10 Badass War Heroes You've Never Heard Of
3. Albert Battel
A lot of these heroes are such because they killed a load of Nazis. It's the way you get the highest scores on Escape From Castle Wolfenstein, so it stands to reason that it's the way to ascend to badassery in real life, surely? Which isn't to say that you're necessarily precluded from being a forgotten war hero if you were fighting on the side of the Germans. Just that it significantly lowers your odds.
Albert Battel was clearly a gambling man, and confident in his skills as such, saving hundreds if not thousands of Jewish lives during his time as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. A respected lawyer who studied economics and jurisprudence in Munich and Breslau, Battel was a fine, upstanding member of the community who was stationed in Przemyl in southern Poland at the outbreak of World War II. The fifty-one-year-old reserve officer was due to oversee the SS liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in the city in 1942, a process which would've seen the entire population shipped off to concentration camps or executed there and then. Batel wouldn't stand for that.
With the support of his superior officer Battel ordered the bridge over the River San, the only access into the ghetto, to be blocked by his troops. When the SS commando squad due to carry out the liquidation arrived in Przemyl, the sergeant major informed his fellow Nazis that his men would open fire if they tried to get past them. Whilst his men held them off Battel snuck into the ghetto and personally evacuated up to 100 Jews and their families, all in broad daylight.
Himmler himself investigated the rebellion but nothing came of it and, before any punishment could be meted out, he was discharged from military service because of heart disease and died in 1952. He was posthumously recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1981.