Stalag Luft III was engineered to be inescapable, with bright yellow subsoil to betray any digging, raised huts, and seismograph microphones buried along the fences. Yet this German POW camp, run by the Luftwaffe with libraries, a theater, and a swimming pool, became the stage for over 600 men executing an industrial-scale engineering feat right under their captors’ noses.

This is the true story of the Great Escape: three tunnels named Tom, Dick, and Harry dug 30 feet deep, ventilated by handmade bellows and clem-tin ducts, with tons of sand hidden by penguins and beneath the camp theater. It is also the story of the operation’s tragic, controversial aftermath, when 50 recaptured officers were executed on Hitler’s orders.

• How the comfortable golden cage of amenities was weaponized into tactical opportunity
• The wooden horse escape prototype that proved the inescapable camp had blind spots
• The ingenious systems for ventilation, sand disposal, and counter-surveillance of the guards
• The cascading failures on the night of March 24, 1944, from a frozen trapdoor to a short tunnel exit
• The arbitrary and chilling selection of who was executed and who was spared, and the postwar pursuit of justice