The Great Escape: 76 officers flee and Hitler's revenge

On a cold March night in 1944, one of World War II's most daring operations unfolded in the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III in Sagan, now Żagań in Poland. Here, 76 Allied prisoners of war, primarily British and Commonwealth officers, escaped through a secret tunnel under the barbed-wire fence in an event that became legendary as The Great Escape.

This extensive escape was the culmination of a year of meticulous planning, led by the charismatic British officer Roger Bushell. Via a network of three tunnels – Tom, Dick, and Harry – these military prisoners initiated the most complex escape attempt of the war, an achievement born of engineering genius, patience, and strong collaboration. However, the triumph was short-lived. Of the 76 escaped soldiers, 73 were quickly recaptured. In a brutal act of revenge, Adolf Hitler personally ordered the summary execution of 50 of them – an act that would later be branded a war crime. Their story, marked by courage, cunning, and ultimate tragedy, reveals the extremes of human experience under the atrocities of war.

Stalag Luft III: 'Escape-proof' camp and surveillance

Stalag Luft III opened in March 1942 and was designed by the German air force, the Luftwaffe, specifically for the imprisonment of Allied airmen. The camp's location in Lower Silesia, Poland, was carefully chosen; the loose sandy soil was supposed to make tunnelling impossible. High watchtowers with machine guns constantly monitored the area to prevent any escape. The camp consisted of four interconnected compounds – North, South, East, and West – each with its own administration. The prisoner huts, which at their peak housed around 10,494 POWs, were raised 60 cm off the ground to hinder underground activities and facilitate inspection.

The Germans employed advanced security measures, including specially trained guards known as "Ferrets," who constantly searched the huts for signs of digging. Microphones, buried along the fence line, were intended to detect sounds from any escape attempts. Despite this, the POWs managed to circumvent these measures, partly by concealing ventilation shafts in the hut walls, from which the noise of loud parlour games camouflaged the digging.

Roger Bushell's 'X Committee': Tunnels and escape plans

In the North Compound of Stalag Luft III, an effective underground resistance movement emerged. In 1943, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, an experienced RAF pilot with previous escape attempts behind him, assembled a secret "X Committee." His plan for this historic escape was both radical and ambitious: 200 men were to escape through three separate tunnels – Tom, Dick, and Harry – ensuring there was always a backup if one was discovered. This military operation required a precise hierarchical structure with specialised teams of soldiers.

The tunnel diggers, led by "Tunnel King" Wally Floody, worked in shifts and improvised tools from cutlery and bed boards. Each digger worked only for short periods to avoid oxygen deprivation in the narrow passages. The "Penguins" team, responsible for soil disposal, discreetly dispersed up to 100 tons of excavated sand by letting it trickle from specially designed pockets in their trousers or mixing it with garden soil. In Tim Walenn's "Dean & Dawson" workshop, forgery experts produced over 400 fake passports, work permits, and train tickets, made with ink from beechwood ash and pens carved from bone. Selected escape candidates also underwent an intensive training program with mock interrogations, German language lessons, and survival courses to prepare them for life outside captivity.

Tunnel building: From 'Tom' to 107m long 'Harry'

The digging of the three tunnels, Tom, Dick, and Harry, developed into an intense psychological war against the German guards. Each tunnel presented unique challenges. Tunnel Tom, started in Hut 123, reached a length of 30 metres before a guard accidentally stepped through the ground surface in September 1943. The Germans dynamited Tom, but the incident provided the Allied POWs with valuable knowledge about the soil's stability. Tunnel Dick, hidden under a sewer cover in Hut 122, was later converted into a storage area for forged uniforms and documents when the Germans began constructing a new camp section directly over its planned exit.

Tunnel Harry became the most complex and ultimately the crucial tunnel for The Great Escape. Originating under an iron stove in Hut 104, the POWs crawled down a 7.5-metre-deep shaft, after which the tunnel stretched 107 metres under the Vorlager (ante-camp) area and the road, aiming for the forest. An ingenious ventilation pump, constructed from 480 KLIM milk tins and a hand-cranked bellows, supplied vital oxygen to the diggers underground.

Escape night: 'Harry's wrong exit and 76 escapees

On the night of March 24, 1944, at 8:30 PM, the first prisoner, Johnny Travis, set foot on the frozen ground outside the barbed-wire fence of Stalag Luft III. But the escape through tunnel Harry quickly ran into problems: The exit turned out to be 3 metres short of the forest edge, positioned directly in the line of sight from guard tower 8. This critical error meant that only one man could leave the tunnel every six minutes, instead of the planned one-minute interval, fatally delaying the operation.

Of the 200 soldiers scheduled to participate in this daring escape, only 76 managed to get out before a guard discovered tracks in the snow at 5:00 AM, leading to a massive wave of arrests.

Reprisals: Three escaped, Hitler's order and murders

Only three of the escaped prisoners of war reached ultimate freedom: Norwegian Jens Müller, who hid in a freight wagon to Sweden; Dutchman Bram van der Stok, who reached England with the help of the Dutch resistance; and Norwegian Per Bergsland, who escaped via a sewer in Szczecin to a Swedish cargo ship. News of The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III quickly reached Adolf Hitler. His reaction was brutal: He issued the infamous "Sagan Order" (Sagan-Befehl) directive, which ordered that all recaptured airmen be shot "while trying to escape."

The Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, carried out this cruel order, resulting in the summary execution of 50 of the recaptured men. They were shot in the back of the neck in remote locations, including at autobahn lumberjack huts and in fields. Among the victims of this mass killing were six Polish pilots. This act constituted a clear war crime. Only 23 of the 76 escaped soldiers survived the war and captivity to later testify about these events at the Nuremberg trials.

Operation Purple Cross: Gestapo hunt and Hamburg trial

After the end of World War II, British intelligence officers launched Operation Purple Cross to track down the Gestapo members responsible for these war crimes and the mass murder of the 50 Allied soldiers. At a subsequent trial in Hamburg's Curio Haus in 1947, 18 former Gestapo men stood accused of their involvement. Documents found in the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) bunker in Berlin proved that the victims had been transported to remote locations under the false pretence of being returned to captivity, after which they were brutally executed. Thirteen of the accused were sentenced to death by hanging for their role in these murders; the remainder received life sentences.

Legacy of The Great Escape: Museum and Geneva changes

On the former site of Stalag Luft III in Żagań, Poland, a replica of Hut 104 now stands as a museum, erected by RAF veterans in 1995. Here, visitors can see the original entrance of tunnel Harry and many of the handmade items used by the POWs during their captivity and escape preparations. The historic event is immortalised in the 1963 film *The Great Escape*, based on Paul Brickhill's book of the same name. Although the film has secured The Great Escape a place in popular culture, it dramatises certain elements; for example, Steve McQueen's famous motorcycle chase is pure fiction.

The true legacy of The Great Escape, however, runs deeper. This remarkable escape directly inspired MI9's future training programs in evasion techniques for British soldiers and contributed to a strengthening of the Geneva Convention's rules for the treatment of prisoners of war. The 50 murders that followed in the wake of the escape were not merely personal tragedies but stand as a grim symbol of the Nazi regime's terror and inhumanity – an eternal reminder of the ethical boundaries that apply even during war.

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