Exhibition "The Bird-Cage"

As many as twenty inmates from Schloss Laufen are said to have attempted escapes, from 1940 onwards. One of the most notorious took place on the morning of 5 September 1940.
Pat Reid (1910-1990), Richard Herbert Howe (1912-1981), Kenneth Lockwood (1911-2007), Harry Elliott (1901-1981), Rupert Barry (1910-1977) and Anthony "Peter" Allan (1917-2002) were British officers who had been captured as a result of the Battle of Dunkirk and transported to Laufen.

Using the simplest of means, they spent weeks digging a seven-meter-long tunnel through which they successfully escaped. Two of them temporarily disguised themselves as women in order to camouflage themselves. As they escaped, they split into two groups, one heading for Yugoslavia and the other for Switzerland. But since they had no identification papers and did not speak German, they quickly attracted attention, were caught and brought back to Laufen. This escape attempt is considered to be the first tunnel dug by British Army officers during World War II.
Back at the castle, they were put in solitary confinement and, in November, were taken to another officers' camp: Oflag IV C, Schloss Colditz in Saxony, which was considered ‘escape-proof’. Once there, the previously escaped officers were named ‘The Laufen Six’. They later became central to future escape attempts by British prisoners of war. Of 300 escape attempts at Colditz, only around 30 prisoners of war managed to escape due to the high security measures in place; one of them was Pat Reid.

In 1942, he successfully escaped to neutral Switzerland, where he served as Assistant Military Attaché in Bern until 1946. He wrote several books about his war experiences, most notably the bestseller "The Colditz Story," which was released as a film in 1955 and adapted into a television series in the early 1970s. The first episode, "The Undefeated," is entirely dedicated to the Laufen escape attempt. In 1973, a board game titled "Escape from Colditz" was released.