Prisoners of the Castle by Ben MacIntyre
This book is all about the most exclusive prison in WWII, Colditz Castle, where Germany held the most special prisoners of war. The castle was home to a wide range of individuals including rogues and war heroes, royalty and commoners, and a lot of eccentrics who liked to try to escape from German POW camps. As the author writes, “participants in the Colditz drama included communists, scientists, homosexuals, women, aesthetes and philistines, aristocrats, spies, workers, poets, and traitors.”
The book opens with a description of a 1943 escape attempt. One of the prisoners, Michael Sinclair, had dressed up as Sergeant Major Gustav Rothenberger, the person in charge of keeping order in the castle. Sinclair, an English officer, was an amateur actor and fluent in German. His costume was crafted out of lots of random pieces of cloth and such. The idea was to have the fake sergeant major tell the guards to take a break, at which point twenty prisoners would climb over the wall and escape. Alas, the pass that Sinclair showed to the one guard they ran into was the wrong color. The plan was thwarted, but you get the idea. These prisoners really were into trying to escape. It was their hobby.
The first prisoner at Colditz was Pat Reid, a Royal Army officer who had been captured in 1940 when France fell to the Nazis. He had tried to escape from his low-security POW camp in France several times, so he was sent to Colditz Castle, which was situated in the mountains near Leipzig, Germany, in the middle of nowhere. It was 400 miles from non-Nazi territory. Sinclair was an engineer by training, so from his first day there, he was figuring out the best escape routes. While the castle looked impregnable, being hundreds of years old, there were lots of ways to escape.
Lieutenant Reinhold Eggers was the commander of Colditz. He was a Prussian school teacher by trade, but he had been a hero in WWI so he was given command of the castle. He spoke English impeccably and he also loved England. Eggers was not a Nazi. He thought they were at best silly and at worst dangerous.
Colditz was run by the German officer corps, not the Nazi SS thugs, who ran most POW camps. There was a certain pride in upholding the Geneva Conventions on war, something the SS did not do. During 1940, as the German forces overwhelmed much of Europe, Colditz welcomed hundreds of British and French prisoners to the castle.
The castle reflected caste and class in society. The officers were special. Although they were prisoners, they had orderlies –a batman (not the Batman with the neat cape) – who waited on them. This master-servant relationship was part of the Geneva Convention that governed POW affairs. The servants were usually not part of the many escape attempts. Those were for the elites.
The menu at Colditz was supplemented by food parcels, which included lots of good things to eat. These were sent to the prisoners from the International Red Cross. Families and friends also sent goodies, especially at holiday time. Life was pretty good except for the prisoner part.
Over time, captured soldiers from France and Poland joined the British residents. This caused some tension. There was always the language problem and there was a lack of trust among the different national groups. Often, prisoners would freelance escape efforts, digging tunnels to escape without coordinating anything with anybody. Soon, they figured out that working together was important.
The escape schemes were impressive. Prisoners would steal keys from German guards and use a soap bar to get an impression that could be made into a hand-carved wooden key that worked.
Alain Le Ray was one of the first French officers to be sent to Colditz. He had tried to escape from several POW camps but had been caught. In his new digs, he spent a few months checking out his options and figured out that there was a ten-minute window between shift changes when a small side door was not guarded. In the early spring of 1941, he arranged for a melee to break out among his fellow prisoners that distracted the Germans long enough for Le Roy to get through the door and over the wall. He hitched a ride on a freight train and got to Switzerland, making him the first successful escapee from Colditz. Le Ray’s bravado inspired others to try to escape but the Germans ratcheted up their security and no one succeeded for quite some time.
While Lieutenant Reinhold Eggers, the supervisor of the castle, was not a Nazi, his boss, Captain Paul Priem, a cheerful drunk, was really into “Heil Hitler” stuff. One of Eggers constant battles was to keep Priem from brutalizing the prisoners, a job Reinhold did well.
