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Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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The prisoners created numerous committees to regulate prisoner life and tried to produce a sense of normality. For most prisoners escaping became their life’s work and interestingly the different nationalities kept a score card highlighting successful escapes. It’s this level of granular detail, the absurd ironies and an ability to get inside the characters behind these complicated narratives that have made Macintyre’s series of histories about World War II and the Cold War so compelling. He knows how to layer dramatic details and doesn’t shy away from sharing the worst things his imprisoned protagonists did, including the degree to which Colditz prisoners quickly replicated the most atrocious aspects of their home societies — from classism and exclusionary social clubs to virulent racism.

One in particular was most important – if a prisoner wanted to try to escape he needed the approval of an Escape Committee headed by the highest ranking officers. However, in this book, he gives us a much more detailed history which covers far more than just the many attempts to escape from the fortress. This was utterly fascinating, not only the escape attempts of the prisoners, but also the politics within the prison, the relationships with the guards, the people on the outside who collaborated to smuggle escape equipment into the prison. Few did, but you can imagine the spark it gave to the prisoners when they learned of a successful escape. At that point, [then US president Ronald] Reagan’s speeches were incredibly incendiary; he was poking the bear very, very hard.

An impeccably readable and enlightening read, ‘Colditz’ is undoubtedly now one of the most authoritative accounts of the legendary gothic castle and its residents throughout the war. I had a tap on the shoulder from one of my tutors, who said, ‘There’s part of the Foreign Office that is slightly different from the other parts. 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. 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. Julius Green, a Jewish dentist from Glasgow developed the most prolific code-letter system and treated Nazi patients who disclosed valuable information that he was able to forward to the right authorities.

Nevertheless, on the whole Prisoners of the Castle is an excellent book on a difficult and saddening topic. 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. This figure represents a total of 57% of all Soviet POWs and it may be contrasted with 8,300 out of 231,000 British and U. 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.His subjects include the British double-agent Kim Philby ( A Spy Among Friends); the World War II plan to plant false documents on a corpse to trick the Nazis over the Allied invasion of Sicily ( Operation Mincemeat); and the female Soviet spy who operated for years undetected in England as a suburban housewife ( Agent Sonya). Although there are reports of 174 who made their way outside the castle’s walls, only thirty-two of them reached home. This factual story is more gripping and entertaining than any fiction about Colditz could hope to be. So how does he reconcile these Germans with the monstrous barbarity exhibited by the Nazis in the concentration and death camps? Hilariously, the British chaplain was appalled at prisoners dressing up as women for some of the plays and skits they acted out in the castle’s theater, thinking that even these ridiculously ersatz women would stir the men’s passions.

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. This book covers, not only the successful escapes but also the many unsuccessful attempts (and there were many).Ultimately, Macintyre offers a more complete and complex account than is typical in popular histories from the Nazi era.

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.

About Douglas Bader: "Each Camp Commandant was deluged with requests from local bigwigs who wanted a chance to see him. Macintyre has already made a name for himself through World War II histories such as “Operation Mincemeat” and “Double Cross,” as well as BBC documentaries. It does focus on a few of the prisoners, but there are many who come and go - whether by escape, transfer to another POW camp, or death. Just as I hoped, he includes a postscript describing the postwar lives of the most notable characters.

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