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How to make a POW escape map

09 July 2008 by Dianne Rutherford. 5 Comments
Collection, How To..., Maps, Prisoner of War

Prisoners in German POW camps were very resourceful. My favourite items to have come out of POW camps in Europe are the maps they made for escape attempts. Early in the war men would draw their maps by hand, but this took a long time and at the end you would have only one copied map. If many prisoners were trying to escape it would take too long to make all the maps they required – especially for large escapes, like the famous “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III.

The handrawn master map and a copy made by Jack Millett in Oflag IVC, Colditz.

One quick and easy method to create many copies of a map was through jelly mimeograph. Recently the Memorial acquired the collection of Jack Millett, a Western Australian man captured at Crete who later became the main map maker in Colditz. The collection included two ‘master’ maps (i.e. the handdrawn originals on waxy paper) and ten mimeograph copied maps.

I have been interested in seeing how well the theory of what I had read would work, so one weekend I got together some supplies I found around my home and did the following experiment in my kitchen. read on