Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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As you read, you'll be overawed by the determination and character displayed by men like Airey Neave, Douglas Bader, Birendranath Mazumbar, Florimond Duke, and Michael Sinclair, among many others. The bestselling historian with the real story of WW2's "inescapable" Nazi prisonIn a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, an unlikely band of British officers spent the Second World War plotting daring escapes from their German captors.

He is a columnist and Associate Editor at The Times, and has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. With renovations largely completed, the castle now includes both a museum and guided tours showing some of the escape tunnels built by prisoners of the Oflag during the war. Some of the prisoners would be classified as real high value POW’s and would be held away from the main prisoners these would be related to high-ranking officials, and they would so the story goes could become bargaining tools as the war came to an end with the Americans advancing on the town of Colditz and the bridge that led to the castle. It was a version of the story largely created by the 1952 book written by Major Pat Reid MBE MC (a Colditz escaper) upon which the 1955 film was based and for which he was the consultant. Initially there were French, Polish, Belgian, and Canadian inmates, but from May 1943 the authorities decided to hold only British and American captives.

If anything, he has enhanced it by adding to its role of honour and to the humanity, good and bad, of those caught up in it. The prison building itself had thick stone walls that were ninety feet high, through which there was only a single gateway. Since the castle is situated on a rocky outcrop above the River Mulde, the Germans believed it to be an ideal site for a high security prison. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. For many years after the war, forgotten hiding places and tunnels were found by repairmen, including a radio room established by the French POWs, which was then "lost" again only to be rediscovered some twenty years later.

From bestselling historian Ben McIntyre comes an incredible true story of WW2's most famous Nazi prison, Colditz - the site of the Oflag IV-C POW camp for officers in World War II. New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims’ families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grie .The castle thus functioned as a hospital during a long period of massive change in Germany, from slightly after the Napoleonic Wars destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and created the German Confederation, throughout the lifespan of the North German Confederation, the complete reign of the German Empire, throughout the First World War, and until the beginnings of the Weimar Republic. 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. The international make-up of the prisoners at Colditz is well illustrated by the make-up of the successful escapers: of the 32 estimated to have made ‘home runs’ 12 were French, 11 were British, 7 were Dutch, one was a Pole and one a Belgian.

Much caricatured by the prisoners, not least by Airey Neave, and hated by some for his efficiency as a security officer, this anglophile English teacher turned wartime soldier, who had never been a member of the Nazi party, emerges from Macintyre’s book as a fundamentally decent man.S. troops entered the town of Colditz and, after a two-day fight, captured the castle on April 16, 1945.