- A Nazi POW camp in the heart of the Third Reich.
- Stalag Luft III was a specially designed camp
to incarcerate those men
who had undergone escape activities.
[dramatic music]
- Crawling with spies.
- A standard German tactic to deal with escapes
and disturbances was to occasionally insert a mole.
- One brave British officer organizes an audacious escape.
- Bushell also hopes that a mass escape
will divert resources away from the fighting on the front.
♪ ♪
- Can he and his men break
Hitler's iron grip and tunnel to freedom?
- The tunnel wasn't long enough.
And they were right beneath one of the observation towers.
- That wasn't the only problem of the night.
- About 1:30 in the morning...
♪ ♪
They had a collapse.
♪ ♪
- Some of the greatest stories ever told
start behind bars.
♪ ♪
Locked up in the most notorious prisons
in the world,
spied on by guards and fellow prisoners.
It takes a devious mind to find a way out.
♪ ♪
It could lead you to freedom,
or it could cost you your life.
♪ ♪
But wouldn't you try when you have nothing left to lose?
♪ ♪
[dark music]
♪ ♪
Stalag Luft III,
a most notorious Nazi prison camp of World War II.
It holds Allied airmen
who have already tried to break out of other POW camps.
This one is designed to be different.
Escape-proof.
♪ ♪
The barracks are up on stilts,
making it hard to hide a tunnel entrance.
The dirt is soft like sand,
so tunnels are highly unstable.
And there's an array of seismograph microphones
listening for the sounds of digging.
♪ ♪
If you try an above-ground escape route,
there are two barbed wire fences,
armed guards manning the watch towers
24 hours a day.
And even before you get to the fences,
there is a warning trip wire.
Anyone who attempts to cross this line
will be shot on sight.
♪ ♪
But one man is determined to escape
and bring hundreds of airmen with him.
He envisions a prison break so massive,
it could destabilize the German front
and turn the tide of the war against the Nazis.
This man is 33-year-old
RAF squadron leader Roger Bushell.
♪ ♪
- Roger Bushell was South African by birth,
from an English family.
He joined the Royal Auxiliary Air Force,
and he was a squadron leader when the war began.
Amongst his first assignments
was to lead a unit of his squadron over to France
to shadow the evacuation of Dunkirk.
And Bushell's air war ended almost before it began
because he was shot down relatively early in the day
on one of his first missions.
- Bushell was captured by Nazi forces...
♪ ♪
But no POW camp is able to hold him.
- Roger Bushell was one of the higher-ranking
Air Force prisoners at the beginning, and that,
coupled with his immensely strong personality,
kind of propelled him
to the front of the escape organizations.
- As long as there are prisoners during the war,
there are plans made by some of them to escape.
Some of these dashes to freedom are organized
by groups of soldiers, and some are solo attempts
by prisoners desperate to break free.
- He escaped a number of times,
but the one that really got him into trouble,
he and a colleague escaped from a train,
and his colleague was Czech, and so their intention
was to head towards Czechoslovakia.
- In Czechoslovakia, Bushell and his colleagues
find shelter with a local family
sympathetic to the Allies' cause.
- The only thing that went wrong
was they found themselves in Czechoslovakia
at roughly the time the Reich commissar, Reinhard Heydrich,
was assassinated, and the entire country
went into a kind of police operation lockdown.
Everyone who was remotely suspicious was swept up,
including Roger Bushell.
- Bushell and the other soldier are caught,
and his link to the Czech family
is eventually uncovered by anonymous sources.
- And the family that sheltered these two airmen
were executed down to the last person.
Bushell learned this.
He was, by all accounts, not only outraged,
but almost broken.
It sharpened his hatred of Nazis,
which became almost pathological,
and it made him almost obsessively determined
to do whatever he could to undermine, disrupt,
disturb the Nazi regime.
- Bushell is taken to the one place
that Nazis know can hold him: Stalag Luft III.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Stalag Luft III was a brand-new camp,
and what it was intending to do was bring in people who tried
to escape from other camps from across Germany.
- It's considered escape-proof by the Nazi regime,
but that doesn't scare Bushell.
As soon as he arrives,
Bushell is already thinking about escaping.
- He is very quickly made the leader
of the camp's escape committee,
known as the X Organization.
He becomes the Big X of the committee.
- Roger was Big X, and I think that was a title
he wore quite proudly and that was never challenged.
