Built to be escape-proof, this camp lost 76 airmen through a tunnel called Harry — then the Gestapo shot 50 of the recaptured men in cold blood.
Stalag Luft III opened in March 1942 near Sagan in Nazi-occupied Poland, a Luftwaffe-run camp for captured Allied airmen that the Germans considered escape-proof. It sat on sandy soil that collapsed easily, its huts were raised off the ground so guards could see any digging, and seismograph microphones were buried around the perimeter to detect tunneling. The prisoners took all of this as a challenge.
In spring 1943 Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, an RAF pilot who had already escaped twice, took charge of the escape organization and proposed something audacious: three tunnels dug at once, code-named Tom, Dick, and Harry, with the goal of getting more than 200 men out in a single night. Bushell banned the word 'tunnel' in camp entirely. Over 600 prisoners took part in the effort.
The tunnels went straight down about 30 feet before running horizontally, deep enough to defeat the microphones, and were only two feet square. Prisoners shored them up with more than 4,000 bed boards, built a railway to haul sand and men, and rigged air pumps from kit bags and hockey sticks. Klim powdered-milk tins from Red Cross parcels became shovels, lamps, and ventilation ducting.
Getting rid of the excavated sand was the hardest problem, because it was bright yellow and obvious against the grey surface soil. 'Penguins' carried it in bags hidden inside their trousers and scattered it while walking the compound, and prisoners spread it under the cover of tending garden plots. Tom was found by the Germans and blown up with dynamite; Dick was abandoned when the camp expanded over its exit and became a storeroom, so everything focused on Harry.
Harry ran from under a stove in Hut 104 for about 100 metres. On the night of 24–25 March 1944 the escape began, but the exit hatch had emerged short of the treeline, in the open near a guard tower, and it was frozen shut, costing an hour and a half. An air raid killed the camp lights, the tunnel partly collapsed, and men crawled out at roughly ten per hour instead of the hoped-for one a minute.
By the time the 77th man was spotted by a guard at about 5 a.m., 76 prisoners had got out — the largest POW escape of the war. It was the coldest March in three decades, with snow feet deep, forcing the 'hard-arsers' who traveled on foot onto the roads. Within days 73 of the 76 had been recaptured across the Reich.
Hitler, enraged, first wanted every recaptured man shot; talked down by Göring and Keitel who feared reprisals against German aircrew, he ordered that 'more than half' be killed. The Gestapo took 50 of the recaptured officers out in ones and twos, told them to relieve themselves by the roadside, and shot them in the back, then cremated the bodies. Roger Bushell was among them, killed near Kaiserslautern.
Only three men made it home. Norwegians Per Bergsland and Jens Müller rode trains to the Baltic and got a ship to neutral Sweden, and Dutch pilot Bram van der Stok worked his way across occupied Europe to a British consulate in Spain. A few recaptured men were spared apparently by luck of their names — one was thought to be related to Admiral Nelson, another shared a surname with Winston Churchill.
The RAF regarded the killings as murder, not a legitimate act of war. After 1945 the RAF Police Special Investigation Branch hunted the killers across a ruined Germany; several former Gestapo men were tried and hanged, and the murder of the fifty was charged at the Nuremberg High Command trial. A memorial built by the prisoners near the camp still marks the fifty dead.
The story reached a mass audience through Paul Brickhill's 1950 book The Great Escape — Brickhill had been a prisoner in the compound — and the 1963 film starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough. The film compressed events and added an American role and a motorcycle chase that never happened, but the tunnels, the sand disposal, and the fate of the fifty were real.