Poland

The electrician who signed the Gdańsk Agreement with an oversized pen for the cameras may also have signed a secret police collaboration agreement a decade earlier, and Polish historians still can't agree which document says more about him.

Germany staged a fake Polish attack on its own radio station to justify a war it had already secretly agreed to split with the Soviet Union, and the order Hitler gave his forces going in left no doubt the killing was meant to go beyond soldiers.

A Russian official's plan to draft young Polish radicals into decades of army service to defuse unrest instead set off the very rebellion he was trying to prevent, and its defeat produced the single largest deportation in Russian history.