Only three men successfully fled to safety—two Norwegians who stowed away on a freighter to Sweden and a Dutchman who made it to Gibraltar by rail and foot. A furious Adolf Hitler personally ordered the execution of 50 of the escapees as a warning to other prisoners.
The film was largely fictional, with changes made to increase its drama and appeal to an American audience, and to serve as vehicle for its box-office stars. Many details of the actual escape attempt were changed for the film, including the roles of American personnel in both the planning and the escape.
After a three-year investigation, 18 Nazi soldiers were found guilty of war crimes for the murder of the recaptured POW's and 13 of them were executed.
Oberleutnant Franz Baron von Werra, known as 'The One that Got Away' was the only German prisoner of war during the Second World War who escaped and got back to Germany.
The great escape
Seventy-six prisoners got away, but the Gestapo recaptured and murdered fifty, including five Australians. Of the 76 escapees, only three reached Allied lines.
There were three successful escapees: Per Bergsland, Norwegian pilot of No. 332 Squadron RAF, escapee #44. Jens Müller, Norwegian pilot of No. 331 Squadron RAF, escapee #43. Bram van der Stok, Dutch pilot of No. 41 Squadron RAF, escapee #18.
Of the 267 Australians, only 73 survived, and they were taken to Nagasaki . On 1 July 1944, a group of 2,250 (including 1,000 Australians) under Major R. Newton left Singapore for Japan. They arrived in September 1944; some 200 were sent to Nagasaki to work on the docks.
American POWs did escape from camps in North Vietnam, some of them from camps in Hanoi. At least five escaped twice from camps in North Vietnam, some from established camps, others from guards while en-route to Hanoi.
A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity (549,360 from 1941 to April 1945; 542,911 from May 1945 to June 1950 and 1,979 from July 1950 to 1955).
Georg Gaertner, 64, was the last of 2,222 German prisoners of war who escaped in the United States. Most were free less than a day. But Gaertner's life on the run lasted for 40 years, from September 1945 until Wednesday, when he surrendered to Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in suburban San Pedro.
Only 76 of the Planned 200 Prisoners Escaped
The Nazis eventually discovered the tunnel Tom and summoned photographers to chronicle their find before its demolition.
Squadron Leader Roger Joyce Bushell (30 August 1910 – 29 March 1944) was a South African-born British military aviator. He masterminded the "Great Escape" from Stalag Luft III in 1944, but was one of the 50 escapees to be recaptured and subsequently murdered by the Gestapo.
The last surviving member of the real-life Great Escape team has died. Former squadron leader Dick Churchill was one of 76 airmen whose escape from the Stalag Luft III camp in Nazi Germany in 1944 was immortalised in the Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen.
During the First World War more than 4,000 Australians became prisoners of war.
The prisoners took more than nine months to dig an 80-metre tunnel using sharpened cutlery and bowls before escaping in July 1918. Of the 29 men who escaped, 19 were caught and 10 reached Holland on foot.
Scattered throughout the tunnel, which is 30ft below ground, were bits of old metal buckets, hammers and crowbars which were used to hollow out the route. A total of 600 prisoners worked on three tunnels at the same time.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
they were ruthlessly hunted down and killed soviet female soldiers were also targeted for death the germans portraying them as degenerates.
After Germany's surrender in May 1945, millions of German soldiers remained prisoners of war. In France, their internment lasted a particularly long time. But, for some former soldiers, it was a path to rehabilitation.
North Vietnamese torture was exceptionally cruel--prison guards bound POWs' arms and legs with tight ropes and then dislocated them, and left men in iron foot stocks for days or weeks. Extreme beatings were common, many times resulting in POW deaths.
The Great Papago Escape was the largest Axis prisoner-of-war escape to occur from an American facility during World War II. On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five Germans tunneled out of Camp Papago Park, near Phoenix, Arizona, and fled into the surrounding desert.
Joseph Alexander became a POW at 15. He was a military and civilian worker at Kelly AFB. Joseph Alexander never got to enjoy his youth. At just 14 years old, and with his grandmother by his side, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and is said to have been the youngest American prisoner of war.
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Tom Uren described how a young Aboriginal soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days.
Landing at Anzac Cove
Neither side succeeded. Some 8,700 Australians lost their lives and some 18,000 were wounded during the campaign. The most successful operation of the campaign was the evacuation which ended on 19–20 December 1915, conducted under a well-planned deception operation.
More than 15,000 Australian soldiers were captured. Of these, more than 7,000 would die as prisoners of war. Controversially, the commander of Australian forces on the island, Major General Gordon Bennett, escaped the island with two staff officers on the night of the surrender.