Falsche Flagge

On the night of the 31st of August 1939, several covert Nazi operatives dressed as Polish soldiers stormed the Gleiwitz radio tower on the Germany-Poland border. They broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish before leaving. The soldiers left behind the bodies of a pro-Polish German farmer and several unidentifiable Dachau concentration camp prisoners. The farmer and the prisoners had been murdered and dressed up in German uniforms. The attack was part of a series of covert actions along the Polish border that the Nazis would use to justify Germany’s attack on Poland the following day. Gleiwitz was a classic ‘false flag’ operation. So, what is meant by the term ‘false flag’? Originally, the phrase was coined for the practice of pirate ships flying the colours of other nations to deceive merchant ships into thinking they were dealing with a friendly vessel. While the pirates would usually unfurl their true colours just before attacking, the wrong flag would sometimes continue to be flown throughout an attack, hence the term ‘attacking under a false flag’. Over time, the term ‘false flag’ came to be applied to any covert operation that sought to shift the responsibility on to a different party from the one carrying it out, as was the case with the Nazis at Gleiwitz. One of the most famous incidents considered by many to be a false flag operation is the Reichstag fire, which took place on the night of the 27th of February 1933. A lone communist sympathizer called Marinus van de Lubbe was arrested and charged with setting fire to the German parliament building. This gave Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels , the excuse they needed to purge Germany of opposition, especially the communists. The sweeping emergency powers Hitler and the Nazi Party grabbed for themselves after the fire are the reason many people think the Reichstag was burned not by a lone communist protesting Germany’s treatment of the working classes (as van de Lubbe himself claimed while in custody), but by the Nazis themselves. Of course, it isn’t just the Nazis who stand accused of carrying out false flag operations prior to invasions during the 1930s. In November 1939, the Russian village of Mainila was shelled by an unknown party. The village was close to the border with Finland, and the attack was used as an excuse to break the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with the country and launch an invasion into Finland that would later become known as the ‘Winter War’. It was eventually concluded by both British and Russian historians that the shelling of the village was a false flag operation carried out by members of the NKVD – the predecessors to the KGB. As a result of the war between the Soviets and the Finns, Finland sided with Nazi Germany in World War II. False flag operations carried on throughout the war, but most can be considered to be in the old sense of the word. One of the most famous false flag operations of World War II was the raid on the French drydock of St. Nazaire. There, British commandoes managed to float an explosives-laden old Royal Navy destroyer fitted out to look like a German torpedo boat close enough to the harbour to destroy all key structures in the port upon the destroyer’s detonation. After the war, the United States and Great Britain jointly organised false flag operations during the 1953 Iranian Coup. The aim of the operations carried out in the country was to deliberately undermine the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had made the mistake of nationalizing Iran’s oil companies. This angered the US and the UK, who jointly decided to launch a series of bombing campaigns against mosques and prominent people that they then blamed on communists sympathetic to the government. Protests grew against Mossadegh, egged on by the CIA and MI6, and Mossadegh was eventually fired from his post by the Shah of Iran and placed under house arrest. He would stay there until his death in 1967. The