Originally someone else asked this somewhere, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and now my intrigue about it has become a clone of theirs.

I hear a lot of stories that sound like they were probably made up, both from WWII and other wars. Like the guy who survived falling out of a plane only to be captured by the Germans and then released because the Germans were impressed that he survived. Or the guy who escaped Auschwitz only to track down his attacker and then just decide to forgive him at the last minute. Or the guy who shot Genghis Khan with an arrow only to be hired by him because, again, he was impressed.

Say it with me. Who verifies this stuff? For starters, the constant idea of being spared because your enemies were “impressed” sounds both counter-intuitive and suspiciously tropey. Imagine being spared by Genghis Khan and having the Mongols just assume you’re not going to backstab them and ask Genghis “hey, want to be impressed again?”

Meanwhile, the WWII ones in particular are everywhere. I kind of thought they weren’t so noticeable. Then they became impossible to ignore. They’re in every five videos. Hitler somehow has five times the number of ironic factoids about him than other famous people. Hmm…

If you had to bet on any war story (be it from a person, video, etc. just as long as it’s not meant to be taken as fiction) being made up, which one would it be?