On March 24 1944, one of the most audacious projects carried out during WW2 occurred. It was the mass escape of Allied soldiers from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III, the story of which was forever immortalised in the 1963 film The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen.
Stalag Luft III was a German POW camp situated deep within Nazi-occupied Poland, some 100 miles southeast of Berlin. The camp held thousands of captured Allied airmen during WW2 and was considered one of the hardest to escape from. Three design features made tunnelling almost impossible â the loose collapsible sandy soil upon which the camp was built, elevated prisoner housing to expose tunnels and the placement of seismograph microphones around the perimeter of the camp. None of that was to deter RAF Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, who conceived the plan for the mass escape in the spring of 1943.
The massive manhunt that the Naziâs subsequently mobilised proved successful and within two weeks all but 73 of the 76 had been recaptured – two Norwegians and a Dutchman managed to evade capture. The Norwegian pair made it by train to the port at Stettin. There they were smuggled onto a Swedish ship and taken back to the safety of Gothenburg. The Dutchman made it across most of occupied Europe via rail, foot and bike, aided along the way by various resistance movements. Heâd eventually end up in Gibraltar and was flown from there to England, where he would rejoin the RAF and go on to fight during Operation Overload.
As for the recaptured 73 men, 23 of them were sent to other various Nazi prison camps. The other 50 were not so lucky. An enraged Hitler personally ordered their execution, a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. Whilst the movie depicts the men being killed in a single massacre, the Gestapo actually carried out the Fuhrerâs orders by killing the men singly or in pairs along quiet country lanes and in secluded locations.
Military History Society of Rochester
rochestermilitary.com
