13. Witold Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz after volunteering to be imprisoned there
Witold Pilecki was a Polish cavalryman who eluded capture by the German army in 1939 and joined the Polish underground. When the underground grew suspicious of the German camps at Auschwitz, Pilecki volunteered to allow himself to be captured and sent to the camp, where he gathered intelligence on the true nature of the operations there and then, almost incredibly, escaped, providing the details of the death camp’s operation to the Polish underground. He later fought in the Warsaw uprising, was captured again, and spent the rest of the war in POW camps. After the war he remained in Poland under the communist regime, where he unearthed evidence of the Soviet war crimes committed there during World War II. In 1948 the Soviets charged him with treason, conducted a show trial, and executed him.