The man who started the Second World War
A Nazi thug of the worst type, Alfred Naujocks was not only behind the false flag attack on Gleiwitz radio station, but as I reveal here, was also instrumental in many other secret Nazi operations...
THE PACKING cases were marked ‘preserves’. Their contents, however, were far less edible than their labels indicated. Rather than containing canned goods, the boxes in fact held the bodies of recently murdered concentration camp inmates.
Each of the men, who had been life prisoners at Oranienburg outside Berlin, had suffered an appalling death, as all had been forced to dress in a Polish army uniform, given a lethal injection, and riddled with machine gun fire.
On 31 August 1939, the cases were taken by SS troops to the village of Hochlinden on the German border with Poland, and dumped in a wood. The troops then fired their guns wildly into the trees, to make it appear as if there had been an intense firefight.
At noon that day, a 27-year-old SS major was told to report to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, who was staying at the Silesian town of Oppeln, some fifty miles southeast of Breslau.
Müller ordered the major to take six men to the German border town of Gleiwitz, where he was to stage an assault on the radio station, and to arrange for a Polish-speaking German to take possession of the open microphone ‘by force’, who would then urge his ‘fellow Poles’ to rise up against the Germans.
The SS major did as he was told, and ‘seized’ the radio station at around 8 pm, interrupting a broadcast of Mozart. For 3 to 4 minutes, the ‘Pole’ made his broadcast, which was then drowned out by the sounds of gunfire before the transmission went dead.
Before the major left, he had one more job to attend to. The body of a local Polish farmer was brought to the radio station, where it was to be left as proof of a saboteur attack. However, much to the major’s surprise, the man was not in fact dead.
“He was alive, but he was completely unconscious,” the major would later claim. “I tried to open his eyes. I could not recognise by his eyes that he was alive, only by his breathing. I did not see the shot wounds, but a lot of blood was smeared across his face.”
It is not clear who gave the man a coup de grace, but for the SS major, it mattered little. He had done his job well, and later that evening, the German News Agency was reporting a Polish attack on the station, which was ‘the signal for a general attack by heavily-armed Poles at two further points of the frontier’.
The supposed Polish aggression at Hochlinden and Gleiwitz gave Hitler the pretext he needed, and just before 6 am the following morning, Germany invaded Poland, an act that signalled the start of the world’s only truly global conflict.
ALTHOUGH the fake attack on Gleiwitz was clearly not the cause of the war, for years afterwards, the SS major would jokingly claim that he was the man who started the Second World War.
The major’s name was Alfred Naujocks, and today is a little known figure. However, thanks to the release of his MI5 file, it emerges that he was at the heart of many a Nazi scheme that was designed to undermine Britain.
In fact, Naujocks could fairly be described as a Nazi gangster, with his fingers in nearly every piece of criminality the regime could devise. Forgery, kidnapping, murder, black marketeering, terrorism – all were activities in which Naujocks took keen part.
Born to a low-flying sales representative in the northern German port of Kiel in September 1911, Naujocks’ childhood was marred by illness and scholastic underachievement. More practical than academic, Naujocks’ first job was making false limbs, an occupation which bored him. A brief spell as a motor mechanic was ended by the firm’s bankruptcy, and it was not until he joined the SS in August 1931 that the young Naujocks found himself a role in life.
Although he quickly proved himself to be an able street fighter in the regular brawls that took place between Nazis and Communists on the streets of Kiel, Naujocks could not live by his fists alone. In November 1932, he married for the first time, and worked for a tobacco shop owned by his in-laws.
The restless Naujocks soon tired of both selling cigarettes and family life, and in February 1934, he moved away from his wife and newly-born daughter and settled in Berlin, where he was employed as a driver by the Nazis’ Party Information Service, which was soon amalgamated into the SD – the intelligence service of the SS, which was masterminded by the sinister figure of Reinhard Heydrich.
For a keen young thug, there were many opportunities for advancement in the SD, and in January 1935, Naujocks was to commit what is believed to have been his first murder. Along with two fellow agents, Naujocks was sent by Heydrich to a small village some 25 miles south of Prague.
Near there, the SD had discovered that a secret wireless transmitter was broadcasting anti-Nazi propaganda, and Heydrich wanted it silenced. After establishing that the broadcaster was one Rudolf Formis, Naujocks and his accomplices not only managed to destroy the radio equipment, but they also shot and killed Formis, who had been a member of a group of disgruntled former Nazis.
By March 1938, Naujocks had risen to the rank of SS major, and he was made chief of his own SD department, which gathered intelligence from southeastern Europe. However, it was in northern Europe, at a town called Venlo on the German border with Holland, where Naujocks was to perform perhaps his greatest coup.
On November 9th 1939, two British MI6 officers, Sigismund Best and Richard Stevens, had been lured by the SD to the Dutch town in order to make contact with a supposed German resistance organisation. Unfortunately for the two men, instead of being greeted by friendly German army officers, they found themselves surrounded by a posse of some ten SD agents, led by Alfred Naujocks.