- Bushell is clearly the mastermind of the escape,
but he doesn't act alone.
♪ ♪
Jerzy Mondschein
is the engineer.
Tim Walenn
is the document forger.
Only a few other men know the full scope of the plan.
Bushell is in command of the escape committee,
but now he needs an actual escape plan.
- Tunnelling is the most conventional,
and therefore the most expected,
means of escape.
The Germans are actively looking
for tunnels in the camp.
And there are dozens of attempts to tunnel out.
Bushell and the other men know this,
so he comes up with an audacious plan
to simultaneously construct not one, not two,
but three tunnels, the idea here being that
if the Germans were to discover one tunnel and destroy it,
it was highly unlikely that they would ever assume
that one or two other tunnels of the same magnitude
were being constructed at the same time.
- The Nazis have a special team
in charge of discovering escape attempts,
elite soldiers nicknamed Ferrets.
- The Ferrets have been brought in specifically
by the Luftwaffe as part of their plan
to make a kind of escape-proof camp,
specially trained guards who had experience
with prisoners in the past.
And the Ferrets were tremendously effective.
They were worthy adversaries for the prisoners.
And I think both sides
maybe not enjoyed this battle of wills,
but they certainly entered into it with great spirit.
- One of the things that Roger Bushell
and his mates worked out
was how important it was to have absolute secrecy.
- The tunnels were code-named
Tom, Dick, and Harry.
- Tom, Dick, and Harry.
You have to love British humor.
- They wanted to make sure that the prisoners didn't go,
"How's the tunnel going?"
They might say, you know, "How's Dick today?"
"How's Tom today?"
"How's Harry today?"
- The guards aren't the only ones meant to be fooled
by the code names.
- A standard German tactic to deal with escapes
and disturbances was to occasionally insert
in a prison camp a mole.
This was someone who would come in
with a transport of prisoners, who looked like a prisoner,
talked like a prisoner, seemed to be a prisoner,
but was working for the enemy.
And the POWs knew this was likely to happen.
And so it became standard practice
that whenever a new transport of prisoners came in,
every single one of them had to be vouched for
by someone already in the camp.
Whether someone who had been on the same squadron as them
or went to the same school or were from the same town.
If they couldn't find that person, they would say,
"Where you from?" "Oh, I'm from Brighton."
So half an hour later, another prisoner
who they knew were from Brighton
would just sort of turn up
and ask a bunch of questions about what Brighton was like.
"Where were the good pubs? What were the good streets?
Where were the good bars?"
And would know in a matter of minutes
whether the supposed airman
was actually from Brighton or not.
If it was clear that this individual
was not who he claimed to be,
typically, the response of the prisoners
was to let the Germans know,
"We have this fellow. We know he's not one of us.
"He's one of you.
"Remove him by 6:00
or we won't be responsible for his well-being."
And that always worked.
♪ ♪
- Weeding out moles is a big part of the plan
because of the sheer number of prisoners
involved in the escape attempt.
- The other audacious part of Bushell's plan
is the sheer number of soldiers
that he plans to evacuate from the camp.
Most prison breaks involve a dozen men.
He proposes to free upwards of 200 POWs.
- The plan was 200 men to escape,
but 600 men to actually enable them to escape.
- The hope, of course,
is to free as many people as possible,
but Bushell also hopes that a mass escape
will force the Germans to begin an extensive manhunt
that will divert resources
away from the fighting on the front
and towards the recapture of dozens,
or even hundreds, of prisoners.
♪ ♪
- Roger Bushell believed that an escape of 200,
250 airmen would create such chaos in Germany,
such chaos within the Nazi regime,
that it would have incalculable damage
on the German leadership.
- But Bushell knows
that persuading more than 200 airmen
to risk death by attempting an escape
is a tall order.
So he gathers them inside this hut
and makes the speech of his life.
"Everyone here in this room is living on borrowed time,"
he says.
"By rights, we should all be dead.
"The only reason God allowed us this extra ration of life
"is so we can make life hell for the Hun.
"Three bloody deep, bloody long tunnels will be dug.
"Tom, Dick, and Harry.
One will succeed."
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Digging your way out of Stalag Luft III
is almost impossibly hard.
First, any tunnel needs to be more than 300 feet long
to make it to the safety of the forest.
Then you have the unstable sand,
the seismograph microphones,
the lack of digging equipment,
and, of course, the Ferrets.
