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No one suspected her. She was 61 when the war started, widowed, a grandmother of eight, and she walked with a cane. She was also the most effective railway saboteur in the Haute-Vienne region of France.

Sophie Scholl was not a resistance fighter in the conventional sense. She and her friends distributed pamphlets calling for the overthrow of Hitler -- by hand, one copy at a time, in broad daylight, at the University of Munich. They were students. Their weapons were paper and ink.

She walked with a limp from a childhood accident and a wooden leg from a training accident. She ran a resistance network from occupied France, escaped the Gestapo twice, and was the only American civilian woman awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in WWII.

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.

Maurice Chevalier he was not. But Marcel Dompnier owned three music halls in occupied Paris and used them to hide Allied airmen, smuggle resistance messages in sheet music, and funnel intelligence to de Gaulle's forces in London.

Built at enormous human cost in 1938, the Kehlsteinhaus above Berchtesgaden saw one of the most surreal moments of the war's end: a delegation of SS officers drinking champagne while negotiating the Alpine Fortress's surrender.

In the basement of a Strasbourg police station, a Jewish baker named Sylvain Bloch fed Gestapo prisoners fresh bread and smuggled escape plans in the dough. He was eventually arrested by his own customers.

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.

In 1943, the Nazi German forces uncovered mass graves at Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, containing the bodies of approximately 4,400 Polish officers who had been captured by the Soviet Union during the 1939 invasion of Poland. The Polish Underground (Home Army) independently investigated the site and confirmed that it was the Soviets -- not the Germans -- who had committed the massacre. Stalin responded by breaking relations with the Polish government-in-exile and suppressing all information about the massacre. The Soviet Union maintained the official fiction that Germany had committed the killings until 1990.