Title: Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle
Author: Ben Macintyre
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 353 including aftermath, notes and index
Price: £25.00
Format: Hardback
Published: September 15 2022
ISBN: 9780241408520
I approached this latest “definitive” account of life in Colditz Castle during World War II with mixed emotions. As I’ve noted before in previous reviews of Ben Macintyre books, I've read and very much enjoyed much of his output, including Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross, SAS: Rogue Heroes and Agent Sonya.
But Colditz is different. I've read so much about it before, from Pat Reid's The Colditz Story (first published in 1952) and The Latter Days at Colditz (1953), from Padre Ellison Platt (Padre in Colditz, 1978), Colditz The German Viewpoint, penned by Rheinhold Eggers, the German Security Officer (first published 1961) and Pat Reid's Colditz The Full Story (1984). Henry Chancellor's Colditz The Definitive History, published in 2002, is based on a C4 televison series, Escape from Colditz, which for the life of me I cannot currently remember.
I've seen the 1955 film The Colditz Story with John Mills. I devoured the BBC's multi-part series Colditz, shown between 1972 and 1974, and enjoyed it even more when I was able to binge watch it via YouTube some 40-plus years later. Let's not even mention the dreadful ITV two-part mini-series with Damian Lewis in 2005.
I need not have worried. Ben Macintyre's book is worth picking up if only for the array of images on the front, back and inside front and back covers. Inside, we see one of legendary flyer and double amputee Douglas Bader hauling himself and his tin legs into the cockpit of a Spitfire, another of two Belgian escapers being brought back to the castle at gunpoint and from the Colditz Museum a collection of fake uniforms, ropes, insignia and other escape aids assembled by Rheinhold Eggers, and the drawing of a New Year's eve 1942 conga of inebriated prisoners.
On to the text, a quick trip through the publisher's press release promises a tale of the indomitable human spirit, but also one of snobbery, class conflict, homosexuality (an issue addressed by Padre Ellison Platt in his work), bullying, espionage, boredom, insanity and farce.
The author's preface underlines the point, noting that 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 mould of the while, male Allied officer, dedicated to escaping,” he states. And then immediately goes on to highlight the traditional mould with the always absorbing story of the Franz Josef escape attempt.
The story of the glider is given due coverage, including the detail that a book sitting in the prison library, Aircraft Design (by Cecil Latimer Needham, a gliding pioneer who also invented the Hovercraft skirt) helped in the drawing of plans for the glider, which was “built from stolen bedboards and coated in old porridge”.
A much more sobering passage, in the Besieged section recounting the liberation of the castle by the advancing Allied forces, tells of the systematic murder of Jews held in a slave labour camp on the outskirts of Colditz. The average life expectancy in that camp in “normal” times was three-and-a-half months from arrival. I had never previously known of the existence of that camp, but it is well nigh impossible to accept that the likes of Rheinhold Eggers did not know of Jewish slaves there, stating that it “was an SS matter”.
Returning to Douglas Bader, I learnt that his long-suffering batman, Scotsman Alex Ross, had to carry him up and down stairs, make meals for him and wash his stump socks. And that while many young officers found Bader an inspiration, others found him intensely irritating, not least because his ceaseless goon-baiting antics provoked collective punishments that “adversely affected everyone in the camp”.
MI9, Ben Macintyre, recounts, did not dismiss out of hand a suggestion that an attempt be made to rescue him from the castle by landing a plane on a nearby Autobahn. “The government wanted Bader back in Britain and many in Colditz would have been happy to see him go,” we read.
In the Aftermath section, we learn that Bader called Ross a “cunt” in a telephone call made in an attempt to locate his tin legs, two weeks after returning from Germany. Ross never spoke to him again.
I have to be careful about making comments on value for money as I am sampling a complimentary review copy, but the book seems to me to be worth the purchase price for the photos and other images alone. This is a book for keeping in one's library and savouring. It will be staying on my shelves per omnia saecula saeculorum, and I fully expect it to grow in texture with regular re-reading.
