As an early SS recruit, Naujocks (above) became the go-to operative for SS security chief Reinhard Heydrich. (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo)Naujocks, a 27-year-old from Kiel on Germany’s Baltic coast, had been an early convert to. Joining the SS in 1931, he had briefly attended university where he developed a talent for brawling and had his nose flattened by an iron bar–wielding Communist. Described by one contemporary as an “intellectual gangster,” Naujocks had risen swiftly within the SS hierarchy, falling under the patronage of, head of the German police network and SS security service, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD.
In that capacity, Naujocks assassinated a dissident Nazi in Prague in 1935 and helped establish a notorious high-class brothel in Berlin, Salon Kitty, patronized by visiting VIPs who could then be easily blackmailed; the rooms were bugged and the “madam” was an SS agent.Having thoroughly proven himself to Heydrich, Naujocks was the SD leader’s agent of choice to run the mission in Gleiwitz. And it was Heydrich’s high-pitched, nasal voice down the telephone line from Berlin that gave him the code words to commence: “ Grossmutter gestorben” (Grandmother has died). With that, Naujocks called his men together for a final briefing, reiterating their respective tasks and objectives. The mission was on.TENSIONS BETWEEN Germany and Poland, which had rumbled on for some two decades, had spiked in the preceding few months. The ostensible reason for the friction was Germany’s territorial losses to Poland in the aftermath of World War I, as dictated by the: primarily a swath of what had been eastern Germany on the Polish border, including parts of Upper Silesia and the provinces of West Prussia and Posen. Those losses, which amounted to over 25,000 square miles (about the size of West Virginia), not only contained upwards of five million people, including a sizable German minority, but cut the German territory of East Prussia off from the remainder of Germany by creating the so-called “Polish Corridor.”Hitler’s ire—stoked by his racial prejudices and belief that Germany’s national destiny lay in expansion to the east—went deeper than losses of land, however.
Re: Reinhard Heydrich Just a few accomplishement of R.H. In the early years of WWII: On Sep 27 1939 Heydrich & Himmler created the Reich Security Head office- Reichssicherheitshauptamt, to pull all the various parts of the police and SS together under a single, centralized directorate.
Growing more reckless in his saber-rattling, eager to capitalize on what he saw as Western weakness, and anxious for a war he thought would define him and his, Hitler began to target Poland, ramping up the rhetoric and complaining continuously of Polish perfidy. An innocuous-looking radio transmitter station in Gleiwitz, Germany, played an outsize role in giving Hitler the war he wanted with Poland. (SZ Photo/Bridgeman Images)While Naujocks was busying himself with the broadcast, SS handlers delivered an unconscious Franciszek Honiok to the building. Shortly before 8 p.m., an SS man in a white coat, purporting to be a doctor, had visited Honiok in his cell at the Gleiwitz police station and given him an injection. Honiok was then driven the short distance to the transmitter station, where two of Naujocks’s men carried him into the building and laid him down near the back door.
At some point—it’s not clear when—someone shot him. As Naujocks left the radio station, he stopped briefly to examine the now-dead Honiok, his face smeared with his own blood. Naujocks would later maintain that neither he nor his men had shot him. He knew nothing about the man, he would tell prosecutors, not even his name: “I was not responsible for him,” he said.Franciszek Honiok was expendable.
He was simply a corpse—a bloodied, silent witness to be paraded before the German and international press as proof of “Polish aggression.” His murder demonstrated in full measure the sneering, contemptuous brutality of the Nazi regime, and was a grim foretaste of the fate that would befall Poland. But its significance was even more profound than that.
It was a single death that prefaced at least 50 million others: an individual tragedy presaging a collective slaughter.It did not matter that the ruse to which Honiok’s body had given spurious credence—Naujocks’s radio broadcast—had failed; the German media were already primed and ready to run the story regardless. Within hours, radios were blaring and newspaper presses rolling, churning out headlines about the Polish “attack” and the inevitability of German “retaliation.” By the time most Germans read those words the following morning, Hitler’s tanks were already advancing into Poland. World War II had begun. On September 1, 1939, with the German invasion already underway, German papers ran news of the supposed Polish attack on the Gleiwitz station. (AKG-Images)BUT WHAT OF ALFRED NAUJOCKS? How did his war pan out?
