AUTHOR’S NOTE

Schubin or Szubin?

To Poles, the town where the POW camp known as Stalag XXI-B, then Oflag XXI-B and later Oflag 64, was located, was—and is—known as Szubin. For two centuries, Germans called it Schubin, a name also used by American and British prisoners incarcerated there. In this work, because they were the form used during World War II by POWs, German styles and terms are used.

Likewise, the camp at Sagan (today’s Żagań) in Silesia, location of the famous Great Escape, was written as Stalag Luft 3 by German authorities, not Stalag Luft III, the style later adopted in the books of Paul Brickhill, author of The Great Escape, and others. Brickhill actually wrote it as Stalag Luft 3 in his early writings, with the change to Roman numerals imposed by his British editors in the 1950s.