Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn was an Orthodox rabbi and the sixth Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement. He is also known as the Frierdiker Rebbe, the Rebbe RaYYaTz, or the Rebbe Rayatz. After many years of fighting to keep Orthodox Judaism alive from within the Soviet Union, he was forced to leave; he continued to conduct the struggle from Latvia, and then Poland, and eventually the United States, where he spent the last ten years of his life.

Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral and the chief of the Abwehr from 1935 to 1944. Canaris was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi regime. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, however, Canaris turned against Hitler and committed acts of both passive and active resistance during the war.