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He was a theologian of international reputation, a jazz pianist, a mountaineer, and a man of profound Christian faith who concluded that killing Hitler was a moral obligation. He was hanged at Flossenburg at dawn on April 9, 1945.

While many Germans looked away during the Holocaust, a young woman from a Protestant pastor's family in Stuttgart organized one of the most effective rescue networks in southwestern Germany -- and almost nobody knows her name today.

Mordechai Anielewicz was the 23-year-old commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. He died in the bunker at 18 Mila Street with his girlfriend and dozens of fighters. But his story didn't end there -- at least not for everyone.

She wore a Nazi armband to move freely through the Warsaw Ghetto. She buried suitcases containing children's identities in a garden. She was beaten so severely by the Gestapo that she could not walk. And she never revealed a single name.

Germany's nuclear weapons program, led by Werner Heisenberg, came tantalizingly close to building an atomic bomb but ultimately failed for a reason that had nothing to do with scientific knowledge and everything to do with logistics: they did not have enough heavy water. The Norwegian resistance, led by Norwegian commandos, conducted a series of audacious raids on the Vemork heavy water plant in Norway, destroying equipment and sinking ships carrying the product to Germany. The last shipment was sunk in February 1944. Without sufficient heavy water to sustain a chain reaction, the German bomb program never progressed beyond theoretical work.

Over the course of the entire war, German industry produced approximately 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns. The Soviet Union produced approximately 108,000 tanks and self-propelled guns during the same period -- nine times as many. The American industrial output, at approximately 89,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, also dwarfed German production. Quantity had a quality all its own.