The night of April 17, 1945 was a dramatic one in the Bavarian town of Ansbach. The Third Reich was on the verge of collapse and U.S. forces were besieging the city. They would take it in less than 24 hours. That night a small, courageous group of young anti-Nazis tried to get the town to surrender without bloodshed or destruction.

The tragic events of that night and the following morning would enable one of Germany's most important postwar historians to clear his name of accusations that he was pro-Nazi. Through a web of lies and half-truths, the historian, Karl Bosl, swept away his Nazi past and replaced it with the image of a brave opponent of the Nazis.

Research by Prof. Benjamin Z. Kedar, the vice president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Peter Herde of Wurzburg University in Germany, has exposed what really happened that night, as well as Bosl's true Nazi past. As a result, the government of the Bavarian city where Bosl was born, Cham, announced about two weeks ago that it was changing the name of a square from Dr.-Karl-Bosl-Platz and removing a statue of Bosl from town hall....