It’s some of the celebrated heroic failures of the second world battle – the “nice escape” of dozens of allied prisoners of battle from a German camp by tunnelling below the wire.
As loosely depicted within the 1963 movie of the identical identify, 76 British and worldwide air power members efficiently escaped from the Stalag Luft III camp in March 1944, just for most of them to be recaptured and 50 brutally executed.
Virtually precisely 80 years on, historians re-examining wartime paperwork have uncovered a bombshell declare made by one of many escapers – that the murdered males have been betrayed by two English Nazi collaborators.
The allegation was made by Flt Lt Desmond Plunkett, a Royal Air Power officer who solid maps for the escapers and impressed the character performed by Donald Pleasence within the movie, which additionally starred Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough.
Not like Pleasence’s blind forger, who’s caught and killed after escaping, Plunkett was one of many few escapers whose life was spared after he was recaptured.
Writing in a questionnaire in Might 1945 after he was liberated from one other prisoner of battle camp, Plunkett wrote: “There are two people … whose actions have a direct bearing on the destiny of the 50 executed prisoners of battle.
“These two individuals have to be traced, as each are undoubtedly indigenous Englishmen, and have to be tried for his or her collaborating actions with the enemy.”
The declare got here to gentle this month on the Nationwide Archives in London, whereas the PoW questionnaires have been being digitised. Will Butler, the top of its navy information who curated its present exhibition on nice wartime escapes, stated no such claims of betrayal referring to the occasion had come to gentle earlier than.
“I’ve learn a number of the fabric that was produced postwar across the executions of the 50 officers, and I’ve by no means come throughout any suggestion that there was some form of collaboration,” he stated.
Did it occur? “It’s completely doable,” stated Butler. “There have been definitely many examples of the Nazi authorities inserting individuals in prisoner of battle camps posing as prisoners of battle however really engaged on behalf of the German state as brokers, both to foil escape makes an attempt or to assemble intelligence.”
That stated, given Plunkett didn’t repeat the assertion in his in depth debriefing after the battle, and the brutal therapy he had obtained after his recapture, “there are query marks, for certain”, over the declare’s reliability, Butler stated.
The historian Man Walters, writer of The Actual Nice Escape, agreed. “I feel [Plunkett] is mistaken, as a result of if he’s suggesting that two supposedly treacherous people have been answerable for the murders, I don’t see how that’s doable,” he stated. “As a result of the escapees … have been captured as a result of they made errors. They weren’t betrayed.
“It’s additionally inconceivable to see how two supposedly treacherous people might be answerable for their murders, as a result of these murders have been on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler.”
Not like the occasions depicted within the film, when the escapers are rounded up and shot en masse, “the murders have been carried out … by Gestapo officers in quite a few places all through the Third Reich, wherever the escapers managed to get to,” Walters stated. He has argued that it’s this atrocity, quite than the failed escape, which finally makes the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III outstanding. “It’s not an act of battle. It’s simply straight homicide. It’s grotesque, horrific.”
The rationale he believes Plunkett was mistaken – “and I hate to take concern with an incredible escaper” – is probably due to “paranoia understandably engendered by 10 months by the hands of the Gestapo, and a breakdown. I feel that he was placing two and two collectively and making 5.”