Best and Stevens were hauled out of their car at gunpoint, and during the tussle, a Dutch intelligence officer, Dirk Klop, was shot and fatally wounded by Naujocks’ men. The two officers were whisked over the border into Germany, where they were held until the end of the war. Under repeated interrogation, it is thought likely that Best and Stevens told the Nazis much about MI6’s networks.
Emboldened by the success of what became known as the Venlo Incident, Naujocks turned to another means by which he could strike a blow against the British. In January 1940, Naujocks helped to establish a counterfeiting operation in a villa in a western suburb of Berlin.
Codenamed ‘Operation Andreas’, Naujocks’ scheme intended to produce vast quantities of high denomination British banknotes, which would be dropped over Britain just before an invasion, and would hopefully bring about chaos and economic collapse.
However, Andreas was never to be as fruitful as its more infamous successor, Operation Bernhard. Naujocks’ team ran into numerous technical difficulties, and furthermore, the decision to only produce high-value notes was soon realised to be a foolish one, as very few members of the British public would often handle such banknotes, and would be instantly suspicious of a sudden plethora of £50 notes in circulation.
The failure of Operation Andreas seemed to do little to lower Naujocks’ stock, but in the following year, he found his fortunes starting to reverse. Charged with corruption, Naujocks was ordered to serve as an ordinary SS private on the Russian front, where, if his own testimony is to be believed, he served with distinction.
By the end of 1941, he was invalided away from the front line, and after recovering from an abdominal operation, he soon found himself back in favour at the SD. In September 1942, Naujocks was to add a new string to his criminal bow – effectively that of racketeering while he investigated black market activities in Brussels.
“It was apparently the intention of this circle to get the most profitable sources of income of the Black Market into their hands,” stated one MI5 contact, “and as far as possible cut out any other influence.”
For a while, Naujocks had it good, and he was even able to use his position to settle scores against members of the German military with whom he had fallen out. However, his masters back in Berlin still needed Naujocks to act as their licensed thug, and in February 1944, Naujocks was ordered by Heydrich’s successor, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to go to Denmark and initiate reprisals against members of the Danish resistance.
Naujocks became a significant figure in what was known as the Peter Group, which was named after its first leader. During its 16 months of existence, the group terrorised the Danish population, carrying out 102 murders, 25 attempted murders, and causing some 150 explosions.
Despite his grim successes in Denmark, like many of his fellow SD men, Naujocks was sufficiently canny to realise which way the war was going. However, rather than staying loyal to the Nazi regime to the end, in July 1944 Naujocks decided to hightail it to Vienna, where he made contact with a sympathetic SD colleague who promised to help him escape.
On October 19th 1944, troops of the 102nd American Cavalry Reconaissance Group arrested a civilian calling himself ‘Alfred Bonsen’ who was attempting to cross Allied lines about three miles north of Wirtzfeld on the Belgian-German border.
Under interrogation, ‘Bonsen’ claimed to be a representative of a secret Austrian resistance movement, and furthermore, he had a letter for a British intelligence officer called ‘Colonel Christi’.
It quickly became clear that ‘Bonsen’ was of course Naujocks, although the American interrogators were unable to establish whether his story about the resistance was true. The Americans seemed impressed, and clearly regarded Naujocks as a potential intelligence asset.
On November 2nd 1944, Naujocks was handed over to the British, who soon saw Naujocks for what he was. In the words of the legendary Lieutenant Colonel Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, the head of Camp 020 interrogation centre, Naujocks was a ‘typical thug of the New Order’, who was ‘a killer without hate and without shame’. Such an assessment matched that one of Naujocks’ own colleagues, who thought that he was ‘capable of anything’, was ‘morbidly greedy after money and power’, and ‘showed sadistic traces of an almost pathological type’.
It comes as a surprise to find that Naujocks was never executed for his crimes. He was eventually brought to trial by the Danes, and sentenced to 16 years imprisonment by the Danish High Court in January 1950. However, under Denmark’s lenient treatment of war criminals, Naujocks was released after just two years in June 1952.
Little definite is known of Naujocks’ activities after the war. It is often said that he participated in the mythical ODESSA organisation, that was reputed to smuggle Nazis to South America, but there is no supporting evidence. Certainly, Naujocks socialised with former unrepentant Nazis, and his name crops up in many files of those investigated for post war crypto-Nazi misdeeds.
In 1960, Naujocks collaborated with a German journalist to produce a highly colourful account of his life, entitled The Man Who Started the War. Much of the book should be taken with a handful of salt, but it was clear that Naujocks revelled in his wartime exploits. He died in Hamburg in April 1966, aged just 54.
Surely someone ought to make a television series vaguely based on this awful man's life - sort of 'Reilly, Ace of Spies but evil'? There are just too many good (awful) stories there not to do something with them.
He seems nice.