- Title: POLAND-WWII/GLIWICE Gliwice remembers attack that started World War II
- Date: 31st August 2014
- Summary: GLIWICE, POLAND (AUGUST 27, 2014) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF RADIO TOWER IN GLIWICE, FORMERLY GLEIWITZ GLIWICE RESIDENT,JOAHIM FULCZYK TALKING WITH JOURNALIST IN FRONT OF CABINET
- Embargoed: 15th September 2014 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Poland
- Country: Poland
- Topics: General
- Reuters ID: LVA5261N18387H41GZVXB2IRY3G9
- Story Text: Joachim Fulczyk still remembers the fateful radio broadcast 75 years ago this weekend that provided Adolf Hitler with an excuse to launch his invasion of Poland that sparked World War Two.
Now 83, Fulczyk listened with his mother and aunt to a brief address supposedly given by Polish saboteurs who had seized the local radio station in Gleiwitz, then located inside Nazi Germany, a few km from the Polish border.
"I was eight years old then and I remember what was broadcast by the German radio, that there was an attack on the Gliwice radio station by.... be it Poles or rebels, I can't tell exactly now how this group of Poles was described. And my mother who heard this news with her sister, my mother said to her sister: 'this cannot be true'," said Fulczyk, who still lives in Gleiwitz, now known by its Polish name Gliwice.
The town became part of Poland after border changes following the 1945 defeat of Hitler's Third Reich.
Jozef Gluch was a miner's son and lived at the Polish side of the border, in Ruda Slaska, in the house only 100 metres away from the border. He was 15 then and, as he recalls, together with his friends he was observing for months as the Germans were building still new objects at the border. That evoked still bigger and bigger anxiety among all the inhabitants.
"We were living right at the border and we saw already before the war how on the other side of border Germans built these defensive lines, laid barbed wire, anti-tank structures," Gluch recalled.
As Poles and Germans prepare to mark the 75th anniversary on Monday of Hitler's invasion of Poland, historians and residents of Gliwice recalled the seizure of the radio station - still today Europe's tallest wooden structure - and drew parallels with the role of media in modern conflicts such as Ukraine.
Damian Reclaw, a historian at the museum now at the site of the radio station, recounted how Germans posing as Poles staged the attack on the evening of August 31, 1939, with the aim of providing justification for a German invasion of Poland.
The seven-strong band, led by SS officer Alfred Helmut Naujocks, broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish.
Hitler made a speech in Berlin the next day citing the Gliwice attack and other similarly orchestrated incidents to justify his decision to storm Poland. World War Two began two days later when Britain and France declared war on Germany.
"(The provocation) reached its aim in German propaganda for sure because Hitler was looking for an excuse, not facts, which could justify the attack on Poland. And he was looking for this excuse to justify his assault in the eyes of his own society which, in spite of all common opinion, was not fully convinced, especially in Silesia, that Poland must be attacked," said Reclaw.
Some Poles see other parallels between the Gliwice incident of 1939 and the current Ukraine crisis. Just as the Germans pretended to be Poles, Russian forces used subterfuge to seize Crimea in March, initially denying any link to the "little green men" with no insignia who led the capture of the peninsula, but later acknowledging they were taking orders from Moscow.
In the Ukraine crisis, where Western-backed Kiev's forces are fighting pro-Russian separatists, the Internet has become a key battleground, with both sides using blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media to blacken their opponents.
Ukraine looms large in other ways. Many people in this part of Poland originally come from the Lviv region of what is now western Ukraine but was part of Poland before World War Two. They were resettled further west in towns such as Gliwice after the post-war border changes, which saw both Poland and then-Soviet Ukraine shift sharply westwards, at Germany's expense.
On a brighter note, relations between Poland and Germany - which are now economic partners within the European Union and military allies in NATO - have never been better.
On Saturday (August 30) evening, at exactly the same time as the German band disguised as Poles attacked their own radio station 75 years ago, clergy from both Germany and Poland will hold prayers for peace and reconciliation at the Gliwice radio station.
On Monday (September 1), German President Joachim Gauck will join his Polish counterpart Bronislaw Komorowski in the Baltic port of Gdansk - once Danzig in Germany - to commemorate the battle of Westerplatte, the opening military clash of World War Two.
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