The job of these elite Nazi soldiers
is to spy on the POWs
and root out any tunnel before it's complete.
So the Allied airmen set up a spy network of their own...
to spy on the spies.
♪ ♪
- Bushell's organization quickly realized
that the only way to deal with the Ferrets
was to essentially keep them monitored
every second they were in the compound.
- Having what they call stooges,
these people who stooged around,
they kept an eye on things.
So you'd have a huge organization.
- The stooges are vital to the organization.
But these watchful eyes
are also being kept in the dark by Bushell.
Only Mondschein, Walenn, and a handful of other men
know the full scope of the plan.
- Nobody was allowed to know anything more
than they absolutely needed to know.
So there was this plan hatched to dig these tunnels,
but perhaps only four or five people knew about it.
Somebody was asked, "If that person over there
"takes his cap off and puts it back on again,
"I would like you to turn your cap around
and turn it the other way; that's your job."
And he didn't know what that was for,
but the point was that that was a signal
to somebody else to scratch their armpit,
and that that was a signal for somebody else
to go into the camp and say, "There's a guard coming."
♪ ♪
Nobody knew why they were scratching their armpits
or turning their caps around,
but it was a vital piece of the jigsaw,
and Roger Bushell knew
how to get communication channels going
so that if anybody was caught,
they just didn't know anything.
- With his counter-spy network in place,
Bushell turns his attention to the dig.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- The soil around the prison was quite sandy,
which is easy to excavate,
but it's very difficult to stabilize.
Just think about sand running through your fingers.
They came up with this ingenious scheme
of removing slats from the beds in the prison,
and they would smuggle these boards over to the room
where they were doing the tunnel,
and then they would use the boards to support the ground.
- How are you gonna join them together?
Where were you gonna get hammer and nails from?
"Oh, we can't use hammer and nails,
'cause that'll be too noisy."
The POWs needed bed boards
to fit perfectly along the tunnel,
and they needed a technique that would enable these boards
to be assembled in terrible conditions,
in the dark or the near darkness.
It had to be an easy system to use.
And what they did was they took the bed boards
like this one and--
Well, this is not a bed board.
It's just a little replica.
They would cut these little bits out of the ends,
and then what they could do
is they could make hundreds of these bed boards
all looking identically the same.
They fit beautifully together
like kind of a tongue-and-groove system.
They had to be really careful
to make sure they didn't knock anything out of place,
because soon as you knock it out of place,
you get a collapse.
And they had lots of collapses.
- The tunnel was about 350 feet long,
but the shafts needed to be supported as well,
so you're talking about 400 feet or so of opening.
- It means lots and lots of bed boards--
Thousands of bed boards we're talking about here
that would have to be harvested.
- The beds aren't the only creature comforts
the prisoners sacrificed for the escape plan.
[soft rattling]
[upbeat music playing]
- They were allowed to play music in their huts.
♪ ♪
Inside the gramophone record player was a spring.
It's metal, and when you unwind it,
it's really hard and really strong.
[dramatic music]
And what you could do is you could stretch this out
and then, with a file, cut teeth into it.
[imitates saw scraping]
That's your saw.
- With their main tool set figured out,
now they just have to dig.
And dig... and dig.
- So what Bushell and co. Also wanted to do
is dig a tunnel that was so deep
that it would not be picked up by any kind of microphones.
- These tunnels need to be deep.
They need to be 30 feet below ground.
That is a significant depth to tunnel down to
before beginning to tunnel out beyond the camp wall.
That could be hundreds of feet.
So that in and of itself is a significant undertaking.
The excavated sand, once excavated,
also takes up significantly greater volume
than it does when it's compacted in the ground.
♪ ♪
- Based on the size and the length,
it's about 125 tons of material was removed
and had to be disposed of.
The hard part was how to dispose of the ground
without the Germans noticing.
♪ ♪
- What comes up must-- Well, in this case, disappear.
But where in a heavily patrolled Nazi prison camp
will the POWs dispose of literally tons of sand
without being caught?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- The tunnels are underway.
Squadron leader Bushell and his team,
the X Organization,
are smuggling thousands of bed boards
out of their prison huts
to keep the tunnels from collapsing,
and they're digging deep enough
to stay out of range of the seismograph microphones,
but there's still one problem:
what to do with all this dirt.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
- All sorts of things became difficult with a long tunnel.
