Operation Himmler was made public during a testimony of Alfred Naujocks during the Nuremberg Trials. However, most of the details were known in 1958 when the British writer Comer Clarke tracked Alfred Naujocks in Hamburg. Confronted by Clarke, Naujocks admitted: "Yes, I started it all. I don't think anyone will bother about me now." In the resulting article, he was identified as "The Man Who Started The Last War."
Naujocks, who died in 1960 and who never faced a war-crimes tribunal, disclosed how he had been summoned to the Berlin office of Reinhard Heydrich, the feared head of the German secret police. "Heydrich told me 'Within a month we shall be at war with Poland. The Fuhrer is determined. But first we have to have something to go to war about. We've organised incidents in Danzig, along the East Prussian border with Poland, and along the German frontier. But there has to be something big and obvious'."
Naujocks described how Heydrich strode over to a wall map of Eastern Europe and stabbed a finger at Gliwice. "This is where you come in. The idea is that six men and yourself will burst into Gliwice radio station, knock out the staff and broadcast a speech in Polish and German, attacking Germany and the Fuhrer and announcing Poland's intention of taking the disputed territories by force."
In 1961, an impressive West German film described the incident. Der Fall Gleiwitz (The Gleiwitz Case), directed by Gerhard Klein, is as interesting as it is cinematically historically.
