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Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison
The definitive and surprising true story of one of history's most notorious prisons-and the remarkable cast of POWs who tried relentlessly to escape their captors, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor
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 Macintyre's telling, Colditz's most famous names-like the indomitable Pat Reid-share 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, America's 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 war's arc from within Colditz's stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler's 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.
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 Macintyre's telling, Colditz's most famous names-like the indomitable Pat Reid-share 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, America's 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 war's arc from within Colditz's stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler's 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.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Prisoners of the Castle
"Riveting . . . This is another engrossing tale of WWII intrigue from a master of the genre."-Publishers Weekly
"A mixture of derring-do and a vivid, warts-and-all portrayal of the iconic castle."-Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Ben Macintyre
"John le Carré's nonfiction counterpart."-The New York Times
"Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history."-David Grann
"One of the most gifted espionage writers around."-Annie Jacobsen
"Macintyre is a supremely gifted storyteller. . . . His books are absurdly entertaining."-The Boston Globe
"Riveting . . . This is another engrossing tale of WWII intrigue from a master of the genre."-Publishers Weekly
"A mixture of derring-do and a vivid, warts-and-all portrayal of the iconic castle."-Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Ben Macintyre
"John le Carré's nonfiction counterpart."-The New York Times
"Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history."-David Grann
"One of the most gifted espionage writers around."-Annie Jacobsen
"Macintyre is a supremely gifted storyteller. . . . His books are absurdly entertaining."-The Boston Globe
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
The Originals
On the afternoon of November 10, 1940, Captain Pat Reid gazed up at the castle on the cliff and experienced the combination of admiration and anxiety its builders had intended. "We saw looming above us our future prison," he later wrote. "Beautiful, serene, majestic and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink . . . a sight to make the bravest quail."
Quailing was not in Pat Reid's nature. Indeed, he saw faint-heartedness of any sort as a moral failing, and refused to countenance it, in himself or anyone else. An officer in the Royal Army Service Corps, he had been captured in May, one of thousands of soldiers unable to get away after the fall of France. Initially held in Laufen Castle in Bavaria, he had immediately supervised the digging of a tunnel from the basement to a small shed outside the prison walls, and then made a break for the Yugoslavian border with five other officers. They were on the run for five days before they were caught and sent to Colditz, a new camp for incorrigible prisoners, and therefore a place for which Reid was amply qualified.
Born in India to an Irish father, at twenty-nine years old Reid was a natural contrarian and a born exhibitionist, a most dependable ally and, as an opponent, obstinate and insufferable. He had once climbed the rugby posts during an England-Ireland international at Twickenham to plant a bunch of shamrocks at the top. Described as "a thick-set, wavy-haired fellow with a mischievous look in his eyes" by one fellow inmate, Reid spoke and wrote exclusively in the argot of the Boy's Own Paper. He displayed, at all times, a relentless, chirpy optimism. With a strong sense of his own place in the drama, Reid would become the first and most extensive chronicler of Colditz. He hated the place on sight and spent most of the rest of his life thinking and writing about it.
The British officers, later known as the "Laufen Six," were marched across the moat, and then under a second stone archway, "whose oaken doors closed ominously behind us with the clanging of heavy iron bars in true medieval fashion." In peacetime, Reid had been a civil engineer and he cast a professional eye over the battlements. The ground fell away in a sheer precipice on three sides, below terraces festooned in barbed wire. As the day faded, the castle walls were lit by a blaze of searchlights. The nearest city was Leipzig, twenty-three miles to the northwest. The closest border to a country outside Nazi control was 400 miles away. "Escape," Reid reflected, "would be a formidable proposition." The little group was marched under another gated arch, and into the inner courtyard. Only the sound of their boots ringing on the cobbles broke the silence. It was, wrote Reid, "an unspeakably grisly place."
Colditz Castle stands on a hilltop 150 feet above the Mulde River, a tributary of the Elbe in the east of what is now Germany. Before it became a German province in the tenth century, the Serbian Slavs who inhabited the area had called it Koldyese, meaning "dark forest." The first stone of what would become a mighty fortress was laid in about 1043, and over the next millennium it was repeatedly expanded and modified, destroyed and rebuilt by the great dynasties that tussled for power and prominence in the area. Fire, war, and pestilence changed the castle's shape over the centuries, but its purposes remained constant: to impress and oppress the ruler's subjects, demonstrate his might, frighten his enemies, and incarcerate his captives.
