Soldiers built SECOND Great Escape tunnel at German POW camp

British soldiers at the 'Great Escape' camp built a new tunnel just weeks after 50 men were executed for the famous breakout.

A fascinating album of 48 previously unseen sketches of daily life inside Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Poland includes one showing a diagram of a freshly dug tunnel.

The sketch illustrate Allied soldiers sitting on chairs fashioned from old Red Cross crates that were used to conceal the entrance of the tunnel. To add to the ruse the men 'innocently' played a game of chess over it.

The drawing is dated September 1944, five months after the mass escape from Stalag Luft III by 76 men who crawled to freedom in a 111-yard-long tunnel.

The breakout - later immortalised in the Steve McQueen film The Great Escape - led to 73 of the men being recaptured, with 50 being shot.

According to historians, the new tunnel was likely to have been dug out of fear that the Nazis would execute the remaining PoWs as the tide of the Second World War turned.

They drawings were created by Lancaster bomber navigator Terence Herbert Francis Entract.

The talented artist was the only member of his crew to survive being shot down over France in August 1943. 

He was turned over to the Germans by a French farmer and sent to Stalag Luft III.

As well as the drawing of the tunnel, Entract also depicted three soldiers listening to a secret radio receiver concealed in the timber wall behind their bed bunks.

RAF Pilot Howard Cundall built a radio transmitter in the camp which was used to transmit messages back to London in the later stages of the war.

Another amusing drawing shows the camp's cat, nicknamed Heinkel, and mocks the Germans by saying that it prefers the prisoners as they always have more food to spare.

There is also a black and white photograph showing the inmates performing a production of Noel Coward's play 'Hay Fever' in May 1944.

The performance, in the so-called Belaria Theatre, was produced by thePoWs with Entract working as the set designer.

There is also a hilarious letter by Camp Commandant Friedrich-Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau to General Charles Goodrich, the Allied officer in charge of the captured soldiers.

In it, the German lambasts him for the PoWs disobeying orders not to play the British national anthem at the end of a concert.

There are further drawings of other buildings in the camp, including the theatre, sleeping quarters - dubbed 'Sagan Slum' - and sick quarter.

In November 1944, as the Soviet forces made territorial gains in the east, the PoWs were forced-marched 200 miles west to a PoW camp at Luckenwalde.

One sketch shows German guards patrolling the barbed wire fence during a large-scale air raid.

It highlights blast waves being visible in the sky during the raid on March 15, 1945.

There is also a first person sketch of his bed and belongings, which include a hat, uniform, towel and pot, at Luckenwalde in March 1945 as well as a drawing of the soldiers sunbathing outside their huts.

Luckenwalde was liberated by the Soviet forces on April 22, 1945, Entract then became a refugee and drew wrecked aircraft at Halle Airfield in May 1945 in a poignant sketch entitled 'Graveyard of the Luftwaffe'.

Halle concentration camp, 80 miles south of Luckenwalde, provided forced labour for the Siebel aircraft company, which made reconnaissance planes for the Luftwaffe.

A final piece shows soldiers preparing breakfast with a ration list, which includes 'meat stew, two tins of sardines, one tin of paté and some special cocoa'.

This vastly contrasts with the ration list from earlier in the war. It shows their ration as one thin slice of bread with margarine for breakfast, 1.5 cups of soup with potatoes for lunch, two slices of bread with margarine for tea and a slice of toast with mashed potatoes for dinner.

After the war Entract worked as an artist in the advertising industry. He sold his album of drawings in 1946 so he could buy a scooter.

They were later acquired by the historian Michael Booker who became an expert on the Colditz PoW camp.

His archive, including the Entract sketches, was recently put up for sale at Wellers Auctions of Guildford, Surrey.

Entract's grandchildren tried to buy the album back for their family but were outbid and it sold for £6,500.

Historian and author Guy Walters said: 'This album of sketches is a real historical gem.

'Not only does it show the mundanity of everyday life in the camp, but excitingly it also reveals the existence and location of a tunnel dug by the prisoners of war near a block house.

'Although the Germans never found the tunnel, it was never used, as the weather by the end of the summer of 1944 made escape conditions too treacherous - a lesson that the PoWs had learned during the Great Escape when the weather was particularly brutal.'

Other items from the Booker collection included a menu from Dulag Luft camp from April 1941, signed by the 17 officers involved in the first mass escape of the war by British officers. It sold for £6,000.

A spokesperson for Wellers Auctions said: 'The detail in the collection, especially the sketches, is just amazing.'

Born in Woking in 1917, Entract went on to be a freelance artist and marketer, doing work for Heinz after the war.

He later married his wife Irene in 1950 and had two sons and five children before passing away in 1999.

Stalag Luft III was established in March 1942 in modern-day Poland. Its location was selected due to its soil being difficult for PoWs to escape by tunnelling.

It is now home to the Stalag Luft III Prisoner Camp Museum.