From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 3-4:
The beginning of World War II began as a deadly theatrical performance staged by the SS. Hitler wanted to invade Poland, so an excuse had to be invented. Poles were cast as the aggressors. On the night of August 31, in an operation named “Grandmother Died,” the Gleiwitz radio station on the German side of the Polish border was “attacked” by German agents disguised in Polish uniforms. A brief anti-German message was broadcast in Polish. To make the imaginary act of Polish aggression seem more plausible, the corpses of a few “Polish” attackers were left on the site. They were in fact murdered concentration camp prisoners dressed up as Poles.
Similar deceptions were staged at other places along the Polish-German border, an area where Polish- and German-speaking populations had been at home for centuries, not always amicably. In a place named Hochlinden, not far from Gleiwitz, a German customs post was attacked on the same night by a number of men in Polish army uniforms. (They also sported heavy beards and sideburns, to make them look more “Polish”—in German eyes, that is.) A show was made of repulsing the attack by men dressed up as German border guards. All of them were Nazi commandos. Again, a few unfortunate concentration camp prisoners were forced to play their roles as Polish soldiers killed in the make-believe skirmish. Photographs of the murdered men were sent to Berlin as evidence of Polish belligerence.
At ten o’clock, on the following night, Hitler, dressed in the grayish-green uniform of the German army, the Wehrmacht, made a speech to members of the Reichstag, a rubber-stamp parliament now hastily assembled in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. Since the Reichstag building itself had been heavily damaged in 1933 by an arson attack that the Nazis might have staged themselves as an excuse to crack down on political opponents, the opera house now had to do. Many seats were empty, since their occupants were away on military duty. The stage, upon which great new music by Hindemith and Schoenberg had once been performed, now had a gaudy backdrop of a giant eagle with a swastika in its claws, flanked by massive red, white, and black Nazi flags. When Hitler’s speech reached its sweaty, fist-shaking climax of screaming bombast, the uniformed delegates stomped and cheered like brawlers in a beer hall. Hitler claimed that Germany had had no choice but to respond to Polish hostility with maximum force. “This night,” he barked, “for the first time, Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs.”
Far Outliers 