camps time. This time system had an advantage, in that they would find the camp stove to themselves at eating times. They also had a pet mouse called Freddie, which ate alongside them with its own bowl. In a peculiarity they had a court-martial for the mouse, after the mouse got caught stealing their food. Fou would go on to captivate and hoax an audience with a lecture about a non existent German professor's Calculus. The camp was the setting for two remarkable escape attempts. On 1 December 1941 Flt Lt Peter Stevens RAFVR, disguised as a German Unteroffizier, led a party of 10 POWs disguised as orderlies, and two more disguised as guards complete with dummy rifles, up to the gates of the camp. The sentry was not satisfied with their gate pass, so Stevens marched his party back into the camp. As the sentry was apparently unaware that the party was not genuine, a second attempt was made a week later. This time the sentry demanded to see their Army paybooks, so the escape party fled, although two, Pete Tunstall and Dominic Bruce were eventually arrested after a camp search by Major Rademacher found a piece of cloth on them that was used to create the sentry uniforms. On 30 August 1942 the camp was the scene of "Operation Olympia", also known as the "Warburg Wire Job", another mass escape attempt. After RAOC officer Major B.D. Skelton ("Skelly") Ginn fused the perimeter floodlights, 41 prisoners carrying four scaling ladders made from bed slats rushed to the barbed-wire fence and clambered over. One ladder collapsed, so of the 41 involved, only 28 escaped the camp, and only three of those made it home. In September 1942 the British prisoners were transferred to other camps, and were replaced with Polish officers, with 1,077 brought from Romania, where they had been interned since September 1939, and another 1,500 transferred from other camps in Germany. At various points in time up to 2296 officers and 287 non-commissioned officers were housed in the camp. The British had begun an escape tunnel, and the Poles continued working on it, and on 20 September 1943, 47 of them escaped. Within four days, 20 had been captured and returned to the camp. They were then transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp and executed. In the next few days 17 more were captured and taken to the