Random Most Hardcore WWII Spy Stories You'll Ever Read (12 items)

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  (#8) Moe Berg Was a Major League Spy Who Almost Assassinated Werner Heisenberg

  Morris "Moe" Berg was an accomplished athlete and graduate of Princeton University who played and coached professional baseball from 1923 to 1941. Because Berg was quite intelligent and multilingual, he made two trips to Japan, accompanying other players on an exhibition game tour of the country. On one of these trips in 1934, Berg brought a movie camera and filmed the city of Tokyo and its harbor from a hospital rooftop, footage that would eventually become strategically valuable.

  Berg was an average player, but he did obtain a law degree and eventually passed the bar exam. When war broke out, Berg got involved in various counter-intelligence efforts and even provided his film footage to the Army unit that planned Doolittle's Tokyo Raid of 1942.  He was eventually parachuted into enemy territory in Yugoslavia, interacting with Yugoslav partisans.

  Berg was also charged with determining German progress toward the construction of atomic weapons, focusing especially on knowledge concerning German physicist Werner Heisenberg.  In a mission to Zurich, Berg was to kill Heisenberg, who was delivering a lecture, if Berg determined that a German device was imminent. Berg concluded correctly that that was not the case and Heisenberg escaped violence.

  After the war, Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom, which he refused, the first incident of his increasingly odd behavior.  He refused requests to return to baseball, law firms, or even teaching.  As a Jew, he requested that the CIA send him to Israel - they refused but, in 1951, they did retain him to gather intelligence in Europe. He did little work and the CIA cut him loose when his $10,000 contract expired. For the next twenty years he lived with friends and relatives, intimating that he was working on top secret missions but essentially doing nothing. He died at age 70 in 1972; his sister accepted his Medal of Freedom posthumously. His baseball card is on display at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. 
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  (#1) The White Rabbit Couldn't Be Contained by Nazi Prisons

  Forest Frederic Edward Yeo-Thomas (who went by F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas) was not your typical cliché espionage agent, photographing documents in the early morning hours behind the embassy doors of some darkened office. After serving for two years in the RAF, Yeo-Thomas requested even more hazardous duty in occupied France serving as a liaison between the French government in exile and the Resistance.

  On his third mission in 1944, he was betrayed to the Gestapo and was badly mistreated. After numerous escape attempts, Yeo-Thomas was transported to Buchenwald. He survived eight more months of abuse, escaped from a work detail, and eventually lead other POWs to freedom in the final days of the war. Yeo-Thomas is recognized by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "among the most outstanding workers behind enemy lines whom Britain produced". Yeo-Thomas is also credited as the inspiration for the character James Bond.
   
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  (#2) Krystyna Skarbek AKA Christine Granville AKA Miss Poland Was a Spy and a Beauty Queen

  Krystyna Skarbek was born in Poland in 1908. In 1930, she was a runner up in Miss Poland contest and was already involved in her second marriage when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

  The couple emigrated to London where Krystyna went to work for British intelligence.

  Skarbek was able to establish a courier system from Poland to Hungary. Fluent in French, she was parachuted into France in 1944, with her new nom de guerre, "Christine Granville."

  She engaged in various intelligence operations, the most famous an incident in Digne, France, where she tricked the Gestapo into believing her cover story and convinced them to release two other captured agents, despite the fact that her picture was on wanted posters all over the German headquarters.

  Despite being awarded the George Medal, the OBE, and the Croix de Guerre, Skarbek was cut loose by the British government after the war, could not return to Communist Poland, and fell upon hard times. Employed as a stewardess for a cruise ship, she was living in a hotel in 1952 when she was stabbed to death by a rejected suitor, Dennis Muldowney. Muldowney was ultimately hanged and Krystyna was buried in London.  
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  (#5) Americans and Germans Combined to Form the Red Orchestra to Combat Nazis

  Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen were committed anti-Nazis who formed an espionage ring referred to by the Gestapo as the Red Orchestra. This was because an investigation determined that this group was "singing" to Soviet Russia. Both Harro and Libertas came from upper-class German backgrounds, Harro the son of a decorated naval officer and Libertas, the daughter of German nobility.

  Harro, through his family connections, was able to secure a position in the Reich Air Ministry in 1934, but he and his wife organized an intellectual circle of like-minded anti-Nazis which included a member of another prominent German family, Arvid Harnack, and his American wife Mildred.

  By the late thirties, their private opposition to the Nazis had morphed into actual espionage, with valuable information passed along to both the American and Soviet governments, including a warning concerning the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, which Stalin ignored. Libertas, through her position in the German film industry, was assembling graphic evidence of German war atrocities. This information passed by radio through Soviet agent Leopold Trepper into Brussels, where a Trepper operative foolishly transmitted from the same location for a week.  Gestapo counterintelligence electronically located Trepper's group in 1941, arrested them, and decoded the names and addresses of the Schulze-Boysens among many others by mid-1942.

  The Gestapo watched throughout the summer, identifying other members of the ring. Finally, on August 31, 1942, Harro was arrested at the Air Ministry. Libertas attempted to flee by train but was arrested on September 9. They were tried, convicted, and condemned on December 19, 1942. Because Goering and Hitler were especially outraged by such a betrayal by the upper class, Harro, Arvid Harnack, and other male defendants would be executed by a new, painful, and more degrading form of execution: death by hanging at the execution chamber at Plotzensee Prison. Female defendants like Libertas would be spared this fate: instead they would die by the current method already in place, death by guillotine.

  The Schulze-Boysens and Harnack were executed within minutes of each other, three days before Christmas 1942  Mildred Harnack would initially receive a prison sentence, but Hitler refused to endorse this punishment. A native of Wisconsin, she would be retried and executed at Plotzensee on February 16, 1943. 
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  (#4) Odette Hallowes Survived by Claiming Kinship with Winston Churchhill

  Odette Hallowes was born in France in 1912. She married an Englishman and moved to Britain where she was eventually recruited into the Special Operatives Executive and sent to back to occupied France. She worked as a courier before her arrest by the Gestapo. Tortured in the notorious Fresnes Prison near Paris, she underwent multiple interrogations but refused to reveal the whereabouts of other agents in her network. Her defiance was rewarded with a transport to the Ravensbruck concentration camp.

  Condemned, she somehow convinced the Germans that she was a relative of Winston Churchill. She survived months of beatings and isolation. Ultimately, Fritz Suhren, the camp commandant, personally drove her to American lines and surrendered, still believing that her supposed status would save his neck. He was wrong.  Odette testified against him and other Ravensbruck prison staff in 1946. 

  She is the first woman to receive the George Cross.
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  (#6) Children's Author Roald Dahl and James Bond Creator Ian Fleming Met as British Spies

  Roald Dahl enjoyed a high-profile career as a writer, screenwriter, and critic best known today for his children's books. However, less well known is that Dahl also was involved in British military and intelligence efforts during World War II. He saw action as a fighter pilot in Libya and Greece, suffering a fractured skull and other injuries after crashing in the North African desert. After officially downing at least five Axis aircraft over Greece, persistent blackout headaches forced his reassignment to Britain.

  He was eventually sent to Washington as an assistant air attaché at the British embassy. Dahl was bored by the administrative details of his job, but became involved with C. S. Forester in composing what was essentially propaganda encouraging American enthusiasm for the war in Europe. Dahl also became the eyes and ears for prominent members of the British government, including Churchill, gathering intelligence usually involving the outlook and attitudes of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Dahl worked with another British intelligence officer, James Bond creator Ian Fleming.  After the war, he would begin his illustrious literary career, writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964 and subsequently the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice.  

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