Firstly, the sheer quantity of sand
that you've got to remove and dispose of.
- The yellow sands
that the prisoners had to deal with,
it's only when you start to dig into the ground
that you really realize,
"Wow, that stuff shines like gold."
Here is a vial of the sand
from the camp at Stalag Luft III.
The fact that it's so golden was a real challenge
to find places to get rid of it.
The Ferrets would be on a constant lookout
for any sign of this golden, shining sand
across the floor of the camp.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
A naval aviator had the idea of using long pouches of sand
made out of long johns down the trousers.
- They disposed of the sand by sprinkling the sand
out of bags that were up their trousers,
and they were sprinkling the sand out
over these vegetable gardens.
♪ ♪
- Few prisoners knew about the tunnels.
Even fewer knew the locations of the entrances.
- One of the most important things about the tunnels
is the entrance.
One of the significant things that the Germans tried to do
was to put the huts so they were on stilts,
and therefore, getting down through the floor of the hut,
down to the floor of the camp,
would mean anybody looking at it
would observe the activity.
- The huts were raised off the ground.
Plumbing and other essential infrastructure
enters through the floor.
Grates are cemented into a four-sided barrier
to keep these wires and pipes away from the elements.
The prisoners made sure to place their opening
directly above this small brick and concrete sub wall.
- It was supporting things like washrooms,
and this meant that they had a concrete stilt
with bricks around it.
And if you were capable of digging down into that,
you would then go straight down into the ground,
and you wouldn't be visible, because you go right through
the heart of one of those concrete supports.
- The trap door was the weakest part of any tunnel
because it was constantly used,
so it had to be in an accessible area.
And yet it was exactly what the Ferrets were looking for.
- One of the advantages
of a camp like Stalag Luft III--
In fact, any POW camp--
Is you've got a range of expertise.
And in that, there was a Polish engineer
who was flying with the RAF,
and he had the capability of crafting concrete
such as you've never seen.
He was able to craft slabs of concrete
which would act as the trap doors.
The one that's most ingenious is underneath a stove.
♪ ♪
The huts would have these stoves.
They would sit on kind of like ceramic tiles
so that they would be heat-resistant.
And what they realized was underneath that
was also one of these piers
they could pierce down through and not be visible.
- They figured out how the wood-burning stove
could actually be running with a fire in it,
and they could lean it back, men could go down the hole,
and they could put the stove back again and lean back
and be reading a book and having a cup of tea.
- Dick's trap was in a shower drain.
♪ ♪
- If you look at Tom,
Tom in hut 123, this was--
There was a concrete floor next to a chimney.
♪ ♪
And it was kind of dark,
and what the Polish engineer was able to do
was to create a concrete slab, like a paving slab,
and then chip out an area of the concrete
and match them up absolutely perfectly.
- But, sadly, sometimes even perfect is not enough
to keep the Nazi Ferrets off your back.
♪ ♪
- The Ferrets carried with them long metal rods,
which they would use to poke into the sand
to see if they could come up against tunnels.
They didn't know that the tunnels were 30 feet deep.
They hoped these rods could pick up things.
And apparently this one Ferret was sitting in the hut
where the tunnel mouth was in a routine search,
was just idly bouncing this metal probe on the floor,
and it happened to hit the edge of the frame
where the tunnel mouth was.
[dramatic music]
It dislodged a small piece of the cement
that had been put in to cover up the tunnel mouth.
The Ferret got down on his knees,
and he could see a little crack running around the edge.
He started to bang it a little more.
Within a few minutes, he knew there was a trap there,
and that was-- That was the end of Tom.
♪ ♪
- The discovery of Tom will finally put Bushell's
three tunnel strategy to the test.
Will the Nazis stop searching, or will they turn up the heat?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- One of the Ferrets has discovered Tom.
Now Bushell and his team await the consequences.
- Then the Germans actually discovered the Tom tunnel.
They blew it up with explosives.
[booming]
- But the genius of Bushell's original plan shines through.
- The camp staff believed,
having seen how remarkably well-engineered Tom was,
they had no belief
that the prisoners could have another tunnel.
They assumed that all of the effort,
all of the material,
all of the resources had been poured into Tom.
So for a while, they actually stopped looking
'cause they assumed they had found
what the prisoners had been working on for so long.
So this gave X Organization a bit of breathing room
to do some catching up, to work ahead a bit.
