46 Unsolved Mysteries From WWII To Send You Down The Rabbit Hole

How did it take less than a hundred years for the fascists to come back and win again...

What happened to the Amber Room. It probably was destroyed by fire but could it have been taken?

All the missing in action men and women. My mother’s cousin Eddie plane went down in WWII in New Guinea. His parents always longed for him. 

His plane was found in the mid-80’s by a group hired by a man looking for his son. He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. Alas, his parents never knew, they were passed already. 

There are many still missing.

The mystery of how an entire nation can completely switch off their empathy for Jews. These folks were their former friends and neighbors, integrated into every aspect of German life.

How Japan was never made to acknowledge all their wartime atrocities.

Not so much horrifying in a human sense, but the artwork, the architecture, the literature, Works by Van Gogh, Raphael, the Amber Room, the missing panel from the Ghent Alterpiece, and countless accounts of our cultural history just ruthlessly stolen and gone forever. Hitler had a list of works and artifacts he wanted and pillaged museums, private collections, and historical sites throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa to get them.

Whay we dont know about, pieces that could hold a key to our shared history, religion, humanity are gone. We will never truly know all that was stolen and destroyed. The works/scrolls/literature that weren't cataloged could've held the key to decoding ancient languages.

What happened to the N**i war criminals who just vanished, there were quite a few.

I had a guy randomly reach out to me on Facebook from Jamaica (I'm in the Midwest) and claim he had my great grandfathers skull and part of his military jacket, along with part of an airplane wing he found on an island down there. Kind of creeped me out. He knew more about my families bloodline than I did.

Probably who turned in Anne Frank.

Also excavations at Auschwitz revealed a list of 17 British soldiers that no one knows whom they were. POWs, defectors, it’s a mystery.

Not really horrifying but The "Battle of The Pips" remains a mystery.. When part of The U.S fleet was heading to retake Kiska & Attu (in Alaska's Aleutian Islands) from Japan, they started picking up a strong pip on the radar, and the fleet opened fire till it disappeared, so simple right they must have sunk a Japanese ship or sub?

But then after the war during the occupation of mainland Japan, they found out The Imperial Navy had nothing in the area around that time, so what made that strong blip/pip on the radar? And what if anything did they sink?

There was a Jewish concentration camp in the Balkans (cant remember which country) where the preferred method was supposedly throwing the prisoners into deep crevasses in the mountains. It is still not known how many sites were used and how many were m******d as that many deny it ever happened and the local government has restricted access to the area. Sorry for the lack of details.

The extent of Mengele's experiments.

I am positive that there are things that weren't documented or the people involved got eliminated.

I seem to recall reading about a German submarine carrying many tons of mercury that set out from Germany enroute to Japan and it sank ..an environmental nightmare waiting to happen. They don't know its location in order to fix the problem ...something like that.

There's a case about a Norwegian resistance fighter called Kai Holst, who ended up d**d in an apartementbuilding in Sweden just a few months after the war had ended.
It was ruled a s*****e, as he was found in the stairways at the top of the buidling with a gun in his hand.
The only thing is, his gun was found in his right hand. Kai Holst was left-handed and had never been known to use his gun with his right hand.

In the days before Kai had been stressed and agitated, and on his way from Norway to Sweden his driver described him as stressed and near paranoid.
He said to his driver that he had information he needed to give to his contacts in Stockholm. It was something that would create huge waves.

So, who was Kai Holst? He was heavily involved in re-shaping Milorg in 1942 after most of the leadership was arrested by the Gestapo or had to flee to Sweden and England. Had it not been for Holst, Milorg would probably not have existed later that year and the war might have gone a very different way.
He was also the link between Milorg and other Norwegian resistance groups, like the Osvald-group, Pelle-group and the 2A-group.

The day before he left for Stockholm he had visited a POW-camp at Lillehammer for interigation of German Intelligence officers only to find out that all 35 of them were simply gone. These intelligence officers had valuable information about Soviet codes, something that the British would love to get their hands on. And since Norway, at the time, was allied to the British it was only natural that these officers were to be sent to the UK.
Somehow Holst managed to figure out what happened to the german POWs. They had been transported out of the camp late at night by the americans and brought by trucks through neutral Sweden in what is now known as Operation Claw.

