Random Lesser-Known Stories From World War II That Should Be Made Into Movies (14 items)

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  (#6) Oradour-sur-Glane, The Town That Died Forever

  The Allied invasion of Normandy instigated widespread activity by the French Resistance, including the kidnapping and killing of Helmut Kampfe, a major in the Waffen-SS Das Reich. In the wake of Kampfe's demise, a battalion of the regiment known as Der Fuhrer Regiment made its way to the small village of Oradour-sur-Glane.

  Commander Adolf Diekmann ordered the town sealed off, the men locked in barns, and the women and children confined to the church. It's unknown why the town was selected - possibly due to its proximity to the regiment, or because Germans knew it was defenseless.

  Diekmann ordered his unit to begin shooting. Residents were incapacitated by shots to the legs, then the barns and church were doused with gasoline and ignited. Hundreds of villagers perished, which was nearly all the residents of the area. Many of the SS present were Alsatian French nationals forced into the German military, and almost all participants escaped punishment. After WWII, French president Charles De Gaulle declared that the village would never be restored, and left as a reminder of the brutal Nazi occupation.      
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  (#10) Hans Munch, 'The Good Man Of Auschwitz'

  The conduct of Nazi staff at Auschwitz is an appalling chapter in human history. The cruelty routinely perpetrated was so egregious that, in 1947, a Polish court convened a special tribunal to mete out justice to 40 former Auschwitz personnel. Of the defendants, only Dr. Hans Munch was acquitted.

  Former prisoners testified that Munch had been kind and humane; he gave them food and extended bogus experiments on female prisoners because he knew they would be gassed once the experiments were concluded. Most impressive, Munch refused to participate in the selection process dictating who lived or perished at Auschwitz. In the final days of WWII, his last official act at a concentration camp was to advise an inmate on how to escape, wish him good luck, and hand him his service revolver.  

   
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  (#14) The Not-So-Great Escape

  Allied POW escapes in Europe have been the stuff of legend since WWII ended. But 400,000 Germans prisoners were housed across the US during WWII. On December 23, 1944, 25 of these men attempted to escape from a Papago Park, Arizona, prison camp. The POWs were all U-boat officers or crew and were determined to get to Mexico, then home to Germany. In preparation, they sold fake German medals to guards to obtain cash, created phony IDs, and three men even created a raft they hoped to sail down the nearby Gila River.

  By December, a tunnel was successfully built to get the Germans out of the compound. Late on Friday the 23rd, while many of the other 3,000 prisoners acted as though nothing was going in, the 25 men, in small groups, made their way out through the tunnel. 

  The FBI and Native-American scouts were mobilized. By then, some of the Germans, stranded in cold, rainy weather, turned themselves in. The rafters got to the Gila, but it was essentially an elongated mud puddle, rendering the raft useless. They were captured near the riverbank. Within a month, the last prisoner was arrested by police in downtown Phoenix at a railway station. 
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  (#7) The Amazing And Mostly Forgotten Georg Elser

  In November 1939, German carpenter Georg Elser set out for Munich. He was alarmed by what was happening in Germany and wanted to assassinate Hitler before the dictator dragged the country into another costly war. Elser knew Hitler frequently changed his itinerary at the last minute as a security measure, but the one event he never failed to attend was the anniversary celebration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, the first attempt by the Nazis to seize power. Hitler spoke annually at the site where the putsch began, the Burgerbraukeller beer hall.  

  When Elser checked out the hall, he noticed a pillar supporting a balcony over the speaker's dais, the perfect spot to plant a bomb. After 30 straight nights of chiseling the pillar, Elser hollowed out a place for his intricately designed, timed explosive device, which was set to detonate right in the middle of Hitler's traditional 90-minute speech. Elser was so methodical, he lined the hole with cork to muffle the ticking clock of the bomb and put tin around it so any attempt to nail decorations through his device would be repelled.

  Everything was in place three days before Hitler's November 8 speech. Unfortunately, Hitler was planning to attack France on November 12, 1939. Although he eventually postponed the invasion until spring 1940, Hitler wanted to quickly return to Berlin to oversee the operation. He cut his speech to an hour so he could catch a train back to Berlin. Just 12 minutes after Hitler left, Elser's bomb went off, killing seven people and injuring 63. The carpenter was on his way to the Swiss border, having scouted a route through the frontier months ago.

  But Elser hadn't counted on wartime security and was detained as he approached the border. He was arrested and tortured before being placed in the Dachau concentration camp. Hitler was convinced the Allies were behind Elser's conspiracy, and the carpenter was kept alive in the hopes of eventually staging a show trial. However, the imminent end of the war forced Hitler's hand. Elser was secretly executed at Dachau in April 1945. The exact date is debated.
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  (#11) Liquor Bottles Almost Killed Hitler

  Adolf Hitler survived several serious assassination attempts, none more dangerous than the March 14, 1943, bombing attempt masterminded by General Henning Von Tresckow. Hitler had flown to the general's headquarters in Smolensk, USSR, for a visit to the front lines. Von Tresckow asked an aide on Hitler's staff to take some liquor bottles wrapped in brown paper to Hitler's HQ and, eventually, deliver them to another officer in Berlin. Actually, the package was a bomb, primed to detonate while the plane was aloft. When Hitler's demise occurred, conspirators would launch a coup in Berlin.  

  But Hitler's plane landed without incident, and a stunned Von Tresckow quickly sent a subordinate by plane to retrieve the device, lest they all be compromised. Von Tresckow was also involved in the July 20 plot in 1944. When he heard of the plot's failure, he took his own life.
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  (#9) The Anti-Communist Finn Who Served Everywhere

  Lauri Torni, AKA Larry Thorne, was born in Finland and, somewhat improbably, perished as an American Green Beret in Vietnam. Torni entered the Finnish military service in 1938. He participated in the war between Finland and the USSR, distinguishing himself in battle, earning the rank of captain. When Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany in 1941, Torni fought for three years as commander of the fearsome Detachment Torni, until the Finnish armistice of 1944.

  After his unit demobilized, Torni joined a German SS unit and continued to fight the Russians. He was captured by the British, escaped a POW camp, and returned to Finland, where he was arrested for his German army service. Pardoned in 1948, Torni secretly traveled to Sweden, masqueraded as a Swedish seaman, and sailed to the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama, where he jumped overboard and made it to land. He was granted residency in 1953 and joined the Army as Larry Thorne. Eventually, he became a Green Beret assigned to Special Forces, and served in various high-profile capacities around the world.  

  In 1963, he deployed to Vietnam as an advisor, but two years later, Torni's remarkable career came to an end when his helicopter crashed during a secret mission. His remains were not located until 1999 and were subsequently buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 2003.        

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