It's hard to understate the sheer scale of World War II — so maybe it'll come as
no surprise to find that, beneath all the heroics and atrocities, there are still a
few mysteries that haven't been solved… even to this day. Here are some of the strangest of all.
For the people of Los Angeles, February 25th,
1942 was one of the tensest days of the entire war. On this day, in the early morning hours,
military personnel and civilians alike were alerted to an incoming bombing raid over the city.
Search lights swept across the night sky, while people sat in their blacked-out homes, quietly
wondering if Japanese forces had been emboldened by their attack on Pearl Harbor months earlier.
Their fears seemed to be confirmed when anti-aircraft guns began going
off at around 3 a.m., first in Santa Monica, and then across the rest of the region. Troops
were even ordered to open fire where some had seen an object floating through the sky.
But when the smoke cleared, there was no sign of any attempted Japanese attack.
Five people died as a result of the so-called "Battle of
Los Angeles" — three from a car accident and two from heart attacks — while a few
buildings were damaged by anti-aircraft shells that hadn't detonated in the air.
So, what happened? Well, the secretary of the Navy basically chalked it up to nerves,
calling the whole thing a false alarm based on faulty radar readings. Some witnesses swore
they saw enemy airplanes soaring through the sky, however, while others suggested a weather
balloon may have been to blame. A small number of people have even claimed that it was all
down to flying saucers. Sadly, nobody has ever produced any strong evidence one way or another.
World War II aircraft crews had plenty to worry about — to say the least. Flying comes with its
own difficulties even in peacetime, such as navigation and the need to refuel. But when
you're flying in a warzone, you also need to deal with, you know… enemies. But by far the strangest
hazard of all for World War II-era aircraft were foo fighters. And no, we don't mean these guys.
Foo fighters were first reported by the Associated Press in 1945, though Allied flight crews had been
seeing them at least a year before that. These crews often reported seeing balls of light
that behaved strangely, typically following other planes and then peeling off or simply disappearing
after a matter of minutes. Some of them even flashed and flew in formation, leading some
airmen to believe that they were enemy weapons. But there are no reports that foo fighters ever
attacked or otherwise harmed any aircraft or its occupants. They didn't even register on radar.
So if these weird lights weren't German weapons, then what were they? Many have
blamed "combat fatigue" that plagued hardworking crews, though many of the
airmen themselves rankled at the idea that they had basically been hallucinating. One common
suggestion — the visible electrical discharge known as St. Elmo's fire — doesn't really
explain the strange movements of these lights, either. Despite a CIA investigation in 1953,
no one has ever been able to come up with a satisfactory answer for them.
In 1941, a Scottish farmer found a burning plane in his field — and a strange man standing beside
it. The man claimed to be someone named Captain David Horn, but it soon became clear that was a
blatant lie. In fact, "Horn" was a real Nazi politician named Rudolf Hess, who had flown
from Germany to Scotland, evading anti-aircraft artillery and radar detection along the way,
until finally crash-landing in that field. But why would such a high-ranking member of
the Nazi regime leave his position and literally throw himself into the heart of enemy territory?
Hess claimed he wanted to broker peace between the Nazis and sympathetic British officials,
but many remained skeptical of this claim. Some simply believed that Hess
was mentally ill. His genuine shock that he was treated as a prisoner and not a
diplomat after being arrested certainly didn't help his case in that regard.
After his arrest and subsequent imprisonment, Hess apparently realized that he was in very
dire straits indeed. He attempted suicide on multiple occasions during the course of the war,
but survived to be jailed in the Allied-controlled Spandau Prison.
Finally, in 1987, the 93-year-old Hess' was found dead in prison.
"One of Adolf Hitler's most fanatical followers,
his deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, died today at the age of 93."
His death was ruled as a suicide, although his son has repeatedly insisted — albeit
with no supporting evidence — that he was actually murdered by British intelligence.
Nearly a year to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Navy radar spotted a single
aircraft approaching the area on a course from Japan. They quickly scrambled two planes
to intercept the newcomer, and the pilots reported spotting an American P-40 fighter
that had been riddled with bullet holes. The pilot inside apparently waved at them,
but appeared to be covered in blood. The plane crashed on land soon after, but inspection of
the wreckage showed no evidence that there had ever been a pilot in the first place. So where
did the plane come from? Who was its pilot? And, most importantly, can the story even be believed?
Well, the bad news is that this tale is almost certainly made-up.
It shares a close resemblance to a story written by Robert Lee Scott, Jr.,
a writer who also served as a pilot during World War II. Scott later said that he and
a fellow pilot had come up with the story to stay entertained during the long days of the
war — but would have never said anything if they knew it was going to grow into an urban legend.
Raoul Wallenberg is rightfully considered a hero of World War II. He was a Swedish diplomat who,
through his position as deputy secretary at the Swedish Embassy in Budapest,
helped thousands of Jewish people flee the Nazis via Hungary. In early 1945, however,
he was apprehended by Soviet officers, and despite not being accused of any particular crime,
quickly disappeared into the Soviet prison system.
Some wonder if the Soviets had suspected him of spying for the Americans. Others think that the
Soviet Union wanted to hit Sweden hard for its pro-Nazi policies earlier in the war.
Either way, Wallenberg's eventual fate has never been fully known. The Swedish government didn't do
much to follow his case, as they were reluctant to become embroiled in Cold War politics. The
Soviets later claimed that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in Lubyanka on July 17th, 1947.
