Great Escape POW feared British troops betrayed him
Mapmaker felt he and the other 75 men who fled the Stalag Luft III camp were victims of informants
GREAT Escape prisoners of war were betrayed by English informants, according to claims in newly unearthed intelligence documents.
The 1944 mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, immortalised in the 1963 war film, led to the arrest and execution of 50 Allied escapees, on the direct order of a vengeful Adolf Hitler.
A document has been unearthed by a surviving prisoner of war (POW) which claims that his murdered comrades were betrayed by English informants.
RAF pilot Flt Lt Desmond Plunkett, who made the claim, escaped along with 75 other prisoners only to be recaptured and detained for the rest of the war. He was the basis for Donald Pleasence’s expert forger character Colin Blythe, who discovers he is slowly going blind in the Great Escape film.
Plunkett was eventually released in 1945 and made to fill in a questionnaire about his imprisonment which has now been unearthed in the National Archives. The questionnaire suggests there were two individuals whose activities affected the fates of executed POWS.
Claims of informants come ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Stalag Luft III breakout on the night of March 24, 1944. There is no evidence Plunkett’s claims were pursued, as no informants have ever been recorded in relation to the mass escape.
On the snowy March evening when the breakout took place, the escape itself was detected when a German sentry spotted one of the escaping airmen interned at the Polish camp Stalag Luft III. The breakout had been planned meticulously for months, and Plunkett had expertly prepared maps for those attempting the escape, making him one of the inspirations for the expert forger played by Pleasence.
He had served only eight days with No 218, his first operational squadron, when his Stirling heavy bomber was shot down over the Netherlands in June 1942. He was taken to Stalag Luft III near Sagan, modern-day Poland, where escape leader Roger Bushell, played by Richard Attenborough in the film, asked him to lead a team employed in mapmaking. Plunkett was the 13th man out of the “Harry” tunnel, having volunteered for the unlucky placement which nobody else wanted, and once he escaped he made straight for a train where he bumped into the escaping Bushell and other officers.
While on the run, 50 of his comrades including Bushell were arrested. On the orders of Hitler, they were shot.
Plunkett, alongside a Czech airman, succeeded in getting into Czechoslovakia where, after several days in the relative luxury of a hotel, they hid in a barn. They eventually got as far as the Austrian border before being arrested.
He endured seven months at the Gestapo’s headquarters in Prague, where he was subjected to torture, frequent beatings, and a mock execution.
In a questionnaire he filled out following release, something all POWS were required by the War Office Directorate of Military Intelligence to do, Plunkett made the claims about his comrades being betrayed by informants. The existence of this document appears to have been forgotten, until it was rediscovered by the National Archives. It is unclear how the two individuals accused by Flt Lt Plunkett of ‘collaborating activities’ betrayed their fellow Englishmen. Of the 76 airmen to escape, 73 were recaptured, most within a few days of the breakout.
In 2021 the National Archives unearthed different documents which suggested the Nazis wanted the breakout to go ahead, so escaping airmen could be hunted down and made an example of.
Dr William Butler, the National Archives’ military expert and Head of Modern Collections, said: “When Plunkett was returned to a POW camp he was hospitalised because of the mental toll his experience in Gestapo prisons took on him. There’s a suggestion that he blamed himself for the executions of the 50 by accidentally saying something in interrogation.”
After the war, Plunkett remained in the RAF for two years. He was posted to India with 10 Squadron, where he turned down the chance to become Lord Mountbatten’s personal pilot.
Plunkett died in 2002, aged 86, after co-writing a book called The Man Who Would Not Die.