♪ ♪
- Well, Bushell's instinct to dig three tunnels
proves to be right.
Not only is Tom tunnel discovered,
but the Nazis begin clearing trees for a camp expansion,
ruining the exit site for the tunnel codenamed Dick.
Bushell decides to stop construction on Dick
and use it as a place to dump sand.
Tunnel Harry is now their only hope.
♪ ♪
- Probably of all the bits of ingenuity
that these POWs used in digging these tunnels
was the ventilation system.
- As you're constructing, you're getting further away
from an oxygen source.
So you have to construct within the tunnel
a means of delivering oxygen.
- The Red Cross was the prisoners' lifeline,
and they sent in food packages and clothing
and all sorts of necessities.
The tunnellers learned very early in the war
that the canned milk that came in Red Cross parcels
were perfectly shaped and sized
to be made into an air system for the tunnel.
- They're called Klim cans,
because the brand name of this powdered milk was Klim.
And K-L-I-M is "milk" spelled backwards.
- So you take off the tab, and off comes the lid,
and this means, of course,
that it's capable of fitting together one tin
with another by sort of forcing the tin on.
You remove the base, you force this into the next tin,
and you build an air line.
- Now they needed a system to pump air through the line.
[dramatic music]
- They designed a bellows system based on two kit bags.
- They had their kit bags,
and these kit bags
were kind of canvas bags,
which they could squeeze,
and that would pump a bit of air.
And then they'd have to open up the bag
and they'd squeeze it again.
So it was a bit like sort of bagpipes.
You needed a lot of air.
So they came up with this fantastic device.
With one kit bag here and another kit bag there
and a pair of ice hockey sticks in the middle,
then they worked out that you could have somebody at the end,
a bit like a rowing machine,
pulling this lever backwards and forwards
to pump the air down.
- And they had a non-return valve
based on a kind of disc using leather parts
so that they would push the air in,
but wouldn't allow it to come back.
- They had airflow,
but the tunnel had one small problem.
It's too narrow to properly turn around in
once you are inside.
And as it gets longer, this becomes a bigger problem.
- This is a really, really narrow tunnel,
and a number of these guys were big guys.
You know, they were having to squeeze into this.
And in addition to that, you are thinking,
"Well, how am I gonna crawl down a tunnel that long?"
So they built a railway based on trollies
with wheels made out of discs,
which had a coating of tin on them,
you know, from the POW tins
that come in Red Cross parcels.
- The trollies are powered by POWs
using a pulley system to move them along the tunnel.
The trolly pullers are stationed at two wider areas
along the tunnel's length.
The diggers get off the trolley at the wider part
and crawl up to the front,
where they continue digging
into the face of the dirt wall.
- Like little waystations, if you like--
Piccadilly and Leicester Square,
they're the two locations famous in London,
and they were located right there
in the center of the tunnel Harry.
So it was a really complex engineering approach
to build this, to create it,
and you can imagine, therefore, there were people
who were constantly on the lookout
for any resource that they could use,
particularly, for example, lighting that tunnel.
When they had the opportunity, they stole wire.
There were a couple of guys working in the camp
who had wire there,
and I think they stole, like, 300 yards of wire.
And this meant that they were able also
to steal light fittings,
to hook that up to the camp electricity supply,
and then have, you know, absolutely electric lighting
all the way along.
The guys who had been doing the wiring
didn't want to say, of course.
They didn't want to report that
because they knew what would happen to them.
- January, 1944.
The tunnel is nearly complete.
♪ ♪
Bushell and his men must now prepare disguises and fake IDs
or they won't get very far in the Polish countryside.
- They had to make official documents, somehow.
They could steal documents.
They could see what the documents
were meant to look like.
And some of these guys were incredibly artistic,
so they would forge documents really well,
and they knew how to make paper look old
or make it look official.
But one of the things they needed
was an official stamp,
and they figured out that they could take the leather
off the soles of their shoes
and, with tiny little scalpel knives
that they managed to procure from somewhere,
they could cut away a stamp,
which they could then use to stamp the passports.
- Almost every German identity document
required a photograph,
and they couldn't manufacture cameras,
so they had to resort to bribings.
♪ ♪
- They could blackmail the guards.
For instance, if they pickpocketed something
out of the guard's pocket--
Maybe a pass or a key or something--
And then they would say, "Hey, Fritz,
somebody tells me you've lost your pass."