But some people swore that they had crossed paths with Wallenberg as late as the 1980s.
Researchers claim that there are still more records of Wallenberg's movements
somewhere out there — but until the Russian government releases them,
the true fate of this heroic diplomat will remain a mystery.
Named for the German word for "Treasure Hunter," Schatzgräber was a station
established by the Nazis just 620 miles from the North Pole. It was strategically
situated to interfere with Allied transports moving troops and supplies through the Arctic,
and also provided valuable weather information to the Germans. But Schatzgräber was abandoned
in 1944, when staff grew sick after eating raw polar bear meat. Hey, it happens.
But why not bring in a new crew to man the station, considering how important it was to
the Nazis? And why didn't anybody reveal the station's existence until well after the war,
in 1953? Well, other explanations for Schatzgräber's existence include the idea
that the Nazis were conducting archaeological excavations for mysterious Nordic artifacts.
Considering many Nazis were fascinated by the occult, and practically revered
the mystical Nordic past that they believed legitimized their regime,
it's entirely possible that Schatzgräber may have been connected to this bizarre Nazi obsession.
The Amber Room was located inside the Catherine Palace, a royal palace in Pushkin,
Russia. Previously, it had been in St. Petersburg's Winter Palace and, before that,
Prussia's Charlottenburg Palace. It was given as a gift by Prussian
King Frederick William I to Peter the Great in 1716, after the Russian royal
visited Frederick William's place and took a particular liking to the room.
This place was seriously fancy, too — the Amber Room was constructed out of multiple tons of amber
panels, each backed with gold. Later renovations added even more glitz and glamour to the room,
to the point where many dubbed it the "Eighth Wonder of the World."
When invading Nazi soldiers entered the Amber Room in 1941, the panels were nowhere to be found — or
at least, that's what it seemed like. In fact, fleeing officials had plastered the panels with
wallpaper, hoping to mask them from the invaders, but the ruse was quickly uncovered by the Germans.
Just a few days later, they had shipped the amber panels to Königsberg, Germany.
And that's where the disassembled Amber Room was last spotted. After that, the trail goes cold,
and nobody's really sure what happened to it. Some suspect that it's now at the
bottom of the Baltic Sea, after a steamer was sunk near there in 1945. Others think
that the panels were destroyed in air raids — or may be still be hidden somewhere in storage.
"We have top men working on it right now."
"Who?"
"Top. Men."
There's no shortage of legends about lost Nazi treasure out there — but some of the
other Axis powers figure into these mysteries, too. Take Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita,
for example. Yamashita reportedly buried looted treasure somewhere in
the Philippines while Japanese forces were occupying the nation. When he was executed
by American forces in 1946, however, any hope of finding the treasure was dashed.
Of course, that's assuming that it's even real. Many people have searched for
Yamashita's gold in the intervening decades, despite the total lack of
evidence or records supporting the tale, and have invariably come up with nothing.
That hasn't deterred anyone, though. The fabled treasure hoard was even at the center of a 1988
court case brought against former Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos by a soldier named
Rogelio Roxas. Roxas claimed that he had found part of the hoard,
but that Marcos had promptly swooped in and seized it. A court later found in his favor
and awarded Roxas his own hoard of cash in 1996. Unfortunately, by that point,
Roxas had been dead for three years. The official cause of death was tuberculosis, though some
people insist he was killed for his role in the supposed discovery of Yamashita's gold.
The region of Lower Silesia in modern-day Poland was once considered to be part of Germany. War
being what it is, borders have since shifted, and the German occupants of the region fled over the
course of World War II. The Polish people who took their place have since uncovered treasures
left behind by their German predecessors and, as the legend goes, there may be more valuable
loot still left uncovered. One of the most colorful stories claims that there is an entire
underground train full of plundered Nazi treasure, buried in a collapsed tunnel somewhere in Poland.
It's certainly true that the Nazis built underground tunnels,
and they did indeed steal cultural treasures and valuables from occupied territories. This
has apparently been more than enough evidence for some treasure hunters,
including one or two who insist they stumbled upon it in the past. Still, nobody has ever
managed to provide the location of the Nazi gold train — or prove that it even exists at all.
Towards the end of the war and in its aftermath, a number of Nazis and other
fascists left Europe to escape the consequences of their defeat. Some high-placed intellectuals,
like Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun, were quietly rescued via Operation Paperclip,
which relocated some 1,600 German scientists and their family members to America.
Other Nazis disappeared from Europe at the end of the war too, with many only reappearing decades
later. For example, Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina by the Mossad in 1960, while Auschwitz's
so-called "Angel of Death," Josef Mengele, lived out a quiet life in Brazil until 1979.
So how could these criminals have gotten so far and evaded capture for so long,
with some escaping punishment entirely? Well, the escape networks used by the Nazis were
eventually known as "ratlines," though it's still not clear who was involved,
how the ratlines ran, and how much everyone knew about the whole affair.
What is clear is that many South American countries seemed to be full of government
officials who were more than happy to ignore the Nazis fleeing to their shores. And evidence seemed
to suggest that Vatican officials also played a significant role in aiding Nazi war criminals
as they fled Europe. Some have even claimed that Pope Pius XII knew more than he was letting on,
though the exact nature of his involvement in the ratlines is still a mystery to this day.
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