AT THREE O'CLOCK in the morning on a freezing winter's night Ron Last stepped out into the snow. The 22-year-old RAF bomb aimer had spent a year in German captivity, after his plane had been shot down in the skies over Berlin. Last had languished for ten of these months in the Silesian PoW camp Stalag Luft III but now, on 28 January 1945, he was on the move. And he was not the only one. As the Red Army's inexorable advance threatened the eastern provinces of the Third Reich, it seemed that liberation was imminent for the hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen held prisoner there. The Nazis had other plans. Beginning in late December 1944, they began to evacuate their eastern camps and transport huge numbers of captives to the west. To what end they did this remains unclear. In their own defence some Germans claimed that the PoWs were being evacuated for their safety, shifting them far from the battle lines. Another theory is that the Nazis feared the prisoners would fight alongside the Soviets once they were freed. Or perhaps Hitler wanted to preserve the PoWs as bargaining chips in future negotiations with the Allies.
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