Great Escape: WW2 soldiers who took part in daring plan remembered on 80th anniversary

More than 70 airmen took part in the Great Escape from a German prisoner of war camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, as ITV News Correspondent Ian Woods explains

Soldiers who participated in what has been coined the 'Great Escape' during the Second World War have been remembered on the event's 80th anniversary.

The Great Escape was an ingenious act of defiance in which 76 prisoners of war (POW) tunneled out of a German labour camp - Stalag Luft III - into a snowy forest.

On Sunday, a solemn roll-call of remembrance was held in the Polish town of Żagań, where the former POW camp is now a museum.

Soldiers belonging to Poland's 11th Armoured Cavalry Division as well as American troops stationed there attended the event, according to Polish state broadcaster TVP World.

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Most of the soldiers who escaped from Stalag Luft III on the night of March 24, 1944, faced a tragic end. Only three made it to safety, while the others were recaptured and 50 of them executed.

The event became known as the Great Escape and was turned into a 1963 film, starring Steve McQueen.

More recently, a new exhibition was opened in the UK at the National Archives, in London, which pays tribute to the escapees.

Three tunnels - named Tom, Dick and Harry - were dug by the prisoners in secret over the course of a year, in which time the Germans discovered only one.

The plan was to get some 200 men out through tunnel Harry, but, on the night of the escape, the first man who emerged realised the tunnel did not extend as far beyond the camp as they had anticipated.

Only 76 made it out before a guard noticed footprints in the snow.

Three men - two Norwegian pilots and a Dutch airman - were the only ones who successfully escaped.

Adolf Hitler was so incensed by the escape that he ordered the 73 recaptured men executed, with the Nazis eventually killing 50 - all in violation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war prisoners.

After the war, the murders of the allied airmen were part of the Nuremberg trials and several Gestapo officers were sentenced to death.

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