I-25. ENDLESS COLUMNS OF PRISONERS PASSED DAY AFTER DAY THROUGH THE BACKLINE

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Who was the first victim of a war that was to claim more than forty million victims? He was an unknown prisoner in one of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps, most probably a common criminal. In an attempt to make Germany seem the innocent victim of Polish aggression, he had been dressed in a Polish uniform, taken to the German frontier town of Gleiwitz, and shot on the evening of 31 August 1939 by the Gestapo in a bizarre faked 'Polish attack' on the local radio station. On the following morning, as German troops began their advance into Poland, Hitler gave, as one of his reasons for the invasion, 'the attack by regular Polish troops on the Gleiwitz transmitter'.

From: Martin Gilbert, The Second World War, A Complete History, Herry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, 1989, p. 1.

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