Stalag Luft III
Stalag Luft III was a Luftwaffe-run prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War, which held captured Western Allied air force personnel.
The camp was established in March 1942 near the town of Sagan, Lower Silesia, in what was then Nazi Germany, south-east of Berlin. The site was selected because its sandy soil made it difficult for POWs to escape by tunnelling.
It is best known for two escape plots by Allied POWs. One was in 1943 and became the basis of a fictionalised film, The Wooden Horse, based on a book by escapee Eric Williams. The second breakout—the so-called Great Escape—of March 1944, was conceived by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell of the Royal Air Force and was authorised by the senior British officer at Stalag Luft III, Herbert Massey. A fictionalised version of the escape was depicted in the film The Great Escape, which was based on a book by former prisoner Paul Brickhill. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945. The site of the former POW camp is now the 'Stalag Luft III Prisoner Camp Museum'.
Camp life (1942–1944)
The German military followed a practice whereby each branch of the military was responsible for the POWs of equivalent branches. Hence the Luftwaffe was normally responsible for any Allied aircrew taken prisoner. That included captured naval aviators, such as members of the British Fleet Air Arm. In a few cases, non-air force personnel were also held at Stalag Luft III.Stammlager Luft was Luftwaffe nomenclature for a POW camp. While the camp initially held only POWs who were officers, it was not known by the usual terms for such camps – Offizierslager or Oflag. Later camp expansions added compounds for non-commissioned officers.
The first compound of the camp was completed and opened on 21 March 1942. The first POWs, or kriegies, as they called themselves, to be housed at Stalag Luft III were British and other Commonwealth officers, arriving in April 1942. The Centre Compound was opened on 11 April 1942 and originally held British and other Commonwealth NCOs. By the end of 1942, they were replaced by USAAF personnel. The North Compound for British airmen opened on 29 March 1943. A South Compound for Americans was opened in September 1943. USAAF prisoners began arriving at the camp in significant numbers the following month and the West Compound was opened in July 1944 for US officers. Each compound consisted of fifteen single-story huts. Each bunkroom slept fifteen men in five triple-deck bunks. Eventually the camp grew to approximately in size and housed about 2,500 RAF officers, about 7,500 US Army Air Force officers and about 900 officers from other Allied air forces, for a total of 10,949 inmates, including some support officers.
The prison camp had a number of design features that made escape extremely difficult. The digging of escape tunnels, in particular, was made difficult by several factors, the barracks housing the prisoners were raised approximately off the ground to make it easier for guards to detect tunnelling; the camp had been constructed on land that had a very sandy subsoil; the surface soil was dark grey, so it could easily be detected if anyone dumped the brighter, yellow sand found beneath it above ground, or even just had some of it on their clothing. The loose, collapsible sand meant the structural integrity of any tunnel would be very poor. A third defence against tunnelling was the placement of seismograph microphones around the perimeter of the camp, which were expected to detect any sounds of digging.
A substantial library with schooling facilities was available, where many POWs studied for and took exams in subjects such as languages, engineering or law. The exams were supplied by the Red Cross and supervised by academics such as a Master of King's College who was a POW in Luft III. The prisoners also built a theatre and put on high-quality bi-weekly performances featuring all the current West End shows. The prisoners used the camp amplifier to broadcast a news and music radio station they named Station KRGY, short for Kriegsgefangener and also published two newspapers, the Circuit and the Kriegie Times, which were issued four times a week.
POWs operated a system whereby newcomers to the camp were vetted, to prevent German agents from infiltrating them. Any POW who could not be vouched for by two POWs who knew the prisoner by sight was severely interrogated and afterwards escorted continually by other prisoners, until such time as he was deemed to be a genuine Allied POW. Several infiltrators were discovered by this method and none is known to have escaped detection in Luft III.
The German guards were referred to by POWs as "goons" and, unaware of the Allied connotation, willingly accepted the nickname after being told it stood for "German Officer Or Non-Com". German guards were followed everywhere they went by prisoners, who used an elaborate system of signals to warn others of their location. The guards' movements were then carefully recorded in a logbook kept by a rota of officers. Unable to stop what the prisoners called the "Duty Pilot" system, the Germans allowed it to continue and on one occasion the book was used by Kommandant Lindeiner to bring charges against two guards who had slunk away from duty several hours early.
The camp's 800 Luftwaffe guards were either too old for combat duty or young men convalescing after long tours of duty or from wounds. Because the guards were Luftwaffe personnel, the prisoners were accorded far better treatment than that granted to other POWs in Germany. Deputy Commandant Major Gustav Simoleit, a professor of history, geography and ethnology before the war, spoke several languages, including English, Russian, Polish and Czech. Transferred to Sagan in early 1943, he proved sympathetic to Allied airmen. Ignoring the ban against extending military courtesies to POWs, he provided full military honours for Luft III POW funerals, including one for a Jewish airman.
Food was always a matter of concern for the POWs. The recommended daily dietary intake for a normal healthy inactive adult male is. Luft III issued "non-working" German civilian rations which allowed per day, with the balance made up from American, Canadian and British Red Cross parcels and items sent to the POWs by their families. As was customary at most camps, Red Cross and individual parcels were pooled and distributed to the men equally. The camp also had an official internal bartering system called a Foodacco – POWs marketed surplus goods for "points" that could be "spent" on other items. The Germans paid captured officers the equivalent of their pay in internal camp currency, which was used to buy what goods were made available by the German administration. Every three months, weak beer was made available in the canteen for sale. As non-commissioned officers did not receive any "pay" it was the usual practice in camps for the officers to provide one-third for their use but at Luft III all Lagergeld was pooled for communal purchases. As British government policy was to deduct camp pay from the prisoners' military pay, the communal pool avoided the practice in other camps whereby American officers contributed to British canteen purchases.
Stalag Luft III had the best-organised recreational program of any POW camp in Germany. Each compound had athletic fields and volleyball courts. The prisoners participated in basketball, softball, boxing, touch football, volleyball, table tennis and fencing, with leagues organised for most. A pool used to store water for firefighting, was occasionally available for swimming.
As described by J. Frank Diggs, many amenities were made possible by Swedish lawyer Henry Söderberg, who was the YMCA representative to the area and frequently brought to its camps sports equipment, religious items supporting the work of chaplains, the wherewithal for each camp's band and orchestra and well-equipped library.