RAF officers on march to mark ‘Great Escape’

A group of 50 Royal Air Force officers have set off to march from the site of a Nazi prisoner camp to a war cemetery in western Poland to mark 70 years since the Great Escape of Allied airmen

By The Newsroom

Published 25th Mar 2014, 21:37 BST

The march is also honouring 50 of them who were caught and executed.

Marek Lazarz, director of the Stalag Luft III Museum near Zagan, said the British group started in pouring rain from a monument marking the place where 76 prisoners of war emerged, one by one, from a tunnel on March 24 and 25, 1944.

The 77th man was spotted by guards, who gave chase. The 1963 Hollywood movie The Great Escape tells the story.

In four days, the British officers are to walk more than 100 miles to the British war cemetery in Poznan, where the ashes of those executed were buried after the war.

RAF Poland