Stalag Luft III murders

[2]: 261 The day after the mass escape from Stalag Luft III, Hitler initially gave personal orders for every recaptured officer to be shot.

[4] The British government learned initially of 47 deaths after a routine visit to the camp by the Swiss authorities as the protecting power in May; UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden announced this news to the House of Commons on 19 May 1944.

[5] Shortly after the announcement the Senior British Officer of the camp, Group Captain Herbert Massey, was repatriated to England due to ill health.

With the information received from Massey along with the official notification of the 50 deaths from the German Government, Eden updated Parliament on 23 June, promising that, at the end of the war, those responsible would be brought to exemplary justice.

[6] A detachment of the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Air Force Police, headed by Wing Commander Wilfred Bowes, was given the assignment of tracking down the killers of the 50 officers.

Worse, according to an account of the investigation, the perpetrators "belonged to a body, the Secret State Police or Gestapo, which held and exercised every facility to provide its members with false identities and forged identification papers[;] immediately they were ordered to go on the run at the moment of national surrender.

[2]: 261 Despite attempts to cover up the murders during the war, the investigators were aided by such things as Germany's meticulous bookkeeping, such as at various crematoria, as well as willing eyewitness accounts and many confessions among the Gestapo members themselves, who cited that they were only following orders.

[12] Luftwaffe Colonel Bernd von Brauchitsch, who served on the staff of Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, was interrogated by Captain Horace Hahn about the murders.

Unfortunately, that overly-dramatised version shows some of the escapees engaging in acts of war while in civilian clothing, which would have weakened the war-crimes charges,[17] had such violence taken place.

A dramatisation of the investigation, written by Robin Brooks and Robert Radcliffe, was featured in the BBC Radio 4 "Saturday Drama" series, first broadcast on 13 April 2013.