Gliwice Audioguides

Gliwice received city rights in 1276 and spent the next seven centuries passing between Bohemia, the Habsburgs, and Prussia, arriving in Polish hands only after 1945. Its industrial identity was forged early: a royal iron foundry opened in 1794 and became famous for artistic castings, and by the 1840s the railways had arrived, bringing steelworks and chemical plants to what had been a market town. The Silesian University of Technology, founded in 1945 by academics evacuated from the Lwow Polytechnic, has since given the city a significant intellectual counterweight to its industrial past.

On the evening of August 31, 1939, SS operatives staged a fake attack on the Gliwice radio station and broadcast a message in Polish, leaving a concentration camp prisoner's body at the scene.

Adolf Hitler cited this Gleiwitz incident the following morning as justification for invading Poland, starting World War II. The original radio tower, 111 meters of wooden construction and one of the tallest wooden structures in the world, still stands. The building is now a museum, and the preserved broadcast room where the falsified transmission originated is one of the few physical remnants of how an enormous lie changed history.