Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Escape

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

In 1944, several months before the D-Day invasion, a group of Allied prisoners of war hatched one of the most audacious prison escapes in military history.  Their prison camp was thought to be escape-proof, yet for almost a year, prisoners worked on tunnels right under the noses of their German guards.  Then on the appointed night, a large group of men escaped in the largest prison break of the war.  Learn more about Stalag Luft III and the Great Escape on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Noom  Noom is not just another diet or fitness app. It’s a comprehensive lifestyle program designed to empower you to make lasting changes and achieve your health goals. With Noom, you’ll embark on a personalized journey that considers your unique needs, preferences, and challenges. Their innovative approach combines cutting-edge technology with the support of a dedicated team of experts, including registered dietitians, nutritionists, and behavior change specialists. Sign up for your TRIAL today at Noom.com   Rocket Money  Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills—all in one place. It will quickly and easily find your subscriptions for you –and for any you don’t want to pay for anymore, just hit “cancel,” and Rocket Money will cancel it for you. It’s that easy. Stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions – and manage your expenses the easy way – by going to RocketMoney.com/daily Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1944, several months before the D-Day invasion, a group of allied prisoners of war hatched one of the most audacious prison escapes in military history. Their prison camp was thought to be escape-proof, yet for almost a year, prisoners worked on tunnels right under the noses of their German guards. Then, on the appointed night, a large group of men escaped in the largest prison break of the war. Learn more about Stalag Luft III and The Great Escape on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Being a prisoner of war is something that nobody really wants. Soldiers, for obvious reasons, don't want to be held prisoner. and opposing forces also, to a certain extent, don't want prisoners either. While it does take combatants off the battlefield, it also requires you to provide food and shelter and devote some of your resources to guarding them. The way that Germans dealt with prisoners during World War II was that each branch of the German

military was responsible for running its own prisons. They created different styles of prisons for housing different types of prisoners. A Stalog was a prison designed to hold enlisted soldiers. Stalog is short for Stomlogger. which is itself short for Kriegs Gfengagen Manshoff Stomlager. Officers were held in facilities known as O-Flegs or Officer Loggers. Naval personnel were held in Mar-Logs or Marine Lager facilities. Allied air crews that were shot down over German territory were held in facilities run by the Luftwaffe,

known as Stalaglufs or Luftwaffe Stomloggers. The events of this episode take place at a prison known as Stalag Luft III, which was located outside what is today, Jaugan Poland, which is about 30 kilometers or 18 miles from the current border with Germany. Stalag Luft 3 was purposely built on a site that was thought to be immune from tunneling,

which had always been one of the biggest escape threats. The soil on which the prison was built was very sandy. Sand is notoriously difficult to tunnel through as it will easily collapse. Moreover, the color of the soil made it easy to see on the clothing of the prisoners. Guards at the facility were told to be on watch for any dirt on prisoner clothing.

The barracks where the prisoners lived were elevated as to not allow easy access from the floor to the ground. Seismic microphones were also placed around the camp to detect the sounds of anyone digging. These measures were on top of the double 10-foot-high fence, gar towers, and other typical measures that you would find in a prison camp. The first compound of Stalag Luft III was constructed in April 1942. The camp, despite not being called an Oflag, almost exclusively held all. officers simply because most aviators were officers. The camp was populated mostly by British aviators who were shot down over German-controlled territory. One of the prisoners in the camp was squadron leader Roger Bushel. Bushel was shot down early in the war while providing air support

for the evacuating troops at Dunkirk on May 23, 1940. Bushel had become accomplished at attempting to escape. In May 1941, he broke out of a prison camp by cutting through the wire and was caught only a few hundred meters from the Swiss border. In October 1941, he jumped off a moving train while being transported. He managed to stay free for eight months in Prague under the protection of the Czech underground, before finally being portrayed by a Czech soldier who was a Gestapo informant. In May 1942, he was then transferred to Stalag Luft III, the supposedly escape-proof prison camp. There, given his experience with prison escapes, he was set up as the head of the camp escape committee, known as the X organization.

Bushal was given the name Big X. The first escape from Stalag Luft 3 took place in October of 1943. Bushel recognized the problem of tunneling such a long distance from the barracks to be on the fence. They solved this problem by creating a Trojan horse. In this case, it was literally a vaulting horse, the kind used in gymnastics. Every day, the men would take the horse outside for calisthenics and then put it in the exact same spot. However, the inside of the horse was hollow, and one or two men would be inside digging a tunnel using bowls. When they were done for the day, a wooden board was placed over the hole and dirt was put on top.

After three months of digging, they had a tunnel that went almost 30 meters or 100 feet. In October 19th, three men managed to escape. All three of the men managed to make their way to Sweden stowing away on ships, and the escape was dramatized in the 1950 movie, The Wooden Horse. Throughout 1943, more American aviators began filling the camp. Eventually, the Americans outnumbered the British three to one, and the total population of the camp grew to 10,000 prisoners. However, the Americans were usually kept in a separate section of the camp, and for the most part, didn't partake in the ex-organization. Even before the wooden horse escape in October, in March of 1943, Bushel had begun planning for something even bigger. Individuals or small groups escaping were one thing.

