Ben Macintyre - Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis Fortress Prison
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- Book:Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis Fortress Prison
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In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.
But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyres telling, Colditzs most famous nameslike the indomitable Pat Reidshare 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, Americas 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.
Prisoners of the Castle traces the wars arc from within Colditzs stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitlers war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.
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Copyright 2022 by Ben Macintyre
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, and in Canada by Signal, an imprint of Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Photography credits can be found on .
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Macintyre, Ben, 1963 author.
Title: Prisoners of the castle / Ben Macintyre.
Description: New York: Crown, 2022 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022026350 (print) | LCCN 2022026351 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593136331 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593136348 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Oflag IVC (Concentration camp) | World War, 19391945Prisoners and prisons, German. | Schloss Colditz (Colditz, Germany)History. | Prisoner-of-war escapesGermanyColditzHistory. | Prisoners of warGermanyColditz.
Classification: LCC D805.5.O37 M22 2022 (print) | LCC D805.5.O37 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/7243dc23/eng/20220603
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026350
Ebook ISBN9780593136348
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Christopher Brand
Cover photographs: Mirrorpix/Getty Images (castle), Johannes Lange (soldiers)
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In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Invictus, William Ernest Henley (18491903)
The myth of Colditz has stood unchanged and unchallenged for more than seventy years: prisoners of war, with mustaches firmly set on stiff upper lips, defying the Nazis by tunneling out of a grim Gothic castle on a German hilltop, fighting the war by other means. Yet, like all legends, that tale contains only a part of the truth.
The soldier-prisoners of Colditz were courageous, resilient, and astonishingly imaginative in the ways they tried to get out of the high-security camp holding the most troublesome captives of the Third Reich. There were more attempted escapes from Colditz than any other camp. But life in Colditz was about more than escaping, just as its inmates were more complicated, and far more interesting, than the cardboard saints depicted in popular culture.
Colditz was a miniature replica of pre-war society, only stranger. It was a close-knit community intensely divided over issues of class, politics, sexuality, and race. In addition to the resolute warriors, the participants in the Colditz drama included communists, scientists, homosexuals, women, aesthetes and philistines, aristocrats, spies, workers, poets, and traitors. Many of these have hitherto been excluded from history because they did not fit the traditional mold of the white male Allied officer, dedicated to escaping. Moreover, roughly half the population of Colditz was German: the guards and their officers have also tended to be painted in one uniform color, yet this group also contained a rich cast of characters, including some men of culture and humanity far removed from the brutal Nazi stereotype.
The inside story of Colditz is a tale of the indomitable human spirit, and much else besides: bullying, espionage, boredom, insanity, tragedy, and farce. Colditz Castle was a frightening prison, but it was also frequently absurd, a place of suffering but also of high comedy, an idiosyncratic and eccentric crucible that evolved its own culture, cookery, sports, theater, and even a distinct internal language. But this heavily guarded cage, surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the world, changed everyone who entered it, as life inside the castle evolved, and the war ground on. Some prisoners were heroic, but they were also human: tough and vulnerable, brave but terrified, by turns cheerful, determined, and despairing.
This is the core of the real Colditz story: how ordinary people, on both sides, responded to dramatic and demanding circumstances not of their making. It asks a simple question: What would you have done?
All photographs credited to Johannes Lange, the official photographer at Colditz, are reproduced from an unpublished scrapbook in a private collection.
British POWs in Dieppe, 1942. picture alliance/TopFoto
Colditz, 1910. SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek/Brck und Sohn neg. df_bs_0011262
Pat Reid. Imperial War Museum IWM HU 49547
Peter Allan and Hauptmann Paul Priem, 1941. Johannes Lange
Prisoners being transferred to Colditz. Australian War Memorial P01608.001
Hauptmann Reinhold Eggers. Johannes Lange
Aerial view of Colditz, 1932. SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek/Junkers Luftbild df_hauptkatalog_0020060
Pierre Mairesse-Lebrun. Johannes Lange
Alain Le Ray. Johannes Lange
Frdric Guigues, portrait by John Watton. Estate of John Watton
Airey Neave in fake German uniform. Johannes Lange
The inner courtyard. Imperial War Museum IWM HU 20288
Roll call. Australian War Memorial P01608.006
Dutch officers with dummy Max. Staatliche Schlsser, Burgen und Grten Sachsen gGmbH, Schloss Colditz
Giles Romilly. Johannes Lange
Dr. Birendranath Mazumdar. Staatliche Schlsser, Burgen und Grten Sachsen gGmbH, Schloss Colditz
Douglas Bader. Mirrorpix Alamy
Michael Alexander. Johannes Lange
Volleyball in the inner courtyard. Australian War Memorial P07203.022
The Park Walk. Staatliche Schlsser, Burgen und Grten Sachsen gGmbH, Schloss Colditz
Stoolball, illustration by John Watton. From The Illustrated London News, September 26, 1942
Senior Allied officers watch the Colditz Olympic Games. Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
The courtyard in summer 1942. International Committee of the Red Cross Archives
Eggers in the audience at a theater performance, 1943. Johannes Lange
The Man Who Came to Dinner, 1944. Australian War Memorial P07203.041
Set design for Gas Light, 1944, by Lieutenant Roger Marchand. From J. E. R. Wood (ed.), Detour: The Story of Oflag IVC, 1946
Ballet Nonsense, 1941. Staatliche Schlsser, Burgen und Grten Sachsen gGmbH, Schloss Colditz
The Man Who Came to Dinner, 1944. Australian War Memorial P07203.040
Kommandant Max Schmidt. Johannes Lange
Senior Corporal Martin Schdlich. Staatliche Schlsser, Burgen und Grten Sachsen gGmbH, Schloss Colditz
Kommandant Edgar Glaesche. Johannes Lange
Kommandant Gerhard Prawitt. Johannes Lange
Belgian escapers brought back at gunpoint. Staatliche Schlsser, Burgen und Grten Sachsen gGmbH, Schloss Colditz
Other ranks. Staatliche Schlsser, Burgen und Grten Sachsen gGmbH, Schloss Colditz
Douglas Bader and Alec Ross, 1942. Australian war Memorial P07203.024
Menu card for an Anglo-French dinner party, 1943. Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
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