The archaeology of warfare has a long history, and now includes the study of bullets scatter across battlefields, such as the Little Big Horn and Naseby, the airfields and aircraft of the Battle of Britain and, more recently, the hardware of the Cold War. However, a new area of discovery has been opened up in the investigation of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp and attempts to escape from it during the Second World War.

The camp is question is the famous Stalag Luft III, the site of such notorious escape episodes as those immortalised in the film The Wooden Horse, from Eric Williams’s book, and the mass breakout described in Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape, when 76 RAF men got away, only for most of them to be murdered by the Gestapo on recapture.

Stalag Luft III was a Sonderlager for persistent escapees, and lay southeast of Berlin in what is now Poland, “as far from neutral and Allied forces countries as possible”, Dr J. K.Pringle and his colleagues note in Geoarchaeology. It was steadily enlarged as increasing numbers of prisoners of war (PoWs) arrived, with regular rows of huts enclosed by high fences, listening devices and guard towers.

There were persistent attempts to tunnel out of the camp, although the yellow sand of the subsoil stood out garishly against the grey Silesian earth and made the spoil from such efforts easy to detect by the guards. Williams’s The Wooden Horse describes how the sand brought up inside the vaulting horse which covered the tunnel opening was scattered thinly from trouser bags as the PoWs wandered nonchalantly around the compound treading it in.

Dr Pringle’s team concentrated on three tunnels in particular, nicknamed Tom, Dick, and Harry by the escape committee headed by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, known as Big X. Tom was discovered and destroyed by the Germans in 1943, following which work on Dick was discontinued and all the effort put into Harry, the longest of all, used for the Great Escape of March 23-24, 1944.

The Russians used Stalag Luft III briefly to hold German PoWs in 1945, and then the site was systematically looted for any useful materials. “As a result, only the huts’ piers and washroom floors survive,” the team say. “In addition the entire camp location has returned to forest and is covered by young fir trees.”

Three surviving PoWs from the camp — Major-General David Jones, who had been a “digger”, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Huppert, and Squadron Leader “Jimmy” James — an escaper — accompanied the team to their former lodgings to help to locate the huts and buried tunnels. Soviet and Polish maps and aerial photographs were utilised to construct the first map of Stalag Luft III since it was built. Magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar were used to locate buried tunnels, and variation in hut details such as the shifting position of washrooms showed how the Germans altered their designs from phase to phase.

Hut 122, from which Dick had begun, was eventually located and an excavation on its western side found the tunnel about 10m (33ft) down. The remains of bedboards, made into frames to shore the sandy walls of the tunnel, were found, together with corroded Klim powdered milk tins, which were strung together to create ventilation lines underground. Even the concrete slab that had covered the deep entrance shaft was still there, with a rusted iron hook used to pull it up for the diggers to go down.

Escapers’ gear was recovered and identified by the former PoWs, including a lamp made from a Red Cross parcel cheese tin, a watercolour paint set, and a rubber boot heel cut into a Wehrmacht eagle stamp, both used for faking documents. “Remains of a wire-bound attaché case containing a civilian-style coat, buttons, thread, a toothbrush and case, and fragments of a German language book were found within the tunnel’s entrance shaft,” the team report. The artefacts have been given to the local museum commemorating the prisoners and those murdered.

“The site of Stalag Luft III offers considerable potential for future investigations: it is estimated that over 100 tunnels were dug there during World War II,” they say, noting that Tom may partly survive underground, along with Harry and George, dug for a mass breakout in case of German reprisals on the prisoners after the Great Escape. The Wooden Horse tunnel in the eastern compound may also survive from 1943: its three escapers were among the most successful morale-boosters for those that remained, and plotted their own exits.

Geoarchaeology 22: 729-46