Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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The larger outer court in front of the Kommandantur (commander's offices) had only two exits and housed a large German garrison. The prisoners lived in an adjacent courtyard in a 90ft (27m) tall building. Outside, the flat terraces which surrounded the prisoners' accommodation were watched constantly by armed sentries and surrounded by barbed wire. The prison was named Oflag IV-C (officer prison camp 4C) and was operated by the Wehrmacht. [3] Gp Capt Douglas Bader, RAF flying ace, double leg amputee and subject of the documentary book and film Reach for the Sky In 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. Or so the story of Colditz has gone, unchallenged for 70 years. But that tale contains only part of the truth.

World War II prisoner-of-war escapes are a staple of adventure fiction. IMDB lists twenty-one films on the theme, most prominently the 1963 production The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough. In reality, however, successful escapes were rare. Britain’s Imperial War Museum notes that “Of the 170,000 British and Commonwealth prisoners of war in Germany in the Second World War, fewer than 1,200 of them managed to escape successfully and make a ‘home run.'” But the numbers fall far short of conveying the sheer drama in the German camps. And perhaps the most colorful examples have emerged from Colditz, the Nazi camp for Allied officers in Germany’s east from 1939 to 1945. Author Ben MacIntyre brings the drama into high relief in Prisoners of the Castle, a nonfiction rendering of life in the most famous of the nearly one hundred WWII Nazi POW camps. One of the most demystifying cases that appears in the book is that of Douglas Bader, one of the most legendary pilots of World War II. Bader was a Royal Air Force flying ace credited with 22 aerial victories. He had both his legs amputated after an accident and continued to fly with prostheses (which he filled with ping pong balls to be able to float if he crashed into the water). Thrilling narratives of escape from captivity during World War II are legion. The story of Colditz is one of the best known: an oft-recounted tale of jolly good chaps, all in it together, outwitting their doltish captors to pull off the impossible with polish and poise. The reality was far different, yet as Ben Macintyre writes in “Prisoners of the Castle,” the “myth” of Colditz “has stood unchanged and unchallenged for more than seventy years.” Many of the emotions felt by the men incarcerated in the medieval castle were the same as those felt by all prisoners of war. There was a sense of guilt. They had joined up to fight but had ended up in captivity. Many felt it was their duty to try to escape. One British lieutenant, Michael Sinclair, felt this so strongly that he attempted seven breakouts, more than any other individual. Some of them nearly succeeded but not one came off. One of those who arrived as a Prominente was Douglas Bader, the flying ace who had lost both legs in an aeroplane accident in 1931. Bader was later presented as one of the war’s great heroes, with Kenneth More playing him in the 1956 film Reach for the Sky.Flt Lt Josef Bryks, Czech pilot, participant of the Great Escape, before which tried to escape three times. Booker, Michael. Collecting Colditz and Its Secrets. London: Grub Street, 2005. ISBN 1-904943-08-X p.32 Capt Pat Reid, Royal Army Service Corps, one of the Laufen Six then British escape officer at Colditz, before writing about his experiences

As the end of the war approached, the danger facing the prisoners rose to a new level. No one knew what would happen to them. Would the guards flee and leave the prisoners abandoned to their fate? Would they all be taken out and shot by the SS? Would the Prominente be used as a human shield around a last-ditch defence by Nazi diehards? As the rule of law collapsed, so the level of peril facing the few hundred prisoners rose. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Capt Charles Upham VC and bar, 20th Battalion, the only fighting soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross twice. Schädlich, Georg Martin, Tales from Colditz Castle. Thomas Schädlich/Colditz Society, 2000. pp.4–6, 27, 61, 63, 91–101.

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Colditz Castle was used as a Nazi prison for Allied POWs, but not just your run-of-the-mill soldiers. These were high ranking officers and troublesome escapees who were a thorn in the Reich’s side. “…if you put all the naughtiest boys in one class, they pool their resistance, egg one another on, and soon your classroom is on fire.” There were larger-than-life characters, daring escape attempts, plenty of contraband, and no shortage of misery. This is a comprehensive book about its subject. I can’t imagine any more details could be included. I have to give it 5 stars since it’s such a perfect book about Colditz. A half star off because even though it sometimes read like a thriller and was mostly interesting, at times it read slowly and was close to boring with all the minutiae. 4-1/2 stars The account is given (almost) chronologically and I think doing that was a good choice. As 1944 became 1945, serious hunger stalked the prison camp. The Red Cross parcels ceased to arrive, but the inmates still fared better than their guards, who had no extra supplies to add to their now-miserable diet.