This was VERY controversial. First, the Americans had helped themselves to POWs in a country that was, in reality, under British control. They had done so without telling anyone, let alone the British.
Second, they did this so they could get their hands on Soviet codebooks. The US and the Soviet Union was at this point in time allies, so the americans went behind one ally's back to get intelligence information about another ally.
Third, they did this in agreement with Sweden, who had declared themselves neutral during the war and in the time after.
In other words, the information Kai had and was on his way to deliver to his contacts in Stockholm (either Norwegian contacts who would then forward it to the Brits, or a British contact directly) was in reality a huge volatile powder keg ready to explode.

There were several other things that happened in Stockholm before he was found d**d, but I won't go into details about that. The most important thing is that Kai Holst's d***h was ruled a s*****e eventhough he had no history of depression, the gun was in his non-dominant hand, and he had appearently shot himself in an apartement building where he had a safehouse and a contactperson who later stated that he had first heard Kai Holst going up the stairs, then followed by another person.

I believe Kai Holst was assassinated before he could deliver the information he had to his contact.
I believe he went passed the apartement he was supposed to go to because he was followed by someone, his training kicked in and he didn't want to risk his contact being k****d.
Who k****d him? From what I've found out of information it would either be American, Swedish or Norwegian intelligence operatives.
The funny thing is, the Swedish police have no records of his d***h ever happend in Stockholm. I contacted them and asked if there were records of any type of d***h at that specific day, which they denied.
I contacted archives in Norway as well, but got more or less stonewalled.

It's one of those cases that's pretty obvious, but I really want an answer to.

The story of the "Lady Be Good"is kinda insane. It was a B-24 Liberator bomber that vanished in 1943.

The plane was returning to its base in Libya after its very first mission. In the pitch black, the crew overshot their airfield, got disoriented by a tailwind, and kept flying deeper and deeper into the empty expanse of the Sahara Desert. When they ran out of fuel, all nine crew members bailed out into the dark.

For 15 years, no one knew what happened but in 1958, an oil survey team saw the wreck from the air. When investigators got there, it was a time capsule. The radio still worked and the guns were still loaded even, but the crew was missing

What makes it horrifying is what they found when they traced their path. The crew had survived the parachute jump and met up in the desert. Because they thought they were only a few miles from the Mediterranean Sea, they started walking north.

In reality, they were 400 miles inland, in the middle of one of the most brutal, barren deserts on Earth.

They had one canteen of water to share between nine men in 130°F heat. They walked for over a week, covering an unbelievable 85 miles before collapsing one by one. Investigators eventually found their bodies along with a diary kept by the co-pilot, Lieutenant Robert Toner. His final, entry was something like "No help yet, very cold nite".

My father had a distant cousin who worked at the German embassy in Istanbul when WW2 started. A young, pretty German woman in her early 20s. She was never heard of again, she just disappeared. Horrifying in the sense that the family has to live with not knowing what exactly happend to her. The family imagined that she ended up in a harem but that is doubtful. We‘ll never know. .

The Death of Władysław Sikorski

Władysław Sikorski was a high ranking Polish general and politician. After escaping the fall of Poland, he eventually became the Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile. Sikorski was a prominent and popular leader, and somebody who had significant influence within Allied governments. On July 4th, 1943, the plane carrying Sikorski, his daughter, and many other senior Polish officials crashed shortly after taking off from Gibraltar, with only the pilot surviving. An official British investigation said that the plane crashed due to jammed elevator controls but said that it was not sabotage, which the Polish exile government refused to accept. The Poles issued their own report saying that the cause of the crash couldn't be determined

Sikorski's d***h came at an extremely fraught time for the Polish exile government. Germany had just revealed the evidence of the Katyn Forest M******e, where 20,000 Polish military officers, POWs, intellectuals, and more had been secretly executed by the Soviets in 1939. The Soviets denounced this as German propaganda, and were outraged when Sikorski accepted the German offer to send a Red Cross investigation. The Soviets broke off recognition of the (Allied-aligned) Polish exile government, and set up their own Communist exile government. Meanwhile, other prominent members of the Polish exile government were furious with Sikorski, as Sikorski continued to advocate for some sort of cooperation with the Soviets even after the Katyn massacres were revealed.

