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Treachery, lies and murder -- those were the hallmarks of Adolf Hitler's launching of World War II. The German Wehrmacht had its orders to invade Poland at dawn of Sept. 1, 1939, but the first killings actually occurred the night before near a border town called Gleiwitz. There German SS troops took twelve prisoners from the Oranienburg concentration camp outside Berlin, ordered them to dress in Polish army uniforms, then injected them with poison and shot them. The twelve "Polish casualties" were dumped in a forest near the village of Hochlinde to be exhibited later to the foreign press...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Blitzkrieg September 1, 1939: a new kind of warfare engulfs Poland | 8/28/1989 | See Source »

...killers took along one more Oranienburg prisoner when they burst in on the Gleiwitz radio station, knocking a Mozart symphony off the air and firing pistols in all directions. The intruders shouted in Polish over the open microphones that they and their comrades were invading Germany. Then they ran off, leaving the corpse of the prisoner as one more "Polish casualty...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Blitzkrieg September 1, 1939: a new kind of warfare engulfs Poland | 8/28/1989 | See Source »

...next day in Berlin, in the ornate Kroll Opera, where the Reichstag had met ever since a mysterious outbreak of arson gutted its traditional headquarters in 1933, Chancellor Hitler arrived wearing the "sacred coat" of the German infantryman and used the crudely faked fracas in Gleiwitz to justify his invasion of Poland. "For the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory," he told the brown-shirted deputies. "Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Blitzkrieg September 1, 1939: a new kind of warfare engulfs Poland | 8/28/1989 | See Source »

...Russians made for Gleiwitz frontally-where the defense belt was deepest. Near it they veered a dozen miles to the north, found the weakness, came up on the main Katowice-Berlin highway. A fast run up the Autostrasse to important Breslau was the reasonable thing for the Germans to expect. Instead, Konev's tanks turned left, cut cross-country to a road that entered Gleiwitz from the southwest...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: World Battlefronts: EASTERN FRONT: Staggering Blow | 2/5/1945 | See Source »

...Gleiwitz was also typical of the Russians' complexity of maneuver all along the front. The industrial basin had not been Konev's only aim. More important was his second objective: crossing the unfrozen Oder River...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: World Battlefronts: EASTERN FRONT: Staggering Blow | 2/5/1945 | See Source »

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