Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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The liberation of the miniature paratrooper reflected the men’s boredom in captivity — but also their aspirations. 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. Ben McIntyre is a master of Non-Fiction stories from WW2, especially those of spies, interesting characters, double agents and all aspects of espionage. This is an amazing book full of incredible true stories of escape, or many attempted escapes of prisoners of war from the notorious castle prison of Colditz.

In a letter to his parents from captivity, Burn wrote, “I am now living in a castle, as most of the best people do at this time of year. The author did not shy away from the harsher sexual reality of prison life and some bits go into more detail than I was comfortable with. The idea of a "gentleman's prison" run in a gentlemanly manner during WWII was new to me, let alone one with an additional built-in culture of escape attempts.About Douglas Bader: "Each Camp Commandant was deluged with requests from local bigwigs who wanted a chance to see him. Some of the few who did escape gained fame, becoming celebrities in Britain for years after the war. The Jews and other "undesirables" sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz had it much, much worse than the prisoners of Colditz. Recaptured prisoners earned time in solitary for their escape attempts, which sometimes destroyed their sanity.

Macintyre describes the prison infrastructure that the prisoners studied assiduously to determine weak points and when they might escape. PRISONER OF THE CASTLE tackles subject matter with gusto and goes beyond the conventional story that may have been told before. And several wrote bestselling books about the experience, distorting and contributing to the enduring legend of Colditz in the British imagination.I tend to prefer to read a book before listening to the audiobook but in this case, I think I would have preferred to listen to the audiobook from the outset. Colditz held hundreds of French, British, Polish, Dutch, and Belgian officers who had been caught escaping from other POW camps. Putin was a young KGB officer when Gordievsky escaped and a lot of his immediate colleagues and patrons were fired as a result of Oleg’s intelligence.

These stories of flight make up the heart of Macintyre’s tale, as do the consequences of each attempt. It was weirdly comedic at times, mostly in the early 1940's, with most prisoners in (relatively) good spirits and many of them pettily annoying the guards, making escape attempts on the daily (in the case of one particular summer), and eating pretty well through the good efforts of the Red Cross. Giles Romilly, a nephew by marriage of Winston Churchill, was a journalist and communist captured in Norway.

Disappointed to learn that the French contingent had beaten them out of the gates to log the first success, the British felt compelled to sharpen their game. Beginning in 1940, Colditz Castle served as a maximum security prison for a special breed of Allied officers. The Soviet leader was venerated as a liberator in the West but held in contempt by many Russians for destroying the Soviet empire.

Forging on was absolutely worth it though as POTC is filled with information and stories that are surprising, shocking, inspiring and humorous as well as those that are heartbreaking, enraging and saddening. As Germany’s military fortunes plummeted, other elements of the Third Reich took an interest in the most prominent detainees at Colditz.Birendranath Mazumdar, an Indian doctor and an officer who was treated poorly by his British “allies” reflecting the racist attitudes of British officers. The number of remarkable stories it contains is incredible, the pacing is fast and taut, and the inclusion of original recollections from the prisoners and one of their captors adds tremendous texture. Sanity was a major issue and for those who remained at Colditz for years PTSD was definitely an issue. I found myself feeling sort of sympathy for some of those German characters, in particular Eggers, who winds up spending 10 years in a Soviet gulag in the postwar reckoning. The story is not, in fact, exclusively British since there were also French, Polish and Dutch prisoners at Colditz.