In The Great Escape, what type of camp holds the Allied prisoners?

The Allied prisoners in The Great Escape are held at Stalag Luft III.

The 1963 film dramatizes a mass escape planned by Allied airmen from a German prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Stalag Luft III was a real Luftwaffe-run camp near Sagan, then in Germany and now Żagań, Poland. The camp was designed to hold captured air force personnel and used sandy soil that made tunneling difficult.

The movie is based on Paul Brickhill’s 1950 non-fiction book, which describes an escape plot involving three tunnels nicknamed Tom, Dick, and Harry. Steve McQueen plays Virgil Hilts, a fictional American character created for the film rather than a direct historical participant in the escape.

The historical escape took place in March 1944. Seventy-six prisoners got out through the Harry tunnel before the escape was discovered; 50 recaptured prisoners were executed on Adolf Hitler’s orders. The movie changes and compresses several details for drama.