Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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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. The officers had a British “boarding school mentality.” They tried to recreate the traditions of Eton and other private schools coopting behaviors such as bullying, enslaving individuals on the lower rung of society, “goon-baiting” Germans, and diverse types of entertainment. Those who did not attend a boarding school were rarely included. It was quite obvious at first that the flaw of Colditz was not in the architecture but in the humans that occupied it. Deeply researched and full of incredible stories, this is a tale of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances - and will change how you think about Colditz forever. In 1944, the generally benign attitude of the Germans came to an end. Hitler had decreed that all prisoners who had been caught while trying to escape should be handed over to the Gestapo and shot.

A special intelligence operation in the UK, MI9, came up with dozens of ingenious ways of smuggling contraband and information to the Colditz prisoners. MI9 wisely equipped flyers with many hidden escape aids, in case they were shot down and captured. When you read about some of these bits of spycraft, you won’t be surprised to learn that their inventor inspired the creation of the Q character in the Bond films. Amazingly, Denholm Elliott, who played Q, was a POW of the Germans in WW2 (though not at Colditz).

The plan was simple, and almost comic. At 7.30pm on Tuesdays British officers would watch a bread shop next to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a diplomatic complex. In an emergency, Gordievsky would turn up wearing a grey cap and holding a plastic Safeway bag. The MI6 officer would walk past him munching a Mars bar or a KitKat. This signal would trigger a plan to smuggle Gordievsky into Finland in the boot of a diplomatic car. A refresher memo was concealed in an OUP edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ben MacIntyre has had a successful and lucrative career as a writer mostly of war stories, predominantly set during the second World War. Operation Mincemeat, the story of the cadaver that helped to divert German forces towards Greece and away from Sicily where the Allies intended to land in 1943, was made into a Hollywood film with an all-star cast last year. Absolutely fascinating. Well researched and written, this book was a treasure trove of information on not only the history of the camp but also the psychology of the prisoners and the guards. The bravery of all the prisoners of Colditz is astonishing, as well as their maintained sense of humor. I appreciated how the author used nationality as a guiding point but not a definitive personality guide. The differences between the German and British minds (and of course American, Dutch, Polish, the list goes on) is shown in stark contrast - but it's not all-absorbing. Among the prisoners in Colditz were the Prominenten who were related sometimes only distantly, to distinguished individuals in their countries, and who were now held as bargaining chips (for ransom, exchange or to extract concessions from their countries). They were kept under especially tight surveillance. They included Giles Romilly, a communist journalist and a nephew of Winston Churchill., and Michael Alexander who falsely claimed to be the nephew of General Alexander, the commander of the Allied forces in the Middle East. The population was comprised of Americans, Dutch, French and Polish and the groups tried to keep each other informed of their escape plans and shared ideas. At one point they even constructed a glider but the camp was liberated before it could be used.

Oleg Gordievsky, the ex-KGB spy who defected to the UK in the mid-1980s and has been living in hiding since. Credit: Alamy Not only the English, but also 140 Polish officers, a few Canadians, Belgians, Frenchmen and Yugoslavs benefitted from the Colditz regime. There were often tensions between the nationalities. Among the French prisoners, there was antagonism between Gaullists and Pétainists, and between some 80 Jewish officers and their antisemitic compatriots who readily persuaded the Germans to move the Jews to a cramped attic. I would recommend this book to history buffs and WW readers alike. It tells quite a few enduring and humbling stories about those poor, brave souls who had to endure the camps for years. Christopher Clayton Hutton's bizarre achievements prove that war is not solely a matter of bombs, bullets and battlefield bravery. They also serve who work out how to hide a compass inside a walnut."Another important contrast is the treatment of Jews vs POWs. The Jews and other "undesirables" sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz had it much, much worse than the prisoners of Colditz. But the POWs still faced hunger & food shortages, near-constant supervision, and of course the danger of being powerless in enemy hands. Yet prisoners of Colditz were among the better-treated POWs - the main men in charge of the camp actually (mostly) adhered to the Geneva Convention of 1929. Which naturally didn't stop the prisoners from attempting to escape. Some of the most comedic bits of this book are during escapes. Their creativity and courage was indomitable.