The Great Escape Murders

If you're a regular reader of this blog, it's probably a safe bet that, at one time or another, you've seen The Great Escape In the movie, the Germans murdered fifty captured escapees by machine-gunning them in a field.

The reality was different. The fifty were murdered by the Gestapo, either individually or in groups of two or three.

The RAF was not amused. After the war, they launched an investigation and manhunt for the killers. They caught quite a number of them. Seven were executed for other crimes. Fourteen of the killers were hung in early 1948. A few escaped the hangman when the British stopped hanging war criminals in 1948 and then, later that year, abandoned most prosecutions for such crimes.