And Fritz would say, "Yes, do you know where it is?"
Said, "Well, what we know, Fritz,
"is that if we tell the commandant
"that you've lost your pass,
you will be sent to the Eastern Front, won't you?"
"Don't tell them, don't tell them!"
"Okay, Fritz. We need some things.
Fritz, will you get them for us?"
- Bushell's forgery factory is in full swing,
snapping photos
and painstakingly hand-painting documents
one letter at a time.
Then, in March, 1944, the tunnel's completed.
Only one thing remains to do.
[dramatic music]
Escape.
♪ ♪
- March, 1944.
Tunnel Harry is complete.
[dramatic music]
Bushell and 200 men are ready.
Now all they need is a green light from Mother Nature.
♪ ♪
- They were a bit constricted by the weather.
They were also constricted by the light of the moon.
They were forced to wait for dark of the moon.
Full moon was fatal to escape attempts
because it was very bright, particularly with snow.
So the final decision to go was based on advice
from the meteorologists in the camp,
and there was a trained meteorologist
among the prisoners.
- On March 24, 1944,
the go ahead is given to escape.
Bushell, Mondschein, Walenn,
and the other prisoners start to assemble for the breakout.
- All of the prisoners who were designated as escapers
had to move from their own huts
to hut 104, where the tunnel was.
- So they'd be kind of checked off on a list,
being dispatched to hut 104,
which is the exit point.
Hut 104 is then starting to get more and more crowded.
- More than a year of top-secret planning
and back-breaking work is about to pay off.
But just when it looks like they have pulled it off,
the whole escape comes crashing to a halt.
At 7:45 p.m.,
an enemy soldier appears at the doorway of hut 104.
- I am Paul Tobolski, the son of Pawel Tobolski.
My dad wore a German uniform on the night of the escape.
When he entered hut 104, all those in the hut thought,
"My God, the game is over. There's a German in the hut."
Others said, "No, that's Tobolski."
- It's a false alarm.
The final countdown to freedom can begin.
♪ ♪
- As these men are getting checked off,
they're starting now to go into the tunnel and move along it.
But they couldn't actually really get out
because the tunnel was really locked solid.
- Bushell didn't have the team
break through the end of the tunnel
until they were ready to escape.
He didn't want a Nazi guard walking around
and falling through the trap door.
But now on this cool night, the last bit has frozen shut,
costing the team valuable time.
But when they finally do get through,
a terrible surprise awaits them.
♪ ♪
- When they pop their head out to have a look around,
they realized at that point
that they had an even bigger problem.
- The tunnel wasn't long enough.
They thought they were under the woods, but they weren't.
So when they'd came up, they were only, like,
50 yards outside the prison,
and they were right beneath one of the observation towers.
- Every 150 feet, there was a goon tower,
which meant that you had the guards
looking at and over the camp,
and they were armed with machine guns.
They were all Luftwaffe personnel.
They were ready to use those guns if they needed.
♪ ♪
- The decision is made to continue going.
Though next to a guard tower,
they are also next to a hideout
meant for Ferrets to spy on the camp.
This becomes their shield from the towers.
♪ ♪
But this isn't the only unexpected obstacle
the team must overcome.
Another threatens to end their escape attempt
once and for all.
♪ ♪
- And halfway through, the Allies started bombing,
and the camp went into blackout.
[dramatic music]
[explosions booming]
- And an air raid on Berlin
meant the entire region went into a power blackout,
and when the power was cut in the camp,
the power was cut in the tunnel.
♪ ♪
So you had 60 or 70 men packed into the tunnel.
Suddenly the lights go out.
And that would've been intensely terrifying.
- The whole thing was shut down for a few hours.
Nobody wanted to go in there if it was pitch black.
- The power is eventually back,
but the delays have taken their toll on the escape.
- That wasn't the only problem of the night.
- At 1:30 in the morning, they had a collapse.
♪ ♪
- It was in the winter; it was very cold,
so they had a lot of clothing on.
Some of these guys were bigger
than the guys that were building the tunnel.
- One guy going down this had kind of careened into the side.
He was a big guy, and he had damaged one of the bed boards.
There was a collapse of sand.
- Fortunately, they were able to get them out of there.
They didn't get stuck.
But then the guys had to go back in
and reestablish the support, so that delayed them.
- The sun begins creeping up over Stalag Luft III.
