14 Real Life Heroes Who Have Changed The World

5. Witold Pilecki

Pilecki experienced the true horrors of war...voluntarily. Witold Pilecki was a member of the Polish resistance and when these unknown camps started appearing all over Poland during the 1940s, he made it his mission to discover what secrets the Nazi party were hiding. He deliberately got himself arrested by the Nazis so that he could infiltrate one of the camps, Auschwitz.

He spent two and a half years in Auschwitz sending back his intelligence to the Polish government so that they were able to convince their allies that the concentration camps were death camps. He sent his intelligence through a radio that he built in the camp with smuggled parts. He later escaped and sent information to London where they assumed that the figures provided were clearly exaggerated. They did not believe that 5 million people were killed over 5 years at the camps.

His own country then sentenced him to death with charges of espionage and the illegal crossing of the borders under a false name. Poland killed their greatest war hero of all time but he was later rehabilitated and given a promotion to Colonel in 1990, 42 years after his execution.