Colditz and the Great Escape: POW Camps and Film Locations

The Wehrmacht ran Colditz Castle as an officer prison camp, Oflag IV-C. Its first British prisoners, the Laufen Six, arrived on 7 November 1940. The castle went on to have one of the greatest records of successful escape attempts of any camp. Late in the war prisoners even built a glider; it was never used, because the camp was liberated not long after it was completed. The castle now holds a museum and offers guided tours showing some of the escape tunnels.

Para el visitante: Colditz Castle has a museum and guided tours of escape tunnels.

Stalag Luft III stood near the town of Sagan, now Żagań in Poland. The site was chosen because its sandy soil made it difficult for prisoners to escape by tunnelling. Prisoners answered with a gymnastic vaulting horse, built largely from plywood taken from Red Cross parcels, which hid one of their escape attempts. The story became the basis of a fictionalised film, The Wooden Horse, released in 1950.

The real Great Escape began in Hut 104, where tunnel Harry started, its entrance hidden under a stove. On Friday 24 March 1944 the escape began, but the tunnel had come up short of the nearby forest. Even so, 76 men crawled through to freedom. The film shows the same flaw: its exit comes up 20 feet short of the woods.

Precisión del lugar: The pin marks the Stalag Luft III site at Żagań; the sources give no exact spot for Hut 104.

The 1963 film The Great Escape, directed by John Sturges, was made on location in Germany at the Bavaria Film Studio in the Munich suburb of Geiselgasteig. Sets for the barrack interiors and tunnels were built here. The camp itself was built in a clearing of the Perlacher Forst, near the studio. The town near the real camp, Sagan, was renamed Neustadt in the film.

Many scenes of The Great Escape were filmed in and around the town of Füssen in Bavaria, including its railway station. In the film, Füssen station is the one where the escapers Bartlett, MacDonald and Ashley-Pitt arrive. The old station building seen in the film was demolished in 2015.

Para el visitante: Füssen is still a railway station; the building from the film is gone.