Alfred Naujocks

Alfred Helmut Naujocks, alias Hans Müller, Alfred Bonsen, or Rudolf Möbert (20 September 1911 – 4 April 1966), was an SS-Sturmbannführer (major), and took part in a staged incident intended to provide the justification for the attack on Poland by Nazi Germany, which in turn provoked the Second World War in Europe.

Naujocks was born in Kiel and attended the University of Kiel where he studied engineering and, after an incomplete apprenticeship as a precision mechanic, he joined the SS in 1931. He then signed on as driver for the SD-Regional Command East, Berlin. He led an undercover attack on an Anti-Nazi radio station in the village of Záhoří, near Slapy, Prague, Czechoslovakia on 23 January 1935. Black Front activist Rudolf Formis was killed in the incident; He confessed to the murder in 1944 while in American custody. By autumn 1937, Naujocks was promoted to Hauptsturmführer (captain) and by 1938 was promoted again to Sturmbannführer (major).

On 10 August 1939, Reinhard Heydrich directed Naujocks of his mission to lead a small group of German operatives to seize the Gleiwitz radio station. Thereafter, on the night of 31 August, Naujocks led the attack on the German radio station Gleiwitz, one of twenty-one similar concentrated attacks that the Germans quickly attributed to the Polish. Once inside the radio station, a short broadcast of a anti-German message in Polish was made (although sources vary on the content of the message). Shots were then fired in the studio and a corpse left on the floor near the microphone.

To add documented proof of this attack, the SD operatives placed fictitious Polish troops (corpses of prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp who had been dressed in Polish uniforms provided by the Abwehr, killed by lethal injection, and then shot for appearance) around the 'attacked' radio station for selected members of the press to see at the site of the incident. These attacks, but not exclusively the Gleiwitz incident, formed Hitler's justification to the Reichstag regarding the necessary "pacification" of Poland, thereby setting Second World War in Europe into motion.

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