Oflag VI-B Dössel-Warburg

Oflag VI-B (Offizierslager VI B) opened in September 1940 on the site of a former planned military airfield approximately one kilometre south-west of the village of Dössel, near Warburg in Westphalia, and was operated by the Wehrmacht as a camp for captured Allied officers. At its peak it held around 2,500 British Commonwealth officers — British Army and RAF among them — alongside French, Polish and other Allied officers; notable RAF prisoners included Wing Commander Douglas Bader and Flight Lieutenant Peter Stevens RAFVR. The camp gained lasting renown for the “Warburg Wire Job” (Operation Olympia) on the night of 30/31 August 1942, in which forty officers used scaling ladders built from bed slats to rush the double perimeter fences; twenty-eight men cleared the wire but only three completed a “home run” to Britain, an operation Douglas Bader called “the most brilliant escape conception of this war.” A Polish tunnel escape on 20 September 1943 saw 47 officers break out, but most were recaptured: 20 were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and executed, and 17 more were killed at the Gestapo prison in Dortmund, with only ten ultimately reaching freedom. On the night of 27 September 1944 RAF aircraft attacking a nearby rail junction inadvertently bombed the camp, killing 90 officers — the heaviest single loss of life at the site — bringing total deaths in the camp to 141. The U.S. Army liberated the remaining prisoners on 3 April 1945, and in 1960 Polish survivors founded the Klub Dösselczyków to preserve the memory of those who died there.