The hereditary rulers of the region, the Electors of Saxony, converted it into a hunting lodge, with a chapel and banqueting hall, and in 1523 the surrounding parkland became a game reserve encircled by high stone walls; white stags were held in a special enclosure in the park or Tiergarten, before being released and hunted down. The electors kept their dowagers, turbulent relatives, and unmarried daughters within the castle walls. In the early eighteenth century under Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, King of Poland, and Grand Duke of Lithuania, the Schloss was enlarged with additional fortifications and pleasure gardens, and a theater. "Augustus the Strong" was a man of immense physical stamina, skilled in the sport of fox-tossing (which was exactly as nasty as it sounds), and a prodigious womanizer said to have fathered somewhere between 365 and 382 children. The castle was expanded to 700 rooms in order to house them.
By the nineteenth century the Saxon princes had turned their attention elsewhere, and the castle on the hill became a poorhouse, a remand home, and then a hospital for the "incurably insane." The most expensive lunatic asylum in Germany, Colditz was a dumping ground for the mentally distu...
The Originals
On the afternoon of November 10, 1940, Captain Pat Reid gazed up at the castle on the cliff and experienced the combination of admiration and anxiety its builders had intended. "We saw looming above us our future prison," he later wrote. "Beautiful, serene, majestic and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink . . . a sight to make the bravest quail."
Quailing was not in Pat Reid's nature. Indeed, he saw faint-heartedness of any sort as a moral failing, and refused to countenance it, in himself or anyone else. An officer in the Royal Army Service Corps, he had been captured in May, one of thousands of soldiers unable to get away after the fall of France. Initially held in Laufen Castle in Bavaria, he had immediately supervised the digging of a tunnel from the basement to a small shed outside the prison walls, and then made a break for the Yugoslavian border with five other officers. They were on the run for five days before they were caught and sent to Colditz, a new camp for incorrigible prisoners, and therefore a place for which Reid was amply qualified.
Born in India to an Irish father, at twenty-nine years old Reid was a natural contrarian and a born exhibitionist, a most dependable ally and, as an opponent, obstinate and insufferable. He had once climbed the rugby posts during an England-Ireland international at Twickenham to plant a bunch of shamrocks at the top. Described as "a thick-set, wavy-haired fellow with a mischievous look in his eyes" by one fellow inmate, Reid spoke and wrote exclusively in the argot of the Boy's Own Paper. He displayed, at all times, a relentless, chirpy optimism. With a strong sense of his own place in the drama, Reid would become the first and most extensive chronicler of Colditz. He hated the place on sight and spent most of the rest of his life thinking and writing about it.
The British officers, later known as the "Laufen Six," were marched across the moat, and then under a second stone archway, "whose oaken doors closed ominously behind us with the clanging of heavy iron bars in true medieval fashion." In peacetime, Reid had been a civil engineer and he cast a professional eye over the battlements. The ground fell away in a sheer precipice on three sides, below terraces festooned in barbed wire. As the day faded, the castle walls were lit by a blaze of searchlights. The nearest city was Leipzig, twenty-three miles to the northwest. The closest border to a country outside Nazi control was 400 miles away. "Escape," Reid reflected, "would be a formidable proposition." The little group was marched under another gated arch, and into the inner courtyard. Only the sound of their boots ringing on the cobbles broke the silence. It was, wrote Reid, "an unspeakably grisly place."
Colditz Castle stands on a hilltop 150 feet above the Mulde River, a tributary of the Elbe in the east of what is now Germany. Before it became a German province in the tenth century, the Serbian Slavs who inhabited the area had called it Koldyese, meaning "dark forest." The first stone of what would become a mighty fortress was laid in about 1043, and over the next millennium it was repeatedly expanded and modified, destroyed and rebuilt by the great dynasties that tussled for power and prominence in the area. Fire, war, and pestilence changed the castle's shape over the centuries, but its purposes remained constant: to impress and oppress the ruler's subjects, demonstrate his might, frighten his enemies, and incarcerate his captives.
The hereditary rulers of the region, the Electors of Saxony, converted it into a hunting lodge, with a chapel and banqueting hall, and in 1523 the surrounding parkland became a game reserve encircled by high stone walls; white stags were held in a special enclosure in the park or Tiergarten, before being released and hunted down. The electors kept their dowagers, turbulent relatives, and unmarried daughters within the castle walls. In the early eighteenth century under Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, King of Poland, and Grand Duke of Lithuania, the Schloss was enlarged with additional fortifications and pleasure gardens, and a theater. "Augustus the Strong" was a man of immense physical stamina, skilled in the sport of fox-tossing (which was exactly as nasty as it sounds), and a prodigious womanizer said to have fathered somewhere between 365 and 382 children. The castle was expanded to 700 rooms in order to house them.
By the nineteenth century the Saxon princes had turned their attention elsewhere, and the castle on the hill became a poorhouse, a remand home, and then a hospital for the "incurably insane." The most expensive lunatic asylum in Germany, Colditz was a dumping ground for the mentally distu...
