Poland on Sunday marked the 80th anniversary of the “Great Escape,” a masterful act of defiance during World War II in which 76 prisoners of war dug a tunnel from a German prison camp into a snowy forest.
British soldiers carried photos of the pilots murdered on Hitler’s orders at the ceremony, which was also attended by the British ambassador to Poland and marked the culmination of a weekend of commemorations.
During World War II, Nazi prisoner-of-war camps housed captured Allied airmen, including British, American and Polish soldiers, with British pilots leading the escapes. The area was part of Germany at the time, but is now located in western Poland.
Sunday’s ceremony also included a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft and four F-16 fighter jets from the Polish Air Force, which flew over the town of Zagan and the ceremony site, Polish media reported.
On the night of March 24, 1944, most of the soldiers who escaped from Stalag Luft III met a tragic end. Only three people arrived safely. Others were captured and 50 of them were executed.
Although it was largely a failure, it became known as “The Great Escape” and was celebrated in a highly fictionalized 1963 film starring Steve McQueen.
The escape was recently featured in an episode of the American war drama miniseries Air Masters on Apple TV+.
A new exhibition at the British National Archives in London also pays tribute to the escapees.
The prisoners spent a year secretly digging three tunnels, named Tom, Dick and Harry. The Germans discovered the first tunnel, but the other two still exist.
Harry’s plan was for 200 people to escape through the tunnel, but on the night of the escape, the first people to emerge realized that the tunnel did not extend as far beyond the barbed wire as they had expected. Only after 76 people managed to escape did a guard notice footprints in the snow.
Three men – two Norwegian pilots and a Dutch pilot – were the only ones to successfully escape.
Adolf Hitler was so outraged by the escape that he ordered the execution of 73 of those captured, and the Nazis ultimately decided to kill 50 – all in violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
After the war, the murders of Allied pilots formed part of the Nuremberg trials, and several Gestapo officers were sentenced to death.
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