not really sense, however, because if Naujocks story in its then current iteration was to be believed, the only connection Müller had with the action in Gleiwitz was that he provided a prisoner as a victim, who was only stunned and not dead at the time of delivery. In 1968, they threw in the towel and passed the buck to the public prosecutor office in Berlin, where the case was merged with another investigation against “Gestapo–Müller”.
A similar pattern can be seen in another investigation by the public prosecution office Hamburg in connection with the 1935 Rudolf Formis incident: it was started in 1961, but they waited until 1967 after Naujocks death to finally file charges against Naujocks surviving partner Werner Göttsch (There was however no trial, since with Naujocks out of the picture the Hamburg court did not consider itself having jurisdiction over the case any longer).[31]
So, to finally come to an end, what are the conclusions we can draw from the Naujocks affair, besides the obvious one, that Naujocks story and the Gleiwitz ‘false flag’ claim is false? One significant point is, that it is impossible that his allied interrogators were not aware of the blatant errors in Naujocks narrative – in fact, it was almost certainly one of them that discovered the errors and instructed Naujocks to correct them. Similarly is it highly implausible, that the West German public prosecutors could have missed the glaring inconsistencies in the Gleiwitz ‘false flag’ narrative.
After the release of the Allied documents (in 2000 and 2008) there also was no more excuse for historians to uphold the story. But, of course, they did. For instance, the historian Florian Altenhöner in his 2010 book about Naujocks had all the documents used for this article at his disposal and is eager to demonstrate that a large part of the stories spread by and about Naujocks (whom he depicts as a scoundrel and liar) are fake, but still insists that we have to believe the Gleiwitz tale. He attempts to justify this obvious double standard by trying to diminish Naujocks role:
“Contrary to what right wingers claim, Naujocks was by no means the only witness to the raid on the Gleiwitz radio station and the other staged attacks on the German–Polish border. Several participants testified to this already during the Nuremberg trials. In the 1960s, Naujocks’ former driver, among others, made detailed statements to the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office. Even before that, in the early 1960s, Jürgen Runzheimer had meticulously interviewed former residents of Gleiwitz. His findings, published in 1962 in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, were largely confirmed by subsequent investigations by the public prosecutor’s office.”[32]
Runzheimer might have been “meticulous”, but the fact remains that he was not able to find any evidence for a German ‘false flag’ operation in Gleiwitz and had to contend himself with some – not very plausible – speculations. The statements of the other supposed “participants” are highly suspect and tend to contradict one another and those of Naujocks. Ironically, nearly all of them deny having participated themselves, so the designation “participant” hardly seems appropriate. The sole exception is Fedor Janisch – which not coincidentally is also the only concrete example that Altenhöner provides – who, as we have seen, was obviously paid by Naujocks for his statements.
This brings us to another aspect that the case files show very distinctly, namely why German defendants often would confirm made up Allied propaganda claims. One reason usually cited is the systematic torture of German prisoners by the Allies, but another very powerful motivation is the hope that by playing along with the narrative and giving the powers that be what they want to get less bad treatment for themselves. This motivation was of course particularly pronounced in a defector like Naujocks, who was even able to turn his lies into monetary gain. And, as the files furthermore show, there are always plenty of opportunists, busybodies and cranks that are happy to amplify propagandistic narratives in order to pander or to simply to boost their own ego, even if there is not a concrete personal threat.
What about other alleged German “False Flags” in the run up to the war? It would exceed the scope of this article to go into detail about them, but, suffice it to say, the claims are highly contradictory, and, as in the case of the mentioned Hohenlinden (or “Hochlinden”) incident there is simply no public record of any of them happening as described. This fact alone should be entirely sufficient to dismiss them, if one doesn’t want to make the absurd claim that the Germans staged border incidents for propaganda purposes, only to then keep them secret.
Documents: https://www.unz.com/article/gleiwitz-the-false-flag-that-never-was/
News of the Times;
Scott Adams’s Ex-Wife Tearfully Reads Legendary Cartoonist’s Final Message:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/01/i-accept-jesus-christ-as-my-lord-savior/
"Disgraced Dilbert creator"?
https://instapundit.com/769336/
Welcome to Kiryas, Joel:
https://x.com/tyleraloevera/status/2012034666568573063
ICE Agent Struck by Renee Good Suffered Internal Bleeding:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2026/01/report-ice-agent-struck-by-renee-good-suffered-internal-bleeding/
Virginia Amendment for Abortions Up to Birth:
https://www.lifenews.com/2026/01/15/catholic-bishop-slams-virginia-amendment-for-abortions-up-to-birth/
This Is Just Absolutely Insane
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-just-absolutely-insane
More Christians Killed in Wave of Islamist Attacks:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/01/more-christians-killed-wave-islamist-attacks-nigeria-that/
The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse:
https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-speech-in
Family, Friends, & Neighbors Start Standing Up For Men Being Dragged Off To War:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukrainians-fight-back-family-friends-neighbors-start-standing-men-being-dragged-war
Perhaps The Cardboard Has Magical Properties:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2024/04/perhaps-the-cardboard-has-magical-properties.html
Are You Dead?:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3381r5nnn6o
Ketanji Brown Jackson Is a Painful Reminder of Biden's Lunacy:
https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2026/01/14/the-morning-briefing-ketanji-brown-jackson-is-a-painful-reminder-of-bidens-lunacy-n4948209
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Somali Welfare and Money Laundering:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/01/minnesota-governor-tim-walz-somali-welfare-money-laundering/
Forgotten Europe Has Been Dropped From the World Order:
https://hotair.com/headlines/2026/01/14/fading-forgotten-europe-has-been-dropped-from-the-world-order-n3810817
CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR Declares "FOOD EMERGENCY":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzkdv8HLoKg
