Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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Some clever bits include stealing a key, pressing into a bar of soap, and melting tin gathered from the roof to fashion keys to help them in their escape attempts.

Many of the emotions felt by the men incarcerated in the medieval castle were the same as those felt by all prisoners of war. There was a sense of guilt. They had joined up to fight but had ended up in captivity. Many felt it was their duty to try to escape. One British lieutenant, Michael Sinclair, felt this so strongly that he attempted seven breakouts, more than any other individual. Some of them nearly succeeded but not one came off.But Macintyre also makes it clear that Colditz was unlike most POW camps. Firstly, its extraordinary location made escape appear impossible. And then there was the fact that everyone housed there was classed as deutschfeindlich, ‘German-unfriendly’, and had been sent there because they had tried to escape from other camps. It was like a school where all the bad boys had been gathered together under one roof. A remarkable cast of characters, previously hidden and lost in history emerges - prisoners and captors who lived in a thrilling and horrific game of cat and mouse. This is an exciting, entertaining read and a first hand historical account of a fascinating and concentrated event in history, hence five stars. He specialises in excavating the stories that have been overlooked or bringing new perspectives to old stories. Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle is one of the latter. There can hardly be a story from the second World War that has been told as many times as that of Colditz. The feature film, The Colditz Story, was released in 1955, followed by Colditz, the 1972 TV series broadcast on the BBC that attracted a television audience of seven million viewers. Most recently there was Colditz, the TV series, broadcast on Channel 4 in 2005. There has been a proliferation of books and documentaries about this infamous German POW camp. The somewhat Monty Python-like atmosphere of Colditz Castle – with its prisoners and eccentric escape artists – clashes with the reality of nearby concentration camps, where the extermination of Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, Slavs, disabled people, political dissidents and religious minorities was carried out through labor and starvation. “Nobody talked about this in Colditz. The German guards said it was an SS thing; the contrast between both kinds of camps was abysmal. It forces us to relativize the history of the castle and its prisoners.”

Those familiar with MacIntyre’s work will recognise many of the attributes that have made him such a successful writer. He tells compelling stories well, with energy and humour. His unerring eye for the telling detail that can illuminate a greater story is apparent in Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle. Oleg Gordievsky, the ex-KGB spy who defected to the UK in the mid-1980s and has been living in hiding since. Credit: AlamyAt that point, [then US president Ronald] Reagan’s speeches were incredibly incendiary; he was poking the bear very, very hard. Gordievsky’s information was, ‘They may be paranoid in the Kremlin but they genuinely believe you’re about to launch your first strike.’ There are two components that dominate Macintyre’s monograph; the replica of the British social class structure that dominated prison life, and the integration of an eclectic and diverse group of prisoners whether British, Dutch, French, Polish, or American. There are other themes that the author introduces that include the Nazi leadership that ran Colditz, the ebbs and flows of the war which prisoners were able to keep up with by building a surreptitious radio, the planning of escapes and what happened to the escapees, the plight of Prominente – a group of influential and famous prisoners whom the Nazis sought to maximize a return, and how Berlin reacted to what was occurring in the prison.

Another of Colditz’s famous prisoners was David Stirling – known as “the ghost commander” – who was the famous creator of the Special Air Service (SAS): a special forces unit within the British Army. He described the castle as “the best-guarded pension (hotel) of the Third Reich.” Stirling was captured in one of his famous raids against the airfields and bases of the Afrika Korps in January of 1943. After several escape attempts from various POW camps, he ended up in Colditz. How did this bold, determined, slippery guy not manage escape? “The problem was that he was very tall,” Macintyre said.

Although this has incredible accounts of those who tried to escape, often successfully, it is also the story of a very unique prisoner of war camp. It held many officers, who could not be forced to work for the Reich, and whom often imposed their own class rules and public school ways onto those inhabitants of the camp. There are theatre shows, tunnels, coded letters, M19, bizarre escape attempts and many wonderfully erratic and eccentric prisoners. Many are well known - such as Airey Neave, Pat Reid and Douglas Bader. I found the incredibly rude and rather unpleasant Bader curiously moving. When he was shot down, the Germans allowed the RAF to deliver a new leg, which seemed an incredible allowance during wartime. Once he had two prosthetics, he immediately hoisted himself out of a window and hobbled off - even the Germans, who he aimed endless venom at, seemed impressed. The final section is about after Reid steps down from being the escape officer so that he can actually try escaping himself. The book's finale is his own escape from Colditz halfway through the war, which again has more of a narrative to it and is therefore much more compulsively readable than the main part of the book. Slightly annoying that it ends basically by just saying 'now read the sequel'.