9 obscure facts from the depths of WWII history. Even Mike might not know these.
Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki deliberately allowed himself to be captured in Warsaw on September 19, 1940. Assigned prisoner number 4859, he spent 2.5 years inside Auschwitz and organized a resistance network called ZOW with hundreds of inmat…
Belgian Andrée de Jongh, age 24, founded the Comet Line, helping 800 Allied airmen escape to Spain. She personally escorted 118 airmen across the Pyrenees on foot, crossing 24 times. She wore a red carnation as her signature. Arrested in 1943, she ne…
Czechoslovaks Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, trained in Britain by SOE, parachuted into their occupied homeland to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich — the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany and architect of the Holocaust. They ambushed Heydrich's open …
In the mountain village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in southern France, the entire Protestant community — led by Pastor Andre Trocme and his wife Magda — conspired to hide Jewish refugees and French resistance fighters. Magda Trocme hid resistance fight…
When German authorities imposed strict press censorship in Denmark, the Danish resistance didn't just print underground newspapers — they created hundreds of them. At the peak, over 50 illegal newspapers were published in Copenhagen alone. The most f…
At the heavy water plant in Vemork, Norway — perched on a cliff above a 1,400-foot gorge — the Norwegian Resistance carried out two separate sabotage missions. First, four commandos parachuted in, then skied for 18 days across frozen terrain to reach…
Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, siblings from a deeply moral German family (influenced by their father's repeated arrests for criticizing Hitler), distributed six anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich. In the final leaflet, they wrote: 'We wi…
British-French SOE agent Violette Szabo provided covering fire outside Salagnac, France, killing a German NCO and several soldiers to cover two agents escape. Overwhelmed, she was subjected to brutal torture by Klaus Barbie and executed at Ravensbruc…
On March 21, 1945, the Danish resistance provided detailed floor plans and timing intelligence for a RAF bombing raid on the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen — the Shellhus building. The low-level bombing raid by Mosquitoes was so precise that it d…