Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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Much of Macintyre’s timeline unfolds via records kept by a German officer present throughout Colditz’s time as a camp. No motorcycle stunts in this book (or at Stalag Luft III, for that matter), but fascinating nonetheless. His dad, Angus Macintyre, became a prominent historian, was appointed tutor in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and worked his whole career there until he died in a car accident in 1994, aged just 59.

Though that is bad enough, the Geneva Convention laws were followed at Colditz so there were no summary executions.Oleg Gordievsky, the ex-KGB spy who defected to the UK in the mid-1980s and has been living in hiding since. A WWII camp in which German officers treat Allied officers with decency is a world I am glad to know about. Having read many WWII books and memoirs, Prisoners of the Castle is a new and unique addition to my WWII library that helps to broaden my perspective and understanding of the war and lives of those touched by it. Prisoners would attempt to dig more than 20 tunnels in all and, at times, the competing projects interfered with one another. But Macintyre also dwells on the details of life for those who remained confined by Colditz’s walls.

Joseph Ellison Platt, a self-righteous Methodist preacher tried, and usually failed to keep prisoners on the straight and narrow. Birendranath Mazumdar, an Indian doctor and an officer who was treated poorly by his British “allies” reflecting the racist attitudes of British officers. But the author also claimed that it must have been going on in a fairly large scale, while in the same breath, mentioning that (with the aforementioned exceptions) it was never verified/caught onto by the guards/we don't have proof. What strikes me here, as in a previous book on, Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War, is his refusal to whitewash or sugarcoat anything. It is set in a POW camp in Poland and portrays the real-life audacious escape attempt of 76 Allied airmen during WWII.

There were constant, and very creative, escape attempts utilizing tunnels, disguises, forged papers and even hiding in a mattress. Much of the drama in MacIntyre’s account centers on the almost continuous succession of attempted escapes, many of which were extremely elaborate and required months of preparation.

imagine these defeated men pooling their ingenuity to build something so magnificent, such a beautiful dream of freedom.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.