Peter Allan was the first Brit to escape. He was small enough to fit into a mattress that was being sent out of the castle. Once outside, he dressed up like a Hitler Youth - he was young enough and small enough to pull it off. He used a train ticket that he had bribed a guard to give him to get to the American consulate in Vienna where he turned himself in. Unfortunately, the Americans who were not yet involved in the war, turned Peter in to the German authorities.
One theme of the book was that many of the German guards were sympathetic to the prisoners. German security would do trade deals that gave them cigarettes and candy and gave the prisoners money, train tickets, and other escape essentials.
Pat Reid, who had been held prisoner for years, was the leader of the mass escape movement. He helped organize a major tunneling project that would go under the castle to freedom. He bribed a few guards to look the other way as twenty men scrambled into the tunnel. Unfortunately, the guards informed Lieutenant Eggers about the plan and it was thwarted. Not all of the guards were friendly.
Prisoners from many countries came to Colditz. People liked the Dutch who seemed to be model prisoners and were pleasant to be with. It turned out that they were escape-happy and had some really good ideas about how to exit the premises.
Pierre Marie Jean-Baptiste Mairesse-LeBrun, a highly-decorated aristocratic French cavalry officer with a very long name, was a superb athlete who competed in the Olympics. He figured out how to jump/pole vault over the wall and started walking/running to Switzerland. He got there with the help of a bicycle he had stolen. He was truly free.
In his former cell at the prison, Mairesse-LeBrun had left a note on his packed suitcase, asking Lieutenant Eggers to send the luggage to an address in England. Eggers, being a gentleman, complied.
By the end of 1941, the prison population reached 500, a huge increase in less than a year. There were several mass escape attempts involving tunnels, but none worked. The German high command bragged about how they had made Colditz escape-proof.
Not quite. Over several months, four Dutch prisoners escaped through a hidden manhole that the Germans did not know existed.
Life at Colditz, while not as harsh as in most POW camps, was very boring. There were no work opportunities. The castle did not have any farm land where prisoners could while away the time tilling the field. People had a lot of free time, some of which they used to tease and irritate the guards. Often the inmates would stage fake mental breakdowns that would drive the Germans into a frenzy, at which point the crazy person would stop acting and bounce back to normal. The French were good at writing and singing songs that made fun of the guards and officers.
In the summer of 1941, the Poles organized a type of Olympics which were very popular. Since there wasn’t much open land at Colditz, the walls were a big part of the games with lots of different climbing contests.
Racism and classism were alive and well among the residents. British officers had orderlies who were essentially servants who pampered their superiors. There was one British officer of Indian heritage, Birendanath Mazumdar, who was ridiculed by other prisoners. Many accused him of being a spy, which was ironic because the Germans did try to recruit him to spy on his comrades. Despite being offered release, he kept his loyalty to the Crown and refused to turn on his mates, even as they made his life difficult.
One of the prisoners, Giles Romilly, a communist journalist, was related to Winston Churchill’s wife, Clementine. The Germans saw him as a high-value asset and gave him rather posh quarters. Other prominent Brits would end up in Colditz which became a repository for famous people who had been captured. They were known as the prominente.
Theater was a big diversion at the castle. Some of the men had been active in drama in college so they knew how to stage rather lavish productions. One was a goofy ballet that everyone loved - big guys in drag trying to dance delicately. They also staged real plays including some Shakespeare. Many of the productions featured lots of guys dressed up as gals.
As was the case in many POW camps, the men had dances where they danced with other men. There was sex between men but no one publicly acknowledged it. One Frenchman actually married his girlfriend. He took his vows at Colditz while she took hers in Cannes. The marriage was not consummated until his release in 1945.
1941 was a turning point in the war but no one realized it then. The Nazis occupied France and much of Europe and the army was meeting with little resistance. The US entered the war in December. At the same time, Germany’s invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, was not going well. Despite some bad news, Lieutenant Eggers and his command staff at Colditz were confident of ultimate German victory. They even let the prisoners stay up late on New Year’s Eve to celebrate 1941. The POWs sang “Auld Lang Syne” and had a snowball fight to bring in the new year of 1942.
