Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948) was a soldier in the Second Polish Republic, the founder of the Secret Polish Army (Tajna Armia Polska) resistance group and a member of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). As the author of Witold’s Report, the first intelligence report on Auschwitz concentration camp, Pilecki enabled the Polish government-in-exile to convince the Allies that the Holocaust was taking place.

During World War II, he volunteered for a Polish resistance operation to get imprisoned at Auschwitz in order to gather intelligence and escape. While in the camp, Pilecki organized a resistance movement and as early as 1941, informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz atrocities. He escaped from the camp in 1943 and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. He remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile and was executed in 1948 by the Stalinist secret police Urząd Bezpieczeństwa on charges of working for “foreign imperialism”, thought to be a euphemism for MI6. Until 1989, information on his exploits and fate was suppressed by the Polish communist regime.

Franz Hößler, also Franz Hössler, (4 February 1906 – 13 December 1945) was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer and Protective Custody Leader at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Hößler was charged with crimes against humanity in the First Bergen-Belsen Trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Hameln Prison in 1945.

Franz Paul Stangl (26 March 1908 — 28 June 1971) was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited and tried in West Germany for the mass murder of 900,000 people, and in 1970 was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.

Eduard Roschmann (25 November 1908 - 8 August 1977) was a member of the Nazi SS organization and commandant of the Riga ghetto during 1943. He was responsible for numerous murders and other atrocities. As a result of a fictionalized portrayal in the novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth and its subsequent movie adaptation, Roschmann came to be known as the “Butcher of Riga”

German World War II Field Marshal. Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel gained immortality in the North African campaign of 1941-1943. Sent with a small German force to help the Axis against the British after the Italians had suffered severe defeat, Rommel—reaching Tripoli in February 1941—was soon master of Cyrenaica and imposing his will on the enemy. For two years the opposing forces alternately advanced or withdrew over the desert, and Rommel’s name became legendary—a master of mobile operations who was rapid, courageous, and audacious.

Sigmund Rascher (born February 12, 1909 in Munich, executed April 26, 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp) was a German SS doctor. His deadly experiments on humans, planned and executed in the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, were judged inhumane and criminal during the Nuremberg Trials.

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the 28th U.S. president, served in office from 1913 to 1921 and led America through World War I (1914-1918). An advocate for democracy and world peace, Wilson is often ranked by historians as one of the nation’s greatest presidents. Wilson was a college professor, university president and Democratic governor of New Jersey before winning the White House in 1912. Once in office, he pursued an ambitious agenda of progressive reform that included the establishment of the Federal Reserve and Federal Trade Commission. Wilson tried to keep the United States neutral during World War I but ultimately called on Congress to declare war on Germany in 1917. After the war, he helped negotiate a peace treaty that included a plan for the League of Nations. Although the Senate rejected U.S. membership in the League, Wilson received the Nobel Prize for his peacemaking efforts.

Field Marshal Douglas Haig (June 19, 1861 – January 29, 1928) was a British senior officer during World War I. He commanded the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from 1915 to the end of the War. He was commander during the Battle of the Somme, the battle with one of the highest casualties in British military history, the Third Battle of Ypres, and the Hundred Days Offensive, which led to the armistice in 1918.

Takijirō Ōnishi (June 2, 1891 – August 16, 1945) was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II, who came to be known as the father of the kamikaze.