Other escape attempts (such as the Wooden Horse) are also mentioned as well as the post-war hunt for the Nazi German Gestapo agents who murdered fifty of the Allied airmen escapees on Hitler's direct order.

Brickhill, an Australian journalist before and after the war, had previously written four different accounts of the story, first as a BBC media talk / interview, then as newspaper and Reader's Digest magazine articles, and in the 1946 book Escape to Danger which he co-wrote with Conrad Norton.

By the time four years later of the 1950 book, Brickhill had eliminated some of the less heroic aspects of the story, including the fact that a large proportion of the compound's imprisoned population had no interest in escaping.

Seventy-three were recaptured and fifty of those were shot by the Gestapo notorious secret police in violation of the ratified 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, which specified that P.O.W.

In the aftermath, according to historian author Brickhill, 5 million Germans searched for the escaped Allied Powers airmen prisoners, many of them full-time for subsequent weeks.

[10] According to author Brickhill's later interviewer / biographer Stephen Dando-Collins (born 1950), while this may have been claimed by the escapees, it is merely an exaggeration which added to the story's heroic narrative.

Sixty-eight years later, on 2 October 2012, Penguin Books released Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen by author and journalist Simon Read.

The book details the 50 murders that took place following the escape and the three-year manhunt by the British Royal Air Force to bring the killers to justice.

[13][14] A year after the publication of Brickhill's history book, on 27 January 1951, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC-TV) network televised a live drama black & white adaptation of the World War II escape story as an episode of The Philco Television Playhouse, starring E.G. Marshall, Everett Sloane, Horace Braham, and Kurt Katch.