The Great Escape

The Great Escape

The Great Escape

Hilts 'The Cooler King'

Hendley 'The Scrounger'

Bartlett 'Big X'

Ramsey 'The SBO'

Danny 'Tunnel King'

Sedgwick 'Manufacturer'

Von Luger 'The Kommandant'

MacDonald 'Intelligence'

Willie 'Tunnel King'

Ives 'The Mole'

Cavendish 'The Surveyor'

Werner 'The Ferret'

Goff

Herr Kuhn

Strachwitz

Sorren

Capt. Posen

Preissen

Lt. Dietrich

Haynes ('Diversions')

Griffith 'Tailor'

Frick

Kramer

Dai Nimmo ('Diversions')

S.S. Officer Steinach

In real life, the forger was James Hill, so obviously the stuff about him going blind and being shot dead is fiction.

The nationality of a few of the prisoners in the story was changed, emphasizing American, and de-emphasizing Commonwealth and other Allied.

The newspaper that Ashley-Pitt (David McCallum) reads on the train is the 'Völkischer Beobachter', a real newspaper produced for 25 years by the National Socialist German Workers Party. It served as a propaganda sheet for the Nazis and helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. At its height, it had a circulation of approximately 1.4 million. The headline for the issue seen in the film translates roughly to "Day after day, the Soviets have high, bloody losses." Given that the escape in the film occurs in the summer of 1944, this too can be viewed as propaganda. The Nazis had transferred hundreds of thousands of troops to Normandy to stop the Allied advances after D-Day, allowing for the Soviet's to launch Operation Bagration on 22 June, which pushed the Nazis back into Poland by the beginning of 13 July and sparked the Warsaw uprising. In all, the Soviet advance caused German losses of approximately 670,000 dead, missing, wounded and sick, including 160,000 captured. Although the date of the escape is unclear, given the green pastures around the Alps that the escapees encounter, one can easily surmise that the newspaper was putting a positive spin on the battles in the east.

When Ashley Pitt is in the tunnel, the topsoil is a sandy color and the tunnel soil is dark. In reality it was the other way around with the topsoil being gray and tunnel soil being yellow.

Sedgwick is shown reading "Liberation", a newspaper not published during the German occupation of France.

There's no part in the German-Swiss border where you can see the Alps or any mountains like those in the film.

Willie: [arriving at Stalag Luft III] How far are the trees, Danny?

Herr Kuhn: We have reason to believe this prisoner is the mastermind behind numerous criminal escape attempts.

Danny: Willie, since I was a boy, I hate and fear little rooms, closets, caves.