Okay, so this young Jewish boy is in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. His mother was immediately gassed upon coming to the place, but he dreams about her often. One night, she tells him that she's going to send him an angel. So one day, he sees this little girl hiding behind a tree right outside the camp's fence, just watching everything that's going on. And then she takes an apple out of her pocket and throws it over the fence to him, and he catches it and runs off before the guards see. Every day, she comes back and sneaks him food, and though they never speak, he starts calling her his "Angel Girl". Then, one day, the boy gets shipped to another camp, and figures he'll never see her again.

After liberation, the boy goes to America. It's been fifteen years since he was in the camp, and his friends arrange a blind date for him. He and the lady get to talking about their lives in Europe. She was Jewish, but her family had posed as Christians to escape the Nazis. He tells her about this little girl who threw him apples while he was in the concentration camp.

Turns out, she's the exact same girl.

Six months later, they got married, and they're still living happily after today.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/20/earlyshow/main4532220.shtml

A fourteen-year-old African-American boy walks into a store and asks the white lady behind the counter, "Hey, babe, what's up?"
A few days later he is found dead, having been beaten to death and dumped in a river. His body is almost unrecognizable.

More here. Warning: pictures are INCREDIBLY disturbing. I almost threw up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

Definitely should have been fiction. This sounds like something a tyrant in some sort of novel would do to a rebellious peasant or a courtier getting too involved with a lady he likes. Not part of American history.

of a British spy who slept with the German ambassador during WWII or something...the details are blurry...
Anyways, the two had an affair, he'd tell her stuff that's going on, and she'd report them back. After the war, though, the two got married.

And there was also that Russian spy who was found out by a hollow nickel and a overly curious paper boy.

It even sounds like the title of a book or something.

The story: a bunch of ridiculously intelligent scientists get together in various locations across the country, each site working on a piece of a secret project for the government according to the specifications of a theory laid down years ago. Nobody really knows what it's all about... until the government bombs Japan.

Scary stuff.

~Neshomeh

Two palaeontologists who started as friends, even naming species after each other ... and then became rivals. Even enemies. These guys used to bribe quarry owners to spy and attempted to blow up each other's fossil localities. In the process of chasing each other up and down the country in an attempt to be the better palaeontologist, they discovered between them almost every dinosaur you could call 'famous'.

And the other ones were mostly discovered by Gideon Mantell. And his story would have made fantastic fiction; a poor country doctor became so consumed by his passion for fossils and geology that he lost his wife, his children, his home, his job ... and ended up making an enemy of Richard Owen, who plagiarised his work, had him refused membership of learned societies ... and when Mantell finally died, got possession of the poor man's twisted spine as an anatomical curiosity, because Owen was in charge of a museum. Oh, and he wrote a very nasty bitchy anonymous obituary for Mantell as well. Of course, it bit him in the arse because his behaviour to Mantell was so despicable that he lost his own position at the various learned societies ...

Radio, radio control, wireless electricity, AC power, the Niagara Falls generating station, death rays in a couple different flavors... the guy was incredible.

Those are some pretty eggs. Probably cost fortunes, too. x.X Plural.

Hmm... I can't think of much off the top of my head, though there's undoubtedly tens of thousands of examples out there. But did you know, it used to be fairly commonplace for ballerinas to essentially spontaneously combust?

No joke. Back when they used fire for stage lighting, most dancers doused their costumes in fire-retardent liquid (I don't remember exactly what) because, well, get too close and it's up in flames. However, some dancers ignored this because it made their costumes look "dingy," or something to that effect.

You can guess what happened the next time they danced too close to the lights.

Also, IMO, the amount of things Windows will choose to crash over is almost comical.

An absurdly creative writer and officer in the Royal Air Force is sent by the British government to investigate America's feelings prior to their involvement in World War II. He accomplishes this by seducing every woman rumored to be anti-British and gathering information from them. In addition, his writings earn him the adoration of the First Lady and her children.

Said writer was Roald Dahl, who along with Noel Coward and Ian Fleming worked as a spy for the British government. It would have made an awesome novel.

Adolf Hitler carried one king-size idiot ball after another! He even, on D-Day, refused to dispatch tanks, assuming Normandy was a cover target!

Speaking of cover targets, there was the whole affair of the man who never was. That's a weird plot device, used in the real world! And once again, the big bad -- and his generals -- fell for it completely!