Overview

Stalag Luft III was a specially built German prison camp designed to hold the most determined escapers - officers and men from the RAF. Their spectacularly daring escape plan was on an awe-inspiring scale: 650 prisoners working for an entire year to build the longest and most sophisticated tunnel under a POW camp. The tragic end, with 50 captured prisoners shot in cold blood on Hitler's personal orders, led to its own lengthy war crimes prosecution and executions. Drawing together the meticulous research carried out for the trial, interviews with the families and friends of the murdered men and with surviving veterans of the camp, Anton Gill provides us with a definitive account of this legendary break-out and its aftermath.

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The drama and thrill of the famous film of the same name pales in comparison to the true history of the biggest British break-out of the Second World War. This is an immaculately researched history of the 76 Allied RAF officers who planned, prepared and then executed their ingenious escape from the prison camp Stalag-Luft III on that windy spring night in 1944. In addition to detailing the mechanics of the numerous escape attempts that led finally to the breakout on 24 March, Gill sets the story in context by telling us of the socio-political background of the war, its progress and the legislative history of the Nazi prison camp system. Gill persistently returns to the biography of the individuals who figured in the escape, fleshing them out as much more than the archetypal Boy's Own heroes they have come to seem. They were many of them exceptional, but still susceptible to the ordinary fears, weaknesses and frustrations of all men: petty jealousy, cowardice, foolhardiness, even simple claustrophobia. It was the determination to escape that set them apart, that and a sense of military honour that was shared by the prisoners and their guards. Those were the days when the commandant would still invite the senior officers to a formal dinner the night after they were caught escaping, and when we discover the eventual fate of the escapers at the hands of Nazi captors who, by then, had lost patience with their persistence, we feel a real sense of loss. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Anton Gill read English at Cambridge University and became a full-time writer in 1984. He has published over twenty books, mainly in the field of contemporary history, including a study of Berlin between the wars and a history of the German resistance to Hitler

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