Master Forger of “Great Escape” Fame

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The master forger of The Great Escape was born in 1916 in Cape Province, South Africa, after which Alexander “Alex” Cassie and his parents immigrated to Scotland. He studied psychology at the University of Aberdeen, graduating in 1938. “I always had a pencil in my hand and had always been a competent artist and used to do covers for the university rag magazine,” he told The Aberdeen Press and Journal in an interview. An only child, he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1940. 

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Lieutenant Cassie was flying an RAF bombing mission over Germany and France when his plane was shot down after it attacked a submarine in the Bay of Biscay in September 1942. He and his crew were rescued by a French fishing boat and turned over to the German authorities.

Cassie went to Stalag Luft III camp in eastern Germany, where he put his artistic talent to good use. While other prisoners were digging three tunnels (code-named Tom, Dick, and Harry) under the camp, shoring them up with boards from their bunks, Cassie and six others began forging documents as part of a conspiracy to free hundreds of the nearly 1,000 captive airmen. They called their unit “Dean and Dawson,” after a well-known London travel agency.

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“One of Dean and Dawson’s occupational hazards was that they had to sit by a window so they could get enough light for their finicky work,” wrote Paul Brickhill, a prisoner at the camp, in his 1950 book, The Great Escape, which became the basis of the feature film. Prisoners standing outside signaled them if a guard approached.

To produce their forgeries, Cassie told the British newspaper The Sun in 2001, “We got the best of the paper from the flyleaves of books which arrived at the camp” through the Red Cross. “The rest—ink, photography, timetables, etc.—was bribed from the Germans. It was amazing what a few cigarettes could do.” They used a typewriter with a German typeface. Cassie used cold tea to age documents. He etched official-looking stamps from boot heels.

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After falsifying hundreds of documents, Cassie was among the top 50 on a list of those who would sneak into the tunnel that night. Altruism and his claustrophobia, however, caused him to stay in the barracks.

On the night of March 24 and 25, 1944, 76 mostly British prisoners headed down a 30-foot shaft and crawled through a 104-meter-long tunnel below the camp. The escapees carried what looked like officially stamped documents in their pockets: identification cards, business cards, and even letters written in German from supposed wives and sweethearts. The documents would help them get past any guards or policemen. But 73 of them were soon recaptured, and 50 of those were executed on orders from Hitler.

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Cassie’s decision to stay behind on that day troubled him for the rest of his life. “All five of my hut mates had been shot. Often I’ve asked myself, ‘Why didn’t I go?’ I can’t shake off the vague feeling of guilt, that why should I have been the lucky one?”

Cassie, with his thick, ginger-colored hair had a distinctive appearance, remained a prisoner until January 1945, when, with the Soviets advancing from the east, the Germans emptied the camps and forced thousands of prisoners to march west. They were liberated by the British in April.

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In 2004, Cassie was 1 of 17 of the prisoners involved in the great escape who reunited at the Imperial War Museum in London. Archaeologists had excavated one of the tunnels at Stalag Luft III, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported, adding, “Artifacts recovered include a rubber stamp carved from the heel of an airman’s boot and used to forge documents for escapers.”

Cassie married Jean Stone and had a family. He continued to sketch and worked as a psychologist after his military service. He died on April 5, 2012, in Whiteley Village, Hersham, Surrey, England.