A Tunnel too Short - Stalag Luft III - Zagan, Poland

Anybody who’s seen The Great Escape will know that it was one of the most audacious escape attempts of the war. Allied airmen dug a 360 foot long tunnel in a bid to escape from Stalag Luft III (Prison Camp for Aviators No. 3) which was a Prisoner of War (POW) camp for Allied Airmen situated in Poland, deep in Nazi Europe

I was in Mlada Boleslav, Czech Republic for two days visiting the Skoda museum there. On the second afternoon while staring at the map and wondering where to take the new Skoda Yeti for a drive I saw that we weren’t too far from the Czech-Polish border. And, I knew Stalag Luft III at Sagan was in West Poland. A quick Google revealed that Sagan (now called Zagan) was just 187km away. Soon the World Wide Web had delivered all the information about the location of Stalag Luft III including geographical coordinates (51° 35′ 55″ N, 15° 18′ 27″ E) which I fed into my Garmin GPS and set off. Along with my camera, my Garmin Nuvi 250 is my constant travel companion, without it I would have never found Zagan as easily as I did. Through motorways, country roads and narrow village streets from the Czech Republic through Germany into Poland, it directed me from Mlada Boleslav right to the doorstep of the little museum in Zagan that stands a kilometre from the location of the old prison camp.
The Germans chose Zagan as a location for a POW camp because it was so deep inside enemy territory. The Baltic Sea was far away and if airmen escaped they’d have to go through hundreds of miles of enemy territory before reaching neutral countries like Switzerland or Sweden. Besides that the soft sand was not conducive to tunnelling.

The little museum is run by locals and makes for an interesting visit showing reel footage and displaying the ingenious tools the prisoners fabricated and a small scale layout of the camp. There is also a replica of the tunnel and visitors can crawl through to get a feel of how it must have been.
The short drive away in the woods behind the village is the location where Stalag Luft III once stood. The Germans destroyed the camp when they abandoned it in the face of the Russian advance and in the 65 years since it has been overgrown by the forest,

but the concrete foundations are still there. A cobblestoned path marks the route of the tunnel nicknamed ‘Harry’ over ground. I walked around the camp and saw the ‘Cooler’ stood. It was here that Steve McQueen was often put into solitary confinement.

The reason that the escape failed was because the exit of tunnel ‘Harry’ that the prisoners had painstakingly dug over a year was short of the tree line of the woods by a few meters.

Today one can stand there and see how little they fell short by. This was the reason why only 76 managed to get out instead of the 250 prisoners as planned. Of these 73 were recaptured and 50 were executed by the Gestapo. Three escaped and 23 were sent back to the camp. Close by near the village cemetery there is a memorial to the 50 who were shot dead. Even today, 66 years later there were fresh flowers on it.