Did you know the Germans lost secret war plans in enemy territory... twice?

Losing a top-secret plan for an operation just a few days before the operation begins is bad in any war. It's even worse when you lose it in enemy territory. And if you do this twice... well, you're very unlucky or very careless. And that's what Nazi Germany did during World War II.

On January 10, 1940, Major Erich Hönmanns, the base commander of Loddenheide airfield in West Germany, took off in an unarmed recon and liaison plane to fly to Cologne. He wanted to log some flying hours and take the laundry to his wife in Cologne, but he also offered to take Major Helmuth Reinberger there, since the major was on the way to the city anyway. Hönmanns got lost due to fog covering the ground, and ended up in Belgium, where he had to land on a field after accidentally cutting fuel to his engine.

Unknown to Hönmanns, his passenger was carrying secret documents related to Case Yellow, the German invasion of France, originally scheduled for January 17, just a week after the incident. The documents only detailed a small part of the plan, but they related to the supply of a parachute division that was scheduled to land behind Belgian lines during the attack, and it was enough to put together the big picture. Reinberger tried and failed to burn the documents twice: first in the bushes with a match given by a local farmer, then in a stove in the border guardhouse they were taken to. The remains of the partially burned document caused an international crisis in Western Europe, which only abated when the planned day of the invasion came and went without an incident – the German plans were delayed until May, partially due to the incident, and partially because of poor weather.

Then something very similar happened again two and a half years later. The war on the Eastern Front had been already raging for a year, when Major Joachim Reichel's observation plane wandered over Soviet anti-air defenses and shot down in Soviet-controlled territory. He was carrying maps with details of Case Blue, the German plan to push toward Southern Russia.

This time, the Germans were saved from an embarrassing catastrophe by the incredulity of Joseph Stalin, who declared that the maps were a ruse, since the next German step was clearly going to be an attack against Moscow (an idea partly planted in his head by a German deception operation).

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