Germany Invades Poland and War Begins in Europe

At 4:45 on the morning of 1 September 1939, German armed forces crossed the frontier into Poland from the north, south, and west, initiating an unprovoked assault that launched World War II in Europe. The attack followed the staged Gleiwitz incident, a false-flag operation conducted during the night by German operatives posing as Polish troops to fabricate a pretext for war. Days earlier, the diplomatic landscape had shifted decisively when Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which contained a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. While Germany publicly framed its military operations as a defensive reaction to alleged border provocations, the underlying strategic objective was the dissolution of Polish sovereignty.

The ideological ambitions underpinning the campaign had deepened steadily after Adolf Hitler came to power in early 1933. Although Germany had concluded a non-aggression pact with Warsaw in 1934, from October 1938 Berlin pressed for the annexation of the Free City of Danzig and extraterritorial transport links across the Polish Corridor. Polish officials repeatedly resisted these initiatives, recognizing that yielding would reduce their state to a subordinate client. In the spring of 1939, Hitler cancelled both the non-aggression agreement with Poland and the naval accord with Britain, instructing military planners to draft Fall Weiss, the operational outline for an armed confrontation. In private briefings with senior commanders, German leadership stated plainly that Danzig was merely an excuse for expanding living space in the east.