Stalag VIIIB

This Stalag VIIIB tour is made possible by my friends Jack Chapman and Vern Richardson, who were taken as prisoners at Dieppe. Both were interned at the infamous Stalag VIIIB/344 near Lamsdorf. They worked at Arbeitskommandos (working parties) E608 (Hirschfelde Forest) and then at E578 & 749 (Peiskretcham).

They started their 1000 km, 100 day death march on Jan. 22, 1945. Their march started at Peiskretcham (now Pyskowice) near Krakow and Auschwitz and ended near Munich. Vern kept a meticulous daily diary from which I was able to reconstruct their death march route. This was extremely difficult as most of the names of the places they marched through, have been changed. This march took place during the most bitter, cold winter of record and under appalling conditions.

This is a fascinating one-of-a-kind tour that will be of interest to anyone with a connection to Stalag VIIIB. The route takes us through the beautiful, scenic countryside from Poland to the Czech Republic and ends in Germany.

More Information

Dieppe Stalag VIIIB (PDF, 78 kb)

Dieppe – Vern Richardson Diary (PDF, 637 kb)

Great Escape & Colditz-This is a combined tour.

GREAT ESCAPE You will visit Stalag Luft III, the infamous POW camp for captured Air Force personnel. The camp is most famous and immortalized by the Hollywood movie “The Great Escape”, starring Steve McQueen. Stalag Luft III is located in Sagan (now Żagań in western Poland). The prisoners, in March 1943, devised a plan for a mass escape of 200 prisoners through a tunnel. In a very small compound, 600 men worked for a year under the complete secrecy on tunnels named Tom, Dick, and Harry. These tunnels were hundreds of feet long and included underground railways, workshops, air pumping stations, all deep enough to avoid German sound detectors. The prisoners organized facilities for making German uniforms, compasses, maps, documents and even a studio for fake passport photographs. When everything was in place, on the snowy night of March 24, 1944, 76 prisoners escaped from the camp through the Harry tunnel but soon after 73 were recaptured during the pursuit. Enraged, Hitler ordered that fifty of them were to be executed, a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention.

Follow the dramatic events of the escape at the Museum of Allied POW Camps in Żagań and visit the grounds of Stalag Luft III and the memorial to the brave airmen who paid the ultimate price for an escape that they considered a soldier’s duty.

COLDITZ-Oflag IVC, “Colditz”,  an amazing place and the infamous WW2 POW ‘Bad Boys Camp’ for Allied Officers. This is where the Germans tried to gather high profile prisoners and serial, prolific escapers. By modern standards, a super maximum facility. Instead, there were more escapes from Colditz, than any other POW camp!

You will visit the old abandoned Train Station, where so many prisoners began their internment. Of course, we will then spend considerable time at the Castle and will see various German Courtyard buildings, then up the causeway, past the guardhouse and arrest cells. We then enter the prisoners yard and see the solitary confinement cells, before finally entering the prisoners yard. Here we see the solitary confinement cells, the sick bay, the chapel, potato cellars, wine cellars, the Dentist & Barbers cells, the kitchens and canteen, shower blocks and the theatre. These areas, all have many escapes related to them. We also visit other areas in town – like the extra solitary confinement cells, the former Adolf Hitler Bridge, the Concentration camp (massacre of Jews there)- and the initial grave of Mike “The Red Fox” Sinclair, the ‘Greatest Escaper’ of all. We discuss the special group of prisoners, the prominent or “Prominente”, who were assembled at Colditz as part of an SS plan to ransom these relatives of the British Royal family and Winston Churchill – and how they were saved by another group of SS. Lastly, we spend some time in the excellent small museum viewing the array of artifacts on display.

For an explanation of our detailed itinerary policy please see Detailed Itineraries.