- 4:45, we're getting towards the point
where we're getting the leading edge of the men,
the last men who would be possible to exit
from that tunnel.
And what we see then is 76 men
have already exited the tunnel
and are somewhere out there in the forest,
and there are three or four men
who are the last to emerge.
And what has happened, of course,
is that they start to be spotted.
♪ ♪
A couple of the guards caught sight
of one of the prisoners and realized,
"This is an exit point for the tunnel.
We need to close this down."
♪ ♪
So by around 5:00, the whole escape had ground to a halt.
The men in the tunnel themselves,
those remaining men,
had to sort of back it up along those tunnels.
The four who had exited and had been captured
were saying, you know, "Nicht schiessen."
"Don't shoot."
And, of course, weren't shot, so they gave themselves up.
The 76 men had dispersed out and were on their way
to try and escape as far as they could.
- Of the 200 escapees, 76 have made it out,
including Bushell,
and now they are running for their lives.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- After some bad luck and multiple delays,
Roger Bushell and 75 other POWs
are quickly dispersing through the Nazi-occupied land,
trying their best to hide out
and escape to neutral territories.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- The original plan was for 250 escapers
to leave the tunnel.
79 actually got out of the tunnel.
Three of them were recaptured at the tunnel mouth,
trying to get away.
And so 76 actually got away from the camp.
And even as the alert went out,
they were spreading their way all across occupied Europe.
♪ ♪
There were two Norwegians,
two men named Muller and Bergsland,
who were both fighter pilots.
Their escape went like clockwork.
They didn't miss a beat.
They were on a Swedish ship
36 hours after leaving the camp.
♪ ♪
The majority of them were rounded up
within 72 hours after the escape.
A lot of them didn't even get more than a few miles.
♪ ♪
The third successful escaper, Bob Vanderstock,
spent much more time on the run.
He crossed all of Germany
into the Netherlands, where he was from.
He connected up
with resistance organizations there.
They passed him on to resistance groups in France.
He traveled all the way across occupied France,
eventually crossed the Pyrenees into Spain,
and got from Spain to Gibraltar,
and back to England.
Took him about three months, but again,
a remarkable success as an escaper.
♪ ♪
- The rest of the escapees
did not share the same good fortune.
♪ ♪
- All POWs have the right to expect that
as long as they are identifiable
as a prisoner of war
that they will be retained
as a prisoner of war.
They may be punished
by being put into detention or whatever,
but they wouldn't have expected in any way
to have been murdered,
and that's what ultimately happened.
♪ ♪
- Hitler himself was incredibly displeased
when this news reached him,
and his initial impulse was to execute
every escapee that they found.
And he was eventually talked down to executing only 50.
And these men were executed
in the most heinous manner possible.
- One particularly telling moment is one Gestapo agent
who rings his girlfriend to say,
"Oh, darling, I'm gonna be late for my dinner.
Can you keep it warm for me? I'll be back soon."
He then drove out these two aviators to a lonely space
and killed them and came back to his dinner.
[gunshots] [grunting]
♪ ♪
This was cold-blooded murder.
- Roger Bushell is one of the 50 POWs
brutally executed under orders from Hitler.
- So Bushell successfully got out of the tunnel.
He was traveling by train,
transferring from one train to another.
His documents were closely examined.
They were seen to be forgeries, and immediately,
Bushell was put into the hands of the Gestapo.
♪ ♪
- But his plan was not in vain.
- Roger Bushell's goal
was to disrupt the German high command
by flooding escapers throughout occupied Europe.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
In this, I think he succeeded more than he ever imagined.
The news of the escape came to the daily conference
at Hitler's headquarters,
and you see, from this point, a growing dissent
in the highest ranks of the Nazi regime.
And you can find the people who were closely connected
with the great escape aftermath,
who clearly moved into an opposition to Hitler
because they were disturbed by what went on
in the aftermath of the escape from Stalag Luft III.
♪ ♪
- Squadron leader Roger Bushell
persuaded his fellow prisoners
that it was worth risking their lives
to escape Stalag Luft III.
The goal was not freedom.
The goal was to undermine Hitler.
By ordering the execution
of Bushell and 49 other escapees,
Hitler played right into their hands.
It opened a rift within Nazi armed forces,
one that would never heal.
Did it help end World War II?
Some historians say it did,
and that was all Roger Bushell hoped for.
♪ ♪