Truer to life than you might think

Rating: Null/10 (14 December 2004)

What most people don't know is that there really was a Stalag 17 (Stalag XVII-B). It was located, just as in the movie, near Krems in Austria. It housed about 30,000 POWs, including Americans, Russians and Brits.
Sefton's ability to bribe his way past the guards into the Russian women's compound and to lavish the Russians with goodies from his Red Cross packages would have been feasible. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, so Soviet POWs in the 2nd World War were not entitled to food and other necessities from the Red Cross.