Bushal wanted to do a breakout where 220 prisoners would escape all at once. Trying to capture 220 Allied soldiers running around German occupied territory would take an enormous amount of resources and probably thousands of soldiers that would otherwise be used in the war effort. The plan was to dig not one, not two, but three tunnels that started in various barracks. The purpose of the three tunnels was that if one were found, progress could continue on the others. The theory was also that if one of the tunnels were discovered, the Germans would hardly expect two other tunnels of similar size to have already been dug. To get around the seismic microphones and poor soil, the tunnels were to be dug 30 feet or about 10

meters straight down. There, the soil would also be less sandy than was found on the surface. The tunnels were dubbed Tom, Dick, and Harry. The security around the operation was so tight that simply using the word tunnel could make you subject to a court-martial. The tunnels were started in three different huts. The holes were initially started under stoves or under shower drains, which actually had segments of the building foundation underneath them. And the tunnels were highly elaborate constructions, given the conditions that they were built under.

They had to be reinforced with wood, which was taken from bunks and the interior and rafters of the barracks. Air ventilation systems had to be created to pump air to the tunnelers, and electric lights were even strung up with wire that was stolen. Digging was done with modified, power. milk cans. The tunnelers would often work close to naked so that dirt would not get on their clothes and the guards would notice. One major problem was what to do with all of the dirt that was excavated from the tunnel. The eventual solution was to create long bags that would be placed

inside the pants of the prisoners. They would be filled with dirt and then as they walked around the prison yard, they would release dirt from the bottom of the bag and just kick it into the ground. An estimated 25,000 trips had to be made to remove all of the dirt from the tunnels. However, digging the tunnels was only one hurdle that had to be overcome. Once prisoners made it outside the fence, then what? They had to procure maps to know what was around them. They had to have civilian clothes to be able to blend in, and they needed forged documents to get through checkpoints.

Many of the things they had to make, and some of them they got by bribing German guards with chocolate and cigarettes they received from the Red Cross. An estimated 600 men were involved in various aspects of the escape attempt. As work on the tunnels continued, the Germans began to get suspicious that something was up. They transferred 19 of their biggest suspects to a different camp, even though only six of them were actually working on the project. In June 143, Bushel decided to halt work on Dick and Harry so they could focus all of their attention on Tom.

The dirt from Tom was used to fill in Dick, as it was now considered too dangerous to spread dirt in the yard. However, on September 8th, their work came to a halt when the Germans discovered Tom. The Germans destroyed Tom and tunneling activities were put on hold for several months. The destruction of Tom meant that all of the remaining efforts had to go into the construction of Harry. Work on Harry began again in January of 1944. After almost three months, the tunnel was believed to be ready. The escape committee scheduled to break for a night with a new moon, which was to be Friday, March 24th, 1944. The order of the escapees was determined by who had the best chance of making it in terms of language skills and who had put the most work into the project. Roger Bushel was to be one of

the first people through the tunnel. There was a problem, however. The tunnel was supposed to break through just past the tree line, which was outside the fence. However, the tunnel was about 10 meters from the tree line. The temperature was near freezing and there was snow on the ground. They had to go slowly. Instead of one man going out per minute, which was the plan, it was reduced to 10 per hour. During the escape, there were other problems as well. There was a collapse inside the tunnel which had to be cleared, and there was an air raid during the escape which caused the electricity to be cut, rendering the tunnel pitch black. The initial decision was to cancel the escape so they could go back and finish the tunnel properly, but they realized their forged documents were all dated for an escape of that night, so they had to go ahead. 76 men managed to escape before the Germans found out what was happening.

When word of the escape spread, Hitler was furious. He demanded that they all be captured and executed. When it was pointed out to him by Heinrich Himmler and other high-ranking Nazis that it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention and that it would hurt their relations with neutral countries, and it could also result in reprisals against German pilots, Hitler consented to just having 50 of them executed. Over the next several days and weeks, a manhunt took place throughout every area under German control. Back at the camp, the Germans were astonished at the scope of the operation.

Thousands of bedboards, dozens of bunks, hundreds of mattresses, thousands of utensils, and other equipment were unaccounted for, and had all been used in the escape attempt. The escapees had problems the moment they left camp. It was an unusually cold march with deep snow, so cross-country travel wasn't possible. Some of the maps they had were wrong, which resulted in many men missing their trains. In the end, 73 of the 76 escapees were caught. Of the 73, 50 of them were executed, as per Hitler's orders. The only three prisoners to make it to freedom were Per Bergseland and Jens Mueller, both of whom were Norwegian pilots, and Bram van der Stoke, a Dutch pilot. Bergseland and Mueller made it to Sweden with the help of sympathetic Swedish seamen, and Vanderstock,

crossed the entirety of Europe using his language skills and crossed the Pyrenees into neutral Spain and then finally into British Gibraltar on July 8th. Robert Bushel, the mastermind of the plan, was executed alongside the road outside of Ramstein, Germany on March 29th. After the war, the execution of the escaped prisoners, which was a violation of the Geneva Convention, was considered a war crime. Members of the Gestapo who were responsible were brought up on charges at the Nuremberg trials, and several of them were executed or imprisoned.

The mass escape from Stalag Luft 3 has been dubbed The Great Escape, and it's been the subject of books as well as a very popular 1963 movie of the same name, starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough. The escape from Stalag Luft 3 remains one of the greatest prison breaks of any kind in history. The fact that so many men were able to do so much under such conditions and under such scrutiny does indeed earn it the distinction of being called the Great Escape. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

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