If one compares the publications on the beginning of World War II with the vast literature on the outbreak of war in 1914, a significant difference immediately becomes apparent. A substantial proportion of the latter works concerns itself with questions of detail about the various mobilization measurers and declarations of war in 1914 and attempts to arrive at a most precise reconstruction of the course of events at the time. With very few exceptions, there is nothing similar in the literature about 1939.

This difference is easy to explain. The interest in the most minute details of the crisis of July 1914 is connected with the controversy over the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War; there is, on the other hand, no sensible person who today disputes the fact that the Third Reich initiated World War II. There are, nevertheless, details of the developments of August 1939 which merit closer examination because they spotlight important aspects of German foreign policy at the time.

It is generally known that the German government in 1939 arranged a number of measures in order to surprise Poland while simultaneously blaming the Poles for the outbreak of war. The quiet, publicly unannounced mobilization, now described in detail in the first part of the fifth volume of the series “Germany in the Second World War” was expected to contribute to the element of surprise, while the provocative incidents fabricated on German soil at the Gleiwitz radio station and near the villages of Hochlinden and Pitschen were supposed to prove that it was the Poles who had attacked Germany.