Early in 1942, Brits Tony Luteyn and Airey Neave put on fake German uniforms and went into the theater where they used a new tunnel to get to the outer wall which they climbed over. They put on civilian clothes, walked to town, grabbed a train with tickets they had bartered for with a guard. They switched trains to get within a few miles of the Swiss border. Several times during their journey they were stopped by German authorities but each time they were not apprehended. They made it to freedom. When word got back to the prison, the British contingent celebrated their success.
During 1941-1942, the inmates dug a tunnel that was 400 feet long. They were planning a mass escape. Lieutenant Eggers found out about it (probably from a turncoat POW) and thwarted the effort. However, he was impressed with the scope of the excavation work.
The British POWs made their own invisible ink so that they could send information back to the military. They also developed secret codes so that regular letters could contain vital information. Once back in England, escapee Airey Neave was recruited by MI9, British intelligence, to help them better understand the German POW system.
POWs relied on packages from relatives for various materials to help their escape efforts. While the contents of anything coming into Colditz were examined, there were ways to hide important materials. People sent German cash hidden in Monopoly game money. Containers had fake bottoms that could hide contraband. Hollowed-out books were good for hiding things.
The prisoners also figured out how to get to packages before the Germans inspected them. A locksmith inmate made keys that would open the door to the storeroom where the packages were stored when they came in. During the night, prisoners would sneak into the room, unwrap the packages, take out the contraband, and reseal the packages. It worked for many years. One of the packages contained a small radio that provided real news to the prisoners for a few months until a snitch told Eggers about it.
Among the inmates, there were some Nazi sympathizers who were sometimes identified as spies helping the Germans. Some of these people were put on trial by their fellow prisoners. While there was some talk of executing traitors, it never happened. The opprobrium of having been found to work with the enemy was punishment enough. The most famous of these was Walter Purdy, an Englishman so was fascinated by Hitler that he moved to Berlin where the Nazis wined and dined him. He would do anything to help the Reich, so he was sent to Colditz to spy. He wasn’t very good at it and was caught within a few weeks. He was court-martialed by the POW court that recommended execution. There was no way to do that, so Purdy was sent back to Berlin to drink and eat at the Nazis expense.
In July of 1942, a new commander came to Colditz - Colonel Edgar Glaesche. He was a by-the-book disciplinarian which really didn’t work with either the Germans or the POWs. He did sharpen anti-escape efforts and it worked. Only a handful of men left the prison after he got there.
As the war news got worse, Nazis became more savage in their treatment of everyone, including POWs. The Gestapo was brought into the prison to stop escape efforts. Four men had worked to cut through the bars of a window leading outside. Their plot was discovered and the Gestapo escorted them to Berlin where they were executed by the SS, a clear violation of all of the POW rules.
Some people did get away. Pat Reid, one of the first people to occupy Colditz, and three others, picked a lock on a door and eventually made it over the wall. All of them made it to Switzerland. It was the biggest breakout from the castle. Because of his familiarity with the castle, Reid was the architect of most of the escape plans. Because of this knowledge, he spent the rest of the war working for British intelligence services, assisting them in helping prisoners escape.
Christmas 1942 was fairly pleasant. The Germans negotiated a truce with their captives. In exchange for a pledge of no escape attempts for the season, there would be good food and alcohol for Christmas. The deal held and there was a nice steak dinner for Christmas.
One inmate, Checko Chaloupka, a captured Czech pilot, was a fixer. He could get the guards to help the POWs do things, and he organized some memorable events. He also had a girlfriend in town, Irma, a dental assistant, whom he visited and had sex with whenever he had dental issues, which was often. His captors wondered what was up with his teeth.
In 1943, Colditz had a leadership change. Colonel Edgar Glaesche, who was frustrated by the prisoner shenanigans at the castle, was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Prawitt, a real Prussian hard bar who was convinced he could intimidate the prisoners into submission. He ordered six to eight random inspections a day and told the guards that they could shoot uncooperative prisoners. They didn’t do that. Eggers, who still ran the day-to-day operations, described Prawitt as the most ignorant man he had ever met.
