WWII Movies That Show A Side Of The Past Even History Buffs Don't Know About

Reviews of The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler identified the titular Polish social worker and nurse as a female “Oskar Schindler” of sorts, but Sendler was a very different rescuer during WWII. Played by Anna Paquin, Irena Sendler smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto as part of the Polish Underground Resistance. 

The movie, described by The Hollywood Reporter as devoid of “compelling moments," did highlight an unknown individual who risked her life to save others amid German occupation. Sendler took children out of the ghetto via ambulances, “some children were placed in coffins… other children were smuggled out in potato sacks.” Sendler not only aided children in escaping Warsaw, she also placed them with Polish families once outside the ghetto. 

Sendler was arrested in 1943 and the Gestapo nearly found the lists of the children she had saved when they searched her home. She was beaten and nearly executed but she escaped with the help of Zegota, the Polish resistance organization. 

Sendler later said,

I could have done more.… This regret will follow me to my death.

She passed away in 2008.

With a stellar ensemble cast that included director George Clooney, The Monuments Men is about efforts to retrieve stolen works of art from the Germans who took them during the war. 

The characters in The Monuments Men are based on real scholars and the like, although their names differ. George Clooney as Frank Stokes is akin to George L. Stout, a conservationist and museum director, while Bill Murray as Richard Campbell is an amalgamation of art and architecture scholars Ralph Warner Hammett and Robert K. Posey.

Despite different names and some changes to the story, Clooney later said, 

Listen, the good news is, 80 percent of the story is still completely true and accurate, and almost all of the scenes happened. Sometimes they happened with other characters, sometimes it happened in smaller dimension.

All told, there were “345 men and women from fourteen nations who served as monuments men.” The movie did take liberties to make a story that was appealing on the big screen, The Monuments Men also highlighted a group of overlooked war heroes. 

Paradise Road condenses many of the stories and experiences of women in POW camps during WWII, but several of the characters are based on actual individuals. Adrienne Pargiter (played by Glenn Close) and Daisy “Margaret” Drummond (portrayed by Pauline Collins) were inspired by Norah Chambers and Margaret Dryburgh, respectively.

Paradise Road focuses on English, American, Dutch, and American women confined on the island of Sumatra. Chambers was a musician and Dryburgh was a missionary. The former was captured trying to flee Australia (her boat was bombed and sank) while the latter was serving as a missionary in Singapore when the Japanese captured it in 1942.

The movie highlights how these women and their fellow prisoners found ways to survive as disease and malnutrition raged. Chambers and Dryburgh united to form a choir that sang at the church services arranged by Dryburgh. 

Adapted from Hans Poley's book of the same name, the movie Return to the Hiding Place is about Corrie ten Boom. Ten Boom (Mimi Sagadin) was a member of the Dutch underground during German occupation of The Netherlands. 

Poley (played by John Rhys-Davies), for his part, was a student at Delft Technological University; he refused to declare alliance to the Third Reich despite knowing he could be deported. Poley's defiance and association with other students under threat of deportation led to his need to hide. He hid with family friends, the Ten Booms, and became involved in their efforts to aid Jews.

Hans was eventually captured by the Gestapo, interrogated, and sent to Amersfoot concentration camp.

The Ten Booms, believed to have saved as many as 800 Jews by harboring them and smuggling them to safety, were turned in to the Gestapo by an informant. The family was later arrested, imprisoned, and sent to concentration camps. Carrie's father and sister, Betsie, died at Scheveningen prison and Ravensbruk concentration camp, respectively.  

When Louis “Louie” Zamperini's plane crashed in the Pacific during WWII, he survived on a raft for more than a month before being captured by Japanese soldiers. His story is told in Unbroken, with Jack O'Connell starring as Zamperini.

Zamperini's personal journey from troubled teen years to participating in the 1936 Olympic games as a distance runner is covered in flashbacks throughout Unbroken. At those games, Zamperini met Adolf Hitler before attempting to steal a Nazi flag as a souvenir.

When Zamperini joins the military and enters combat, he spends 47 days on a raft with fellow soldiers Russell “Phil” Philips (Domhnall Gleeson) and Francis “Mac” McNamara. After Mac's death, Philips and Zamperini are captured and sent to an internment camp in Tokyo.

The experiences of Phillips and Zamperini as they are brutalized at the camp highlight the sheer vulnerability of prisoners of war. The men are separated, but Zamperini, specifically, enters into a tete-a-tete with Japanese officer Mutsuhiro Watanbe (Miyavi) as the latter vies for dominance over him and promotion in the Japanese military alike.

The movie didn't depict everything about how POWs were “beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death… shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism” - all of which was covered in Laura Hillenbrand's book, Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, the text upon which the movie was based. 

When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the establishment of a new organization to train spies, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was born. The SOE, unofficially called the "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" (also a movie staring Henry Cavill and directed by Guy Ritchie), didn't just train men - it also recruited and dispatched women to take part in espionage.

A Call to Spy explores the role these women played during WWII, As many as 75 women took part, with Christine Granville (born Krystyna Skarbek) functioning as the first female and longest-serving SOE agent. She's not portrayed in the movie but Virginia Hall and Vera Atkins are played by Sarah Megan Thomas and Stana Katic, respectively. 

Virginia Hall was an American-born spy who became “the most highly decorated female civilian during World War II,” according to Janell Neise from the CIA Museum. Hall worked in various international offices and, after accidentally shooting herself in the foot, lost her lower leg to gangrene. The limp her artificial leg (she called it “Cuthbert”) gave her led to German officials later referring to her as “the limping lady."

Hall was a pioneer who escaped the clutches of German counter-intelligence over and over again. She was considered one of the most dangerous and most feared spies during the war. Former CIA officer Craig Gralley explained,

Virginia Hall, to a certain extent, was invisible… She was able to play on the chauvinism of the Gestapo at the time. None of the Germans early in the war necessarily thought that a woman was capable of being a spy.

Hall disguised herself and even found a “rather sort of scary London dentist to grind down her lovely, white American teeth so that she looked like a French milkmaid.”