Colditz Castle - The Glider

Perhaps the most ambitious escape plan was the construction of a glider that would carry a couple of men, back-to-back over to freedom. The glider was constructed behind a false wall in the attic of readily available wood (prisoners had access to wood through the prison run live theater) and bedsheets made more suitable for aircraft use by coating with porrige using an aircraft construction book unwittingly provided by the guards.

The plan was to cut open the attic wall, place tables on the peak of an adjacent roof, reassemble the plane, and launch the glider using a bathtub filled with concrete, dropped over a pulley at the roof's end ... in one night!

American troops reached the prison after guards abandoned it near the war's end resulting in the plan never being tested but in 2012 an engineer was invited to attempt a reconstruction of the glider and to launch it with a puppet pilot under remote control and it was successfully flown and (deliberately) crash landed across the river using only bathtub launch power.