Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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The castle is between the towns of Hartha and Grimma on a hill spur over the river Zwickauer Mulde, a tributary of the River Elbe. From the elitist members of the Colditz Bullingdon Club to America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent, the soldier-prisoners of Colditz were courageous and resilient as well as vulnerable and fearful — and astonishingly imaginative in their desperate escape attempts.

During 1504, the servant Clemens the baker accidentally set Colditz afire, and the town hall, church, castle and a large part of the town was burned. The castle was used by Frederick Augustus III, Elector of Saxony as a workhouse to feed the poor, the ill, and persons who had been arrested. There were larger-than-life characters, daring escape attempts, plenty of contraband, and no shortage of misery. The real irony, and certainly injustice is that the NKVD camp to which he was sent was a re-named Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, where by 1951 he was one of only 1,500 survivors out of over 12,000 inmates. In a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, a band of British officers spent the Second World War plotting daring escapes from their German captors but that story contains only part of the truth.Padre Jock Platt became terribly worried about the risk of what he saw as ungodly homosexuality at Colditz. K.) and the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Although it was considered a high security prison, it had one of the greatest records of successful escape attempts. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Heroes and bullies, lovers and spies, captors and prisoners living cheek-by-jowl for years in a thrilling game of cat and mouse - and all determined to escape by any means necessary.

We all know of the many escape stories and how the planned meticulously each escape plan, but for many of those held at the castle it has become clear the psychological effect it would have on those. As I’ve noted before in previous reviews of Ben Macintyre books, I’ve read and very much enjoyed much of his output, including Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross, SAS: Rogue Heroes and Agent Sonya. The pièce de resistance´, although mercifully unused, was the building of a glider in the roof of the castle.

You may have heard about the prisoners and their daring and desperate attempts to escape, but that’s only part of the real story. It was not until the middle of 1943 when the Germans moved almost everyone else to other locations that the British contingent, which had grown to about 230, became the biggest group and remained so for almost all of the rest of the war. S. troops entered the town of Colditz and, after a two-day fight, captured the castle on April 16, 1945.

During the 19th century, the church space was rebuilt in the neo-classic architectural style, but its condition was allowed to deteriorate. The Red Cross parcels ceased to arrive, but the inmates still fared better than their guards, who had no extra supplies to add to their now-miserable diet.

The castle gained international infamy as the site of Oflag IV-C, a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II for "incorrigible" Allied officers who had repeatedly attempted to escape from other camps.

The astonishing inside story, revealed for the first time by bestselling historian Ben Macintyre, is a tale of the indomitable human spirit, but also one of class conflict, homosexuality, espionage, insanity and farce. The story of the lived experience of prisoners and guards is powerful stuff, but it needs to be told well to make that power tangible and moving for the reader. Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1. Tales of what happened inside Colditz during those years began to spread even before the war ended, and in the eighty years since those stories have assumed the stuff of myths and legends.

Set aside a few hours for this book, since once you start reading, you will not stop until the last page. Many would escape but would be captured only to be march across the bridge and through the gates and back into Colditz, but the stories of those who escaped and made it back home are the stuff of legend. Colditz was the last stop for Allied prisoners who had been caught escaping from other, less secure camps around Germany.