On June 14, 1944, pilot Roy Allen and the crew of his Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress embarked on a mission over Nazi-occupied France.
At Avenue Foch, he was tortured, labelled a terrorist and deprived of his rights as a Prisoner of War under the terms of the Geneva Convention.
As the front neared them, the Germans decided to ship Roy Allen and 167 other Allied airmen, including Phil Lamason, to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
The harsh treatment endured by Allen and the other airmen at Buchenwald was a blatant violation of the Third Geneva Convention, which specifically prohibits the physical and mental abuse of captured service personnel, and states that they must be treated humanely.
Sympathetic to their plight (and also aware that Luftwaffe POWs in Allied hands could suffer reprisals if he did not intervene), the German officer organized their transfer from Buchenwald to a legitimate prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag Luft III in what is now Poland.