Anyone for whom a screening of the film The Great Escape is an annual Christmas tradition will know how strong a hold the myth of that escapade holds over the collective British imagination. But a myth is all it is. The old 1960s movie, with its star-studded cast performing stiff upper lip heroics, manages to turn a horrific tragedy and crime into an ‘Allo Allo’ style farce akin to Carry On Tunneling.

Now, the escape from the Stalag Luft III prisoner of war camp in Silesia (now Poland), and its terrifying reality, is in the news again. Almost exactly 80 years after the breakout a document has been discovered in the National Archives at Kew claiming that the escape mission was betrayed by two unnamed English traitors.

The mass murder of the camp’s escapees was a war crime

The previously unknown document was found in the National Archives during preparations for an exhibition on the escape. It was written by Flight Lt Desmond Plunkett, one of the lucky few prisoners who survived after being recaptured and held by the Gestapo for several months. 76 men who broke out of the camp in March 1944. Notoriously, fifty were shot in cold blood by the Gestapo on Hitler’s direct orders after they were rearrested.

Plunkett – loosely portrayed by the actor Donald Pleasance in the film – was the camp forger who made many of the fake ID documents used by the escapees. According to the historian Guy Walters, Plunkett may have become paranoid about planted traitors in the camp while he was held by the Gestapo. There is no other evidence, Walters said, that the Nazis had stool pigeons in Stalag Luft III. There is also no evidence to suggest Plunkett repeated his claims elsewhere when being debriefed after the war.

The mass murder of the camp’s escapees was a war crime, but was only tacked on as an afterthought at the end of John Sturges’s big screen version of the story.

QOSHE - The Great Escape was a great disaster - Nigel Jones
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The Great Escape was a great disaster

3 1
22.03.2024

Anyone for whom a screening of the film The Great Escape is an annual Christmas tradition will know how strong a hold the myth of that escapade holds over the collective British imagination. But a myth is all it is. The old 1960s movie, with its star-studded cast performing stiff upper lip heroics, manages to turn a horrific tragedy and crime into an ‘Allo Allo’ style farce akin to Carry On Tunneling.

Now, the escape from the Stalag Luft III prisoner of........

© The Spectator


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