Archaeologists excavating Stalag Luft III, the Luftwaffe POW camp in Lower Silesia made famous by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, have found a fourth tunnel dug after the failure of the attempt immortalized/fictionalized on film. Although historians knew about the existence of this fourth tunnel, named George, and that it was dug underneath the camp theater, its exact location was a mystery.Using ground-penetrating radar and information from POWs who survived internment, archaeologists spent three weeks looking for George. Now they’ve found it and it still contains a number of artifacts left behind when the Germans hastily evacuated the camp in the middle of the night on January 27, 1945, forcing the 11,000 remaining POWs to march 50 miles in below freezing temperatures deeper behind German lines.
[Artifacts] include yards of wire that inmates stole from the Nazi searchlight power-lines to make electric light in the shaft and tunnel. Also found were numerous “klim tins” – powdered-milk containers – which were hollowed out and used as fat lamps stuck into the side of the tunnel walls when the electricity failed.
Others were joined together to form tubes along which air was pumped for the men digging at the face. Numerous bedboards were used to shore up the workings, and many jagged hinges, bits of old metal pails, hammers and jemmies, used to scour away the sandy soil of the camp, were also excavated.
“It is hardly a treasure in the conventional sense,” said Marek Lazarz, director of the museum that has been built to honour the men of Stalag Luft III. “But it is priceless to us and a time capsule of what life was like back then.
No comments:
Post a Comment