Free Republic

A remarkable set of photographs showing how captured Allied soldiers dug a tunnel used for the famous 'Great Escape' have appeared in a new book to mark 75 years since the event. They depict the ingeniously engineered tunnels which helped nearly 80 soldiers escape from the notorious Nazi POW camp Stalag Luft III, in Sagan, Poland on March 25, 1944. Of the 76 Allied airmen who broke out, 50 were later executed by the Gestapo on the direct orders of a humiliated Adolf Hitler - only three successfully evaded capture.

The architect of the Second World War prison break immortalised by The Great Escape is to be honoured with a plaque on the spot where Gestapo officers murdered him in 1944. Daredevil skiier, ladies' man and multilingual Cambridge-educated barrister Roger Bushell helped 76 prisoners of war escape from Stalag Luft III, a Nazi camp in occupied Poland. Just 33 at the time of his death, Squadron Leader Bushell - played by Richard Attenborough in the classic 1963 film - had been in enemy hands since his first day of combat, when he was shot down in a Spitfire during the...

He was the mastermind of the mass prison break from a German camp which inspired the iconic film The Great Escape. But a new book has now suggested Spitfire pilot Roger Bushell could also have been linked to the assassination of notorious Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich, known as 'Hitler's Hangman' and the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Simon Pearson's The Great Escaper places Bushell in Prague at the time Heydrich's car was bombed by Czechoslovakian Jan Kubiš, and Slovak Jozef Gabčík, which led to the Nazi officer's death a number of days later.