Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

Product Information

They get caught! Damn it. I do sometimes has trouble understanding the little things they are doing to escape, and they should be understood I think, but I try not to let it disturb me. And much more,” added Macintyre, who has written widely about double agents and secret missions during the Nazi era. “I grew up, like most Britons, wrapped up in the Colditz myth. At the age of 14, I watched the 1972 BBC series with David McCallum. I played the board game, created by Pat Reid, [who was] one of the castle’s real escapees. Colditz’s heroes were part of my personal mythology: a story of brave Englishmen and courage. But, as often happens, the story turns out not to be so simple and not so uplifting.”

Years ago, you could see a replica of a glider that was clandestinely built at Colditz Castle, on the top floor of the Imperial War Museum in London. Crazily enough, some of the officers attempted to escape by plane. “I’m not very convinced that they could have managed to fly.I think it had more to do with mythical escapism and imagination than with a real escape. It was a dream for the prisoner collective: to fly away to freedom,” said Macintyre.Much of the material comes from recordings made in the late 1980s and early 1990s by every surviving Colditz prisoner, which are held in the Imperial War Museum but hadn’t been listened to by researchers or historians. It’s through these archives that Macintyre learnt of Ross’s anguish and other prisoners’ private fears, including a chaplain’s anxiety over the men acting on homosexual urges. The book reveals a culture of homosexuality among the prisoners, including one who was openly bisexual. “No one has really written about that before,” says Macintyre.

Much of the drama in MacIntyre’s account centers on the almost continuous succession of attempted escapes, many of which were extremely elaborate and required months of preparation. One British officer tried eight times, but many others were almost equally persistent. Few were successful. Although there are reports of 174 who made their way outside the castle’s walls, only thirty-two of them reached home. Colditz was 400 kilometers from Switzerland, and the route led through vast expanses of heavily policed Nazi territory. Macintyre shows how the mood in the castle prison changed as the war progressed. In 1942, there was hope that victory might be around the corner. By 1943, this had turned to despair that it might instead go on for years to come.

Compared to many prisoners of war, those incarcerated in Colditz were not particularly ill treated. Food was sparse, but that was something fairly commonplace in wartime Germany - and it should be remembered that the Nazi regime was not a signatory to the international convention which governed the treatment of prisoners of war (and yet the regime at Colditz seems to have respected the convention's rules - they had exercise, access to primitive medical care, and even received parcels from home). The imprisoned officers were not forced to work themselves to death, or used for medical experimentation, or killed in large numbers, as Jewish prisoners were. They were certainly very well treated compared those British soldiers captured by the Japanese. And in more modern times; the Americans who suffered sleep deprivation in the Gulf, or the terrorist suspects waterboarded by the CIA were worse off. So bad treatment was also not a big motive for escape.

We first meet the POWs of Colditz as they try their hand at an escape attempt they have been cooking up for several months. The false German uniform had been made, the travel passes had been created, and photographic passports had been produced by clever means. All that was left to do was complete the plan and walk through the gates of one of the most daunting prison camps in the world. War stories are usually about what happened. The story of Colditz, by contrast, is largely a tale of inactivity, a long procession of duplicate days when little of note occurred, punctuated by moments of intense excitement. Of the 35,000 Allied troops who made their way to safety from captivity or after being shot down about half were carrying one of Hutton's maps." One can only wonder what Oleg Gordievsky would make of the reaction to Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing in August 2022. The Soviet leader was venerated as a liberator in the West but held in contempt by many Russians for destroying the Soviet empire. Almost four decades later, realpolitik has turned full circle, with Vladimir Putin trying to resurrect the empire through his brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Retailers:

So, is is really the duty of every prisoner of war to attempt to escape? Reid takes it for granted that this is the case, so much so that he doesn't even discuss the officers' reasons for making achingly difficult escape attempts (such as carrying out such a convincing simulation of insanity that the escapee risked suffering mental damage as a result). According to Wikipedia's list, there were 37 successful escapees from Colditz, 10 of them British. This is a vanishingly small number among the war's combatants, and it is not likely that any of them would have been so effective individually that their escape would have made a direct military difference to the outcome of the war. (This argument doesn't hold so well for other nationalities, such as the French and Belgians, whose home countries were occupied.)

Through an astonishing range of material, Macintyre reveals a remarkable cast of characters, wider than previously seen and hitherto hidden from history, taking in prisoners and captors who were living cheek-by-jowl in a thrilling game of cat and mouse. The book isn’t just about the escape attempts, though. A closed community tends to have intensified social dynamics. On the positive side, the prisoners threw themselves into cultural pursuits, including putting on concerts, skits and plays. Hilariously, the British chaplain was appalled at prisoners dressing up as women for some of the plays and skits they acted out in the castle’s theater, thinking that even these ridiculously ersatz women would stir the men’s passions. Oleg Gordievsky, the ex-KGB spy who defected to the UK in the mid-1980s and has been living in hiding since. Credit: Alamy Another name familiar to an Irish audience is Airey Neave. Before he was murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army in 1979, Neave was most famous for having been the first British prisoner to escape from Colditz. He was hugely frustrated when an elaborate ruse to smuggle him out as a German officer was foiled as the counterfeit uniform appeared too green under the searchlight. He escaped in January 1942 and made his way to Switzerland. After returning to Britain he helped co-ordinate the Pat O’Leary line, named after a Belgian, not Irish doctor, which smuggled downed Allied airmen out of occupied Europe.

I had a tap on the shoulder from one of my tutors, who said, ‘There’s part of the Foreign Office that is slightly different from the other parts.’ He never actually said what it was, but it became pretty clear. I did the first couple of interviews and I enjoyed talking to them. But they took one look at me and realised that here’s a man who can’t keep a secret, as I’ve just demonstrated by telling you the story, which I’ve told others before.” The first part of the book details how the author and narrator, Pat Reid, escaped from his POW camp only to be recaptured and sent to Colditz, a supposedly inescapable prison, being a castle built into a mountain, where officer POWs who had escaped from other camps were all penned in together. This part of the story was enjoyable but extremely tense because you know going in that the escape is doomed to failure. Once interned at Colditz, Reid became the 'escape officer' of the British prisoners, which meant that all escape attempts had to be run past him and he helped work out the plans and recommend men for the job and generally orchestrate the escapes without being able to escape himself. At 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.’ A radio was produced so they could keep up-to-date with what was happening on the outside. Magazines of the front were pilfered from guards. This gave the POWs ideas on how others were trying to escape from their respective prisons.