A few years ago, as her father was succumbing to dementia, journalist Lucinda Franks discovered a small box in his dilapidated apartment. Beneath mysterious maps and crumpled foreign banknotes, she found a military cap adorned with a Nazi insignia: an eagle, a skull and crossbones, and a swastika.
Franks knew little about her father's WWII service and had long sensed he was hiding something. "Was my sphinx-like father presenting one character and living another?" she writes in her memoir, My Father's Secret War. When she pressed him, he refused to speak, citing a decades-old pledge of secrecy.
After years of investigation and conversations with her ailing father, Franks pieced together his story. Fluent in German, he had been a spy and occasional assassin. The Nazi cap was part of his disguise as a Waffen SS member, worn the night he infiltrated a Gestapo headquarters, killed a guard, and sought files listing people wanted by the Nazis.
Near the end of his life, he finally explained why he kept the hat: because of the "death's head" insignia. "I never wanted to forget who these German soldiers really were."