World War II Unwound

Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Cambridge Five — Five Men, One Betrayal, Thirty Years Season 1, Episode 7 — The Spies & Secret Wars Every story this season has been about deception aimed outward — at Nazi Germany. This one is different. Five men. Recruited as students at Cambridge University in the early 1930s. Educated at one of the finest universities in the world. Trusted completely by...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: Operation Mincemeat — The Spy Who Never Lived Season 1, Episode 6 — The Spies & Secret Wars He had a fiancée. A bank manager who was annoyed with him. Theater ticket stubs from a night out in London. A locked briefcase full of secret documents, chained to his wrist. He had never been alive. In the spring of 1943, the body of "Major William Martin" wash...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Limping Lady — Virginia Hall and the Resistance the Gestapo Could Not Catch Season 1, Episode 5 — The Spies & Secret Wars The Gestapo in Lyon called her the most dangerous of all Allied spies. They circulated wanted posters across occupied France. Their chief — Klaus Barbie, the man who would become known as the Butcher of Lyon — said he would give anything...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Architects of Deception — The Men Who Planned D-Day Season 1, Episode 4 — The Spies & Secret Wars In the spring of 1943, a small planning staff in London was handed the largest problem in military history: design the invasion that would end the war in Europe. No commander had been named. No location was finalized. No resources were guaranteed. They had eight...

Send us Fan Mail The Germans believed it was mathematically impossible to break. The number of possible configurations ran into the hundreds of quintillions. No human being could check them all. No process known to exist could narrow them down fast enough. They were wrong. In a Victorian country house fifty miles north of London, ten thousand people — most of them women — worked in absolute secrec...

Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Zigzag Spy — The Bravado of Eddie Chapman Season 1, Episode 2 — The Spies & Secret Wars He was a safecracker. A criminal. A man who had escaped custody twice before the war even started. When Germany occupied Jersey in 1940, he didn't wait to be liberated — he approached the Abwehr and offered to spy for Nazi Germany. They trained him for over a year. R...

Send us Fan Mail The Man Nobody Wanted — How Juan Pujol Garcia Fooled Hitler and Saved D-Day Season 1, Episode 1 — The Spies & Secret Wars He had no military background. No intelligence training. No government connections. British intelligence turned him away. So he went home, sat at his kitchen table in Lisbon, and invented an entire network of twenty-seven secret agents — none of whom existe...