The general beat of the conspiracy is that somebody ordered Sikorski to be k****d. Some theories say that he or some others were k****d on the ground and the crash was staged. Others say that the plane itself was sabotaged. Many conspiracies point to the Soviets, as Sikorski was publicly willing to accept an investigation into the Katyn M******e, which would make the Soviets look extremely bad. Others say that it was other Poles who organized Sikorski's m****r, as Sikorski was too accommodating to the Soviets. Others say that the British actually k****d Sikorski, because his actions were jeopardizing the British-Soviet alliance. And there's always the idea that the Nazis had him k****d

There are some juicy details that do give a bit of credence to the "conspiracy" angle. The head British intelligence agent in Iberia at the time was Kim Phillby, who was later revealed to be a Soviet double agent. The Soviet ambassador and associated personnel were actually in Gibraltar at the time of the accident and Sikorski's plane was not guarded. The bodies of several passengers, including Sikorski's daughter, were never recovered, and this leads to speculation that they were m******d before the crash, or were kidnapped. For the kidnap angle, there were reports by the Polish underground that Sikorski's daughter had been sighted in a Soviet g***g in 1945 and 46. The only survivor was the pilot - the pilot was supposedly a superstitious man who never brought a life vest when flying, but was wearing a life vest when rescued

That there was a conspiracy is still taken very seriously in Polish circles. Sikorski's d***h was catastrophic for the Polish exile cause, as no other Polish leader was so prominent and influential, and some blame this crash for the Soviets being able to turn Poland into a satellite state. Sikorski's body was exhumed in 2008 by the Polish government who concluded that he had died due to an air crash, but that they couldn't rule out that the crash was due to sabotage.

The fate of Heinrich Müller

Heinrich Müller was the head of the Gestapo, and was one of the most evil men in all of N**i Germany. Müller was last seen in the Fuhrerbunker on May 1st, the day after Hitler committed s*****e and the day before Berlin surrendered. He was quoted as saying that "the russians wouldn't capture him" (or something along those lines). He was never seen again, and to this day his fate is unknown. He is by far the highest ranking N**i official that we don't know the fate of

Again, the most probable (and boring) conclusion is that he k****d himself or was k****d during the fall of Berlin, and his body was just never identified. There's one allegation that a body bearing papers with his name on it was buried in a mass grave in (ironically) a former Jewish cemetery in East Berlin, but this couldn't be investigated during the Cold War, and the site has never been exhumed. His disappearance has sparked their own conspiracy theories, and unlike a lot of conspiracies, these were taken very seriously by global intelligence agencies

The most plausible is that he escaped to Argentina or elsewhere, like many other Nazis. Adolf Eichmann, the most prominent N**i escapee to have been found, thought that Müller was alive (though had no specific evidence to back that up). Mossad was quite convinced that Müller was alive, and some of their agents were caught trying to break into his wife's apartment (she survived the war) to look for evidence

There are also accusations that he was recruited by either the Soviets or Americans. Declassified CIA papers say that the Americans thought that the Soviets had picked Müller up, and a senior defector from Poland's intelligence service claimed that his Soviet counterparts told him that Muller now worked for the KGB. However, since the fall of the USSR nothing in the Soviet archives collaborates this. On the CIA side, the Soviets circulated rumors that he'd defected to the Americans, and a forged CIA dossier claiming to be Muller's was sent to journalists

Rudolf Hess's Flight to Britain — In 1941, Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess unexpectedly flew alone to Scotland, claiming he wanted to negotiate peace with Britain. His true motives remain disputed, making the incident one of the war's most puzzling diplomatic mysteries.

There's a famous photo of a very small Asian-looking young man in a N**i uniform, who was captured by US paratroopers in Normandy shortly after D-Day. There's a bit of controversy as to who he was and what his backstory was.

The more (morbidly) entertaining story is that he was ethnic Korean and conscripted into the Japanese Army for WWII, captured by Soviets fighting in the Far East, the Soviets recruited him to join them and sent him to fight the Germans in Europe, where he was captured by the N*zis, who then recruited him and sent him to fight in northern France. This isn't completely implausible, because the N*zis did pretty frequently try to single out ethnic minorities in Allied armies and "convert" them to fight for the N**i cause.

Apparently this unusual photo floated around for a while, and then in the 1990s this full theory and even proposed identification of him emerged. But according to Wikipedia it's all pretty tentative, and other scholars think he's just one of the many ethnic Georgians that the N*zis recruited from among Soviet POWs: