Bram van der Stok. Stalag Luft III
Stalag Luft III was a German prisoner of war camp built near Sagan, Poland to house captured Allied airmen. It was built by and operated under the administration of the Luftwaffe. Stalag Luft III was the site of the mass escape of British and other Allied airmen (no Americans took part) presented in fictionalized form in the 1963 film The Great Escape. The character Sedgwick, an Australian who in the film bicycled his way across Europe to Paris and thence to Spain with help from the underground, was loosely based on Bram van der Stok. Van der Stok was a Dutch flyer who had achieved the status of a flying ace – with six kills against the Luftwaffe – before being shot down and captured by the Germans in 1942.
Van der Stok made two escape attempts from Stalag Luft III, where the Germans had imprisoned him, before further tries were curtailed by senior allied prisoners. Plans were underway for the mass escape envisioned by the British leadership in the camp and they demanded than any attempted escape not part of their overall plane be approved by committee.
It was planned for two hundred prisoners to exit the camp via tunnel on the night of the escape, van der Stok was the 18th man to exit the tunnel. In the event, only 76 escaped before the activity was detected by the guards. Of these, 73 were recaptured, and fifty were executed by the Gestapo and SS.
Van der Stok was equipped with forged documents which were good enough to allow him to pass numerous security points and random ID checks as he made his way across Europe via train from Breslau to Dresden, and then on to Utrecht. Once in contact with members of the Dutch resistance his papers were replaced and he traveled by bicycle to Belgium.
Again provided with new identity papers, he traveled by train to Toulouse, where the French Resistance took over his protection, and in the company of several other Allied officers who had been shot down but evaded the Germans, he was escorted to Spain. Van der Stok rejoined the RAF after returning to England, fighting the Germans over Europe, and became the most decorated aviator in Dutch history.