Dominic Bruce, OBE, MC, AFM, KSG (7 June 1915 – 12 February 2000) was a British Royal Air Force officer, known as the "Medium Sized Man.

[17] As he relates in the IWM tapes, he was in combat during the Dunkirk retreat, attempting to bomb the advancing German forces so that more British and French troops could cross the Channel safely.

He finishes the report, mentioning the parking in the hangar; highlighting his workload filling up his bulky navigator's satchel and how he sadly climbed out of the plane on to nothing, resulting in him receiving a sprained ankle.

In Pat Reid's book about Colditz, he describes how a group of new Navy entrants to the castle were horrified when a uniformed German doctor (in fact Howard Gee, one of the 'Prominente' hostages) insisted that they were lice-ridden and must strip naked for their private parts to be treated by his medical orderly.

[23] In the IWM interview tapes held in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Bruce tells the tale of a bombing mission over Berlin when he persuaded the pilot to descend to five hundred feet over the city.

During the aftermath of the 'Tea Chest' escape, Bruce was travelling through Germany on a stolen bicycle and, coming across the file of soldiers being marched down a street, decided to cheer them up.

[35] In his IWM interview tapes, he tells how he fooled the King's cousin Viscount Lascelles (later the Earl of Harewood, he was being kept in Colditz as a hostage by the SS) into believing that the average or medium size of homo sapiens was 5 feet 3 inches (his own height).

'[37] During his failed escape under the wire at Colditz, he discovered his German nickname, as the guard who fell over him in the dark (and in his fright shot at Bruce, just barely missing his eyebrow) answered the security patrol's question as to who it was by saying 'Der Kleine' ('the little one').

When he emerged from his six-week sentence in solitary confinement he asked another prisoner, Cyril Lewthwaite, who spoke excellent German, if he could explain the guard's odd reaction.

Bruce obliged, whereupon Lewthwaite pointed out that "Ich ueber gebe mich" does not in fact mean "I surrender" but "I am going to be sick" (taken from a private letter to Peter Tunstall dated 5 September 1979).

Bruce persuaded a friend, Rex Harrison of the Green Howards, who was six feet five inches, to carry him inside his long greatcoat from a series of straps.

[44] On 9 June 1941, while navigating a Wellington bomber over the North Sea, on a mission to bomb enemy shipping on the Dutch and Belgium coast, his aircraft was shot down by what was thought to be two Bf 109s.

[9] Inside the castle, Bruce would meet persistent want-to-be escapees like Eric Foster,[39] Joe Barker,[39] Eustace Newborn and Pete Tunstall.

[9] When Bruce and Tunstall noted the slow process, they began examining the rest of the castle and left the digging to the other team involving Sammy Hoare.

In late July and early August 1941, Bruce, Newborn and Tunstall took an interest in the architecture of the building and broke into a flat in the Schloss belonging to a forestry principal.

The three POWs simply walked out of the camp posing as a German officer (Tunstall) and two doctors (Bruce and Newborn) of a Swiss Red Cross inspection team.

Upon reaching the bottom of the hill outside the castle's grounds, they quickly removed their Swiss Commission disguises and then made their way to Kassel, a strong Nazi military centre, dressed as Luftwaffe airmen, aiming to steal a plane.

[80] According to Tunstall, not one of the escape party was caught and the German uniforms, the dummy rifles and forged papers where quickly stowed away in the hides at emergency speed.

[88] They wanted to break out of the camp and follow a previous route to France which was attempted by a former prisoner who had jumped on a goods train in Dössel and had evaded capture for five days.

Campbell (subsequently Baron Campbell of Alloway ERD QC (24 May 1917 – 30 June 2013)) argued that, according to King's Regulations, Bruce had a duty to escape; and using a precedent, cited a case of a German fighter pilot called Franz von Werra who had escaped, von Werra who was famed for getting the German High Command to change its policy with regards to POW's; and highlighted the fact that Bruce had never used violence.

[111] When the German guards entered the storeroom, they found the empty box on which Bruce had, in yet another of his pranks, inscribed in chalk:"Die Luft in Colditz gefällt mir nicht mehr.

[129] On 16 June escape, Bruce, Major R. Lorraine and John "Bosun" Chrisp tunnelled through sewers into an old well in the German yard that had a pipe that lead into the river, but were again detected.

[134] Upon hearing the noise, the guard gave a shout to the riot squad and security officer; and an immediate order was made to open up the three manhole covers.

[24][25] Travelling home, Bruce and his comrades were loaded on to a lorry, taken to a Luftwaffe airfield and flown by a Dakota to Liege, then to Brussels and then onto Westcott in Oxfordshire, England.

After an unsuccessful tunnel attempt in July, 1942, Flight Lieutenant Bruce and two companions made a very clever escape from Spangenburg in September, 1942, disguised as a German civilian commission and officer escort.

[149] There was significant interest at the time for this important new position and the short list consisted of Bruce, a distinguished Royal Navy captain and an army brigadier (i.e. a 'one star' general).

[17] He was also awarded the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great (Latin: Ordo Sancti Gregorii Magni) by Pope John Paul II.

"[5] Eric Foster's autobiography, Life Hangs by a Silken Thread is an eyewitness source for the Swiss Red Cross Commission escape[158] at Spangenberg Castle.

In the BBC TV series Colditz (1972–74), which chronicled the lives of the Allied prisoners of war held in the castle, one of the characters portrayed was Flight Lieutenant Simon Carter (played by David McCallum), a young, upstart, hot-headed RAF officer who enjoys goon-baiting and is very impatient to escape.

In order to make up the episodes to a sixty-minute slot (the BBC had hoped to sell the series to the US, hence the use of Robert Wagner, so they had to be only fifty minutes in length to include commercials) a select group of six Colditz escapers were interviewed individually by the famous war correspondent Frank Gillard and shown immediately after the repeat programmes were broadcast.