English Nazi collaborators may have aided recapture of ‘great escape’ PoWs

Document discovered by National Archives shows claim made by one prisoner who evaded recapture, but historians are sceptical

It's one of the most celebrated heroic failures of the second world war - the great escape" of dozens of allied prisoners of war from a German camp by tunnelling under the wire.

As loosely depicted in the 1963 film of the same name, 76 British and international air force members successfully escaped from the Stalag Luft III camp in March 1944, only for most of them to be recaptured and 50 brutally executed.