Sometimes there are a lot of mysteries connected with war and some remain mysteries forever. Take the case of the German U-boat, U-530. When World War II ended Admiral Dönitz was in charge of Germany. He ordered the German troops to surrender but U-boat U-530 did not respect his orders. Instead of surrendering immediately it sailed to Argentina where it surrendered itself. There was a problem with this however, the problem was it took the U-boat two months to get to Argentina. What was it doing in those two months and where did it go, if anywhere? When the U-boat surrendered the crew had no identification and the ship’s log had disappeared. Its deck gun had been dismantled. Some suspect the submarine may have transported Hitler out of the country.

World War II saw the Germans employ hundreds of submarines. The allies needed ways to find them and sink the submarines and one of the things they did was turn to blimps. These blimps spotted submarines and were staffed with crews. When a submarine was spotted its location was radioed back to the U.S. Navy. One of these blimps was the L-8. The L-8 took off from San Francisco Bay in 1942. Sometime later they radioed back they were investigating an oil slick in the Pacific Ocean. About three hours after the broadcast the blimp drifted in from the ocean and crashed. It didn’t sustain much damage, but the crew of the blimp were all missing. No crew member from the L-8 blimp was ever seen again and no one has ever found out what happened to them.

Years ago Charlie Chaplin made a comedy about Adolf Hitler. One of the scenes in the movie showed Chaplin dressed as Hitler playing with a huge globe. The name of the movie is “The Great Dictator.” It has been said the globe was Hitler’s favorite possession. The globe was never found, although there have been copies found and another original Hitler kept in a second location. The missing globe was from the Reich Chancellery. There are some theories about what happened to the globe and one of them is the Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs who was the first person to inspect the Reich Chancellery may have made off with the globe.

In 1934 there was a German town named Falkenburg. This town no longer exists in Germany and is now the Polish town of Zlocieniec. It is important to note it had been a Nazi training center. In 2016 archaeologists excavated the town and found what had long been rumored. It was a Nazi time capsule. The time capsule was a copper cylinder and inside of the capsule were two copies of Mein Kampf, different newspapers, coins and documents. What wasn’t in the capsule however was something that had been spoken about for decades, which everyone thought would be there. Supposedly a documentary film which was made in 1933 was said to have been buried inside the capsule. To this day nobody knows if this film exists or is just folklore.

One of the great mysteries of World War II is glowing objects which look like balls of light that followed both Allied and Axis airplanes. The funny part of it is the Americans, after seeing so many advanced weapons in Germany, believed these objects to be a secret German weapon, but what they didn’t realize at the time was the Germans believed them to be American or British. After it was realized by the Americans these balls of light were not German weapons they nicknamed them Foo Fighters. We still don’t know for sure what they were.