It was the most daring escape of the Second World War. In March 1944, 76 Allied prisoners, held at Stalag Luft III, emerged from a tunnel named Harry and spirited towards freedom. It was romanticized in the famed Hollywood classic “The Great Escape.” But up until now we haven’t known the full story. Newly declassified records reveal the existence of a top-secret support organization run from Fort Hunt, Virginia. The unit, known as MIS-X, assisted escape attempts from all 64 German camps scattered across Eastern Europe. They provided an invisible hand that reached into the camp via coded letters the Germans never broke. The Prisoners of War received contraband successfully smuggled into the camps through packages sent by factitious organizations run out of Fort Hunt. But MIS-X also transformed the POW’s into spies along the barbwire front. The prisoners even escaped the camps to gather intelligence that was sent back to Fort Hunt in coded letters. But this jeopardized their status as POW’s with protections guaranteed under the Geneva Convention. That is why the operation remained one of the best-kept secrets of the war.

In 1945, the Secretary of War demanded a life-long vow of silence and ordered all documentary material destroyed. Fifty years later a top secret US intelligence agency recorded classified briefings with the surviving members of the small unit. Those tapes, released to us in 2008, allow us into the world of the “Escape Factory.”

We reveal, for the first time on television, how the men of MIS-X came up with imaginative ways of smuggling contraband into the camps. They transformed a cribbage board into a working radio capable of picking up coded messages broadcast by the BBC in London. They hid compasses inside uniform buttons. Silk maps were placed between the front and back of playing cards, and Fort Hunt printed counterfeit money to help the prisoners once they got out. Knowing the men also needed documentation; cameras and printing equipment were sent to allow the POW’s to make fake ID’s.

As we show in the film, the fact that Germans recaptured 73 out of the 76 who escaped from Stalag Luft III and of those fifty were executed, tells only part of the story. Even in failure the escapees helped the war effort. The Allies know that every German assigned to guard duty wasn’t on the front lines. By war’s end, over two million Germans who could have been sent to North Africa or the Battle of the Bulge were assigned to maintain security inside the German police state.

Through dramatic reenactments and interviews with the only surviving American involved in digging the escape tunnels at Stalag Luft III, and by revisiting the remains of the original camp in Sagan Poland, we bring the story of the “Escape Factory” to life.

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