They fed them enough to stop them starving - this is not enough to make someone feel satisfied.
The Germans didn't shoot them or gas them (at least usually). Of course compared to a Soviet POW, or worse a Jew or gypsy, their conditions were better. In his first year in the bag, Roger lost nearly forty pounds. W reluctance to endure German hospitality. If you've ever known hunger - not gnawing appetite, but real hunger you'll understand part of the reason for P. The German idea of proper feeding wasn't much more than a formality they fed us on about a ha'penny a week. The Geneva Convention lays it down that captured troops are to be properly fed. But perhaps the prisoners sensed that this was a danger, and decided they were better off taking their chances by escaping.Īlso, from the page 24 of the the Great Escape:Īpart from the normal fervent wish to get out of prison and back home to the war, there was plenty of other motive for escaping. In Stalag Luft III they declined to do that - to what extent fear of reprisals, principle, and anger towards their country's failed leaders was the reason, I don't know. Towards the end of the war the German guards were ordered to kill all of the remaining prisoners in Stalag Luft III, and presumably the same orders were given to guards in other camps. So yes, probably not all wished to take the risks of an escape but enough were that things like the great escape were possible along side various other schemes. This allowed the signature highly organized and carefully prepared escape attempts worthy of books and movies, with large teams of POW supporting single or pairs escaping, with those selected obviously being drawn from those who wanted to. Most learned new skills to pass the time and for some those were escape related, while military discipline remained in force with planning committees. This meant that a lot of junior officers (young, highly motivated, often slightly odd) were grouped together in cramped conditions with little to do. The existence of the POW escape genre owes its existence to a fairly complex set of circumstances and a narrow window of time, specifically the end of parole and the implementation of the Third Geneva Convention which established a baseline for behavior (at least among those who signed it, most of the time).įor the purposes of the escape genre, it established that POWs could be locked up, limited the punishment for escape to the host nation's version of 'failure to obey orders' and probably most significantly prevented officers from being put work. Further many saw it as a duty to continue national aims, which in some cases involved escape. Looking specifically at UK POWs in Germany the conditions were by no means pleasant, the rules merely being they could not be beaten or starved to death with a lot of misery possible in 6 years. The key part is that some did want to escape, and got movies made about them (there were 10,000 people in Stalag Luft III, and only 200 assigned to 'the great escape'). Why did these airmen try to escape when their basic needs appear to have been adequately met?Īs noted (paywalled) the majority of POW could not escape, and many did not try to for various reasons including those in the original question and the simple fact that if several thousand POW try to escape at once people die. In addition, anyone caught after would face severe punishment. Why would they try to escape? It was notoriously difficult (soft sand, raised barracks, and seismic microphones to impede tunnelling) and any escapee would have a difficult time getting out of Germany. It seems a very large risk, especially given that they knew the Germans were losing the war. But Brickhill doesn't write about anyone starving, nor does he write of their captors commiting any atrocities. I am aware that they were indeed prisoners, and that the rations were less than ideal. I'm reading The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill, which recounts escape attempts from the Stalag Luft III POW camp in Poland during WWII.īrickhill describes a camp where he and his fellow RAF/AAC pilots were fed, had access to Red Cross packages, we're treated relatively decently by the Germans, and were given a fair degree of freedom (theatre, library, chapel, music, athletics).
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