War Warnings?? #206 By Hank Silverberg On August 31, 1939, at a place called Gleiwitz, a small group of men dressed as Polish soldiers attacked a radio station on the other side of the nearby German border. The men were actually German soldiers under a false flag. And the incident was used, as planned, by Adolph Hitler as an excuse to invade Poland the next day. It touched off World War Two, though the United States did not get involved for another two years. I thought about this rarely-mentioned history the other day when U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Vladimir Putin could make up a similar excuse for invading Ukraine. His misinformation campaign on the internet is already underway. (Map of Eastern Europe courtesy of nationsonline.org) Russia has been building up its forces along the border for months, and is demanding that Ukraine never be admitted to NATO, the European and American military alliance that held the Soviet Union at bay for decades