Did English Nazi Collaborators Betray The 'Great Escape' Prisoners Of War?

It is 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.

- Esther Addley

As loosely depicted in the 1963 film, The Great Escape, 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.

Almost exactly 80 years on, historians re-examining wartime documents have uncovered a bombshell claim made by one of the escapers that the murdered men were betrayed by two English Nazi collaborators.

The allegation was made by Flt Lt Desmond Plunkett, a Royal Air Force officer who forged maps for the escapers and inspired the character played by Donald Pleasence in the film, which also starred Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough.

Unlike Pleasence's blind forger, who is caught and killed after escaping, the real-life Plunkett was one of the minority of escapers whose life was spared after he was recaptured.

In a questionnaire in May 1945 after he was liberated from a later prisoner of war camp, Plunkett wrote: "There are two individuals ... whose activities have a direct bearing on the fate of the 50 executed prisoners of war.