Bram Van Der Stok - Stalag Luft III

Stalag Luft III

On 12 April 1942, during 'Circus 122' Van der Stok was shot down while flying Spitfire Vb BL595 over France and parachuted into a waiting German patrol, who processed him. He was incarcerated in the newly-built Stalag Luft III, where he made a total of three escape attempts. The first was foiled inadvertently by another POW who drew attention to the escaping Van der Stok while retrieving a stolen German cap from the roof of a hut, and the second was thwarted when German officials noticed that his forged pass was out-of-date. In what later became known as the "Great Escape", he was the 18th of the total 76 prisoners that managed to escape from the camp. Out of these escapees, only three made it to neutral countries and freedom: Van der Stok, who crossed much of the European countryside before arriving in the safety of Spain, and two Norwegians, Per Bergsland and Jens Müller, who managed to escape to neutral Sweden.

Van der Stok traveled from Breslau train station to Dresden where he was stopped at several checkpoints, convincing the Germans that he was not one of the escapees. He finally reached Utrecht through Oldenzaal and met up with a member of the Underground who prepared him for his bicycle trek to another safe house in Belgium. There he adopted a new Belgian persona and traveled by train through Brussels and Paris, before reaching Toulouse where he was grouped with two American lieutenants, two RAF pilots, a French officer and a Russian, all being led by their French guide who led them across the Pyrenees to Lleida in Spain. The British consulate took possession of the Allied escapees and over three months after his original escape, Van der Stok finally arrived in Gibraltar on 8 July and was flown to Bristol on 11 July.

After his escape Van der Stok rejoined the RAF Spitfire 91 Squadron and took part in both Normandy and anti-V-1 operations. The following year he joined 74 Squadron for a brief time before moving in March 1945 to command the Dutch-manned RAF 322 Squadron based in the Netherlands, where he learned that his two brothers had been killed in concentration camps and his father had been blinded by the Gestapo.