While World War II might’ve ended many decades ago, there are still some incredible mysteries from it that we have yet to solve, all these years later.
Packed away and gone
The Amber Room was even more impressive than it sounds, and it was, essentially, a whole room covered in amber panels. Top to bottom, the walls were covered with the stuff, including gold leaf. The room was inside Catherine Palace near Leningrad.
But German soldiers got their hands on the Amber Room in 1941 and decided, no, they weren’t going to just leave it there. They stripped the panels from the walls and packed them into crates, then sent them away. They put the panels on display twice before they vanished. Only one mosaic’s been found.
The knock upstairs
Anne Frank. Everyone knows her tragic story, but nobody seems to know how she was found out in 1944. She spent over two years in hiding with her family, and then they were all arrested by Dutch police, although we don’t know how they figured it out.
It’s generally agreed that someone betrayed them. But who was it? A warehouse worker? A family member who supported the Nazis? There’ve been so many suspects over the years, yet we’re still none the wiser about who betrayed the Franks.
A very common name
You’d think the leading Nazis would’ve been on close watch after World War II. That was mostly true, except for the case of Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, who disappeared after April 1945. It’s not like the Allies didn’t try, they did, they found lots of men named Heinrich Müller.
But not him. Müller’s own mistress said she hadn’t seen him since April 24, 1945, and the historians generally agree that he probably died sometime in May 1945. They’re not sure, though. Maybe he made it to South America or another place, who knows?
Lights beside the wings
Numerous World War II pilots claimed they saw something pretty strange during the war. They saw lights. Not your usual kind of lights, they saw eight to ten lights at night, hovering near their plane’s wing, without doing anything, without making any sound, without appearing on radar.
Some pilots said they were orange. Others said they were red or green, and that they followed the planes. It’s unclear what they were, and there have been plenty of explanations over the years. They could’ve been fire or reflections, perhaps St. Elmo’s fire, or none of the above.
The sky over Los Angeles
In 1942, the battle came to Los Angeles just after 2 AM, when local radar stations detected something coming toward the city. Off went the sirens, out went the lights. The antiaircraft crews began firing 1,400 rounds into the sky at what exactly?
It was never clear since there was no wreck or bombs in the morning, no enemy planes, either. Some people say it could’ve been a weather balloon, yet there’s no proof of that, and nobody seems to know what the attack was.Â
An empty ride home
Blimps have problems all the time, perfectly normal, nothing to worry about, but the L-8 was something else. It left Treasure Island in San Francisco with two officers onboard for patrol duty. The pair left a message about how they were checking an oil slick west of San Francisco.
But then zilch, zero, nada. The blimp drifted over Daly City and crashed there, with no sign of what had happened to the men aboard. The door was open, and the aircraft was, for the most part, intact, so it’s unlikely they died in the crash. Where did they go?
A meeting he never returned from
Raoul Wallenberg was one of the many heroes during World War II. He, despite the risks, used Swedish safe houses in Budapest to help Jewish people in the city and gave them protective passports, pretty noble stuff. Soviet forces took him away in 1945 during the Siege of Budapest.
They thought he was a spy and questioned him, after which he seemed to disappear. The Russians did claim in 1957 that he’d died of natural causes in a Soviet prison in 1947, yet there was never any proof, although there were plenty of alleged sightings.Â
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