At first glance, he went on to an impressive wartime career. As Heydrich’s cat’s paw, Naujocks appeared to have led a James Bond-like existence, participating in and leading some effective clandestine operations.
He masterminded the kidnapping of two British secret agents in neutral Holland in November 1939—the so-called “”—which compromised the entire Western European network of Britain’s MI6 secret intelligence service. He also headed a brutal suppression of the Danish Resistance in 1943, and was one of the brains behind Operation Bernhard, an ingenious German plan to forge huge numbers of Sterling bank notes, which were to be dropped over the UK to collapse the British economy. Though Naujocks did not see the project through to its fruition, and the air-drop was never carried out, the operation produced some £150 million in counterfeit notes ($195,525,000 at the time, or nearly $3 billion today)—some of the best forgeries that the Bank of England had ever seen.Yet Naujocks’s stellar career was not all it may have seemed. Life as Heydrich’s chosen one was evidently not a bed of roses.
His master was demanding and vindictive, and—presumably due to the weight of compromising knowledge—did not permit his agents to leave his employ easily. Naujocks would later claim that his relationship with Heydrich was a highly toxic one, marked by a series of acrimonious clashes. Naujocks balked at some of the more extreme assignments and claimed to have refused to carry out a high-profile assassination. As a result, Heydrich branded him a coward and reprimanded him. Yet when Naujocks resolved to leave the SD in 1940, Heydrich vetoed five requests for transfer.
In 1941, Naujocks was charged with corruption, stripped of his rank, and sent to the Eastern Front as a simple soldier in the ranks of the. He had little doubt Heydrich was trying to have him killed.After Heydrich’s assassination in Prague by British-trained Czechoslovakian agents in June 1942, Naujocks claimed that for the first time in the war he was able to “breathe again.” He took a desk job in the German administration in Brussels, in occupied Belgium, and settled into a comfortable routine, enjoying the perks of a German officer. Thanks no doubt to his reputation, former SD associates continued to approach him with secret missions, but he usually demurred, claiming ill-health and citing the shrapnel injuries he had incurred on the Eastern Front.Then, in the autumn of 1944, Naujocks defected. Surrendering to approaching American troops in Belgium, on the frontline near the German border, he told them his name was Alfred Bonsen and asked to be taken to a commanding officer. In his kit bag, he had a change of clothes, a large sum of money in three currencies, and a letter addressed to an official in the Foreign Office in London. When he confessed his true identity, the Americans handed him over to the British, who transferred him to the infamous “London Cage,” a facility in Kensington for the interrogation of high-profile prisoners.The British were condemning of Naujocks. Though his interrogators conceded that he was a “goldmine of information,” praised his “truthfulness and frankness,” and noted admiringly that he never asked to cut a deal, they were nonetheless damning in their assessment of him.
He was, they said, an “effeminate sadist,” a “killer without shame,” and a “callous murderer” who was “capable of any underhand activity,” a man who “would sell his own mother.” At best, they summarized, he was a coward; at worst, he was engaged in “another diabolical plot.” The report concluded starkly that, “this man should most certainly be put to death.”. Now a museum in Gliwice, Poland, the transmitter station bears a plaque noting its history as a “place of Nazi provocation.” (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)And, when the British had finished milking Naujocks for information, that was what they had in mind for him. On August 31, 1945—six years to the day after the Gleiwitz operation, and nearly four months after the war ended—they transferred Naujocks to the American occupation zone in Germany, where he would again be interrogated, his affidavits transcribed for later use in the Nuremberg trials.
Naujocks did not take the stand at Nuremberg, however; instead the Americans handed him over to Denmark, which tried him for war crimes alongside numerous former heads of the SS and Gestapo. Sentenced to 15 years in 1949, he served barely a year in a Danish jail before he was deported back to Germany.
There he disappeared into postwar obscurity, living in Hamburg under a false name.By that time, Naujocks was scarcely remembered. Like Franciszek Honiok, he had become a footnote to the wider history of World War II. When he died in 1966 at age 54, all he left behind was a breathless 1960 biography by an Austrian journalist and historian, whom Naujocks had met at the Nuremberg trials. Naujocks wrote the foreword. It begins: “I am the man who started the war.” ✯ This story was originally published in the February 2019 issue of magazine.