Germany stages a fake attack to justify a real invasion
What happened
Before dawn on 1 September 1939, SS operatives staged a phony Polish attack on a German radio station near the border, giving Hitler a manufactured pretext for what he had already decided to do. Germany then launched an unprovoked invasion with more than 2,000 tanks, nearly 900 bombers, and 1.5 million men, a new style of combined tank-and-air assault the world would soon learn to call blitzkrieg. Poland's air force, fewer than 300 planes to begin with, was largely destroyed within days. Britain and France declared war on 3 September, honoring a guarantee made after Munich, but it was the Soviet invasion from the east on 17 September, executed under the Nazi-Soviet Pact's secret terms, that sealed Poland's fate. Warsaw surrendered on 28 September; the last organized Polish resistance ended on 6 October.
Why it matters
This is the date most commonly given for the start of World War II in Europe, but the staged radio-station attack is a small, telling preview of how the Nazi regime would justify aggression throughout the war: manufacture a provocation, then respond to it. Poland's partition, along the exact line its two invaders had secretly agreed on weeks earlier, showed the Nazi-Soviet Pact was never a peace treaty, only a temporary division of spoils.
How we know
The staged radio-station incident was later confirmed through postwar testimony and captured SS records, and Wehrmacht deployment figures for the invasion survive in German military archives in enough detail to reconstruct the campaign's opening hours almost unit by unit.
Sources
- Holocaust Encyclopedia, US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Invasion of Poland, Fall 1939 · Reputable sourceencyclopedia.ushmm.org · The domain "encyclopedia.ushmm.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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