On the night of August 31, 1939, a team of commandos in Polish uniforms slipped across the German border and attacked a radio tower at Gleiwitz, in Silesia. The raiders killed a handful of German soldiers and broadcast a brief anti-Nazi message (in Polish) before slipping back into the darkness.
The next day, Adolf Hitler claimed that “Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory” while proclaiming to the German Reichstag, “I have resolved to speak to Poland in the same language that Poland for months past has used toward us.” In this telling, Poland was the aggressor, and Germany the reluctant but valiant defender. In fact, German forces had already launched their long-planned invasion at 5 a.m. that morning, commencing a brutal campaign that subjugated Poland within a month, leading to tens of millions of deaths and Germany’s own total defeat, six long years later, in the Second World War.
The Nuremburg War Crimes Trials confirmed what many had suspected at the time—the attack on Gleiwitz had been a “false flag” operation, carried out by German operatives in fake Polish uniforms. Like many similar incidents at the same time—the shelling of German border villages, alleged atrocities against ethnic German civilians, sabotage to minor infrastructure—these attacks were fabricated by the Germans themselves, though sometimes realistically enough to kill some of their own people. Few foreign observers believed that the Poles—outnumbered and outgunned as they were—would be so...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...