Over time, important prisoners were placed at Colditz – star athletes as well as relatives of royalty and important British leaders. One man, Lieutenant Michael Alexander, was a high-level British commando who had done great damage to the German war effort. He was going to be tried and executed for his crimes against the Reich until he had a brilliant idea. He claimed to be related to General Sir Harold Alexander, the commander of Allied Forces in the Middle East, a big deal. Of course, it was all made up, but it worked. No one could Google him back then, so he was sent to Colditz and was not executed. His roommate was Giles Romilly, who was related to Winston Churchill’s wife. The prominente, as the elite prisoners were called, got better housing and food and had more privileges than the regular POWs. The Germans wanted to keep them happy so that if things got bad, these famous people could be used to help the Colditz commander and staff avoid being tried for war crimes.
Throughout 1943, many non-British prisoners were removed from Colditz and it became a British island. The plays then were all favorites of the English people, and the concerts exclusively featured songs from Great Britain, none of that silly French stuff. The prison became more stratified by class, with the upper-crusts being total jerks to those not so well born.
Late in 1943, the prisoners could hear Allied bombers on their way to destroying German cities. Morale among the security staff at Colditz sagged and the guards started to steal Red Cross packages in anticipation of a time soon when food would be scarce. Nazi SS and Gestapo personnel replaced the regular army soldiers who had staffed the castle since the beginning of the war. The new Hitler aficionados were nasty and clamped down on the prisoners to the point where escapes were rare.
Julius Green was a British dentist who ended up in Colditz in early 1944 because they needed a dentist. He was garrulous and had a great sense of humor. He also was a very good spy. He treated the teeth of both POWs and German soldiers from whom he got a lot of information which was sent back to London.
Green was Jewish and, as the year unfolded, it was clear that the SS troops at Colditz would soon get around to exterminating him even if they needed their teeth fixed. Green needed to get out so he feigned insanity, which was grounds for being sent to a different POW placement. The dentist did a good job of faking being nuts and he had the good fortune to be examined by a psychiatrist who hated the Nazis. Green, however, was not transferred. He managed to spend the rest of the war at the castle without being attacked by the SS or Gestapo, so his” insanity” was fruitful.
On the night of June 6, 1944, Colditz was alive with news of the Allies D-Day landing in France. The POWs had snuck in another radio and the Nazi guards kept talking about the massive invasion. The German high command was getting nervous about the outcome of the war, so they doubled down on doing cruel things across the Reich. The Nazis ramped up the death machines at the concentration camps and the SS was told to give no quarter to any recalcitrant prisoners. Since the punishment for a failed escape attempt was now a bullet in the head, no POWs tried to escape.
The first American to be housed at Colditz was Florimond Duke, an East Coast WASP who decided that he wanted to be a spy. He was handsome, smart, and rich but he was a terrible spy. He was too old for service but his family pulled some strings and got him into the Office of Strategic Services, the WWII American intelligence shop. In February of 1944, OSS developed a plan to parachute Duke and three other spies into Hungary which had developed a strong resistance movement against the Nazi invaders. Right about when the men were dropped into the country, Hitler sent a big military force to put down the resistance.
Duke had only one hour's worth of paratroop training during which he jumped off a chair. He and three others did land in the country, at which point they were promptly apprehended by German loyalists. After being threatened with execution they ended up at Colditz. He was a big hit with the other POWs who were happy to have an American with them since the US Army was most likely to liberate Colditz at some point. He was a popular guy who helped with the drama productions and he was an enthusiastic player of the game of bridge.
The Germans were getting nervous about how the war was going so they transferred a bunch of distinguished prisoners, mostly British royalty, to Colditz. The thinking was that once the place was taken by the Allies, the high-value prisoners would help the Germans negotiate their way out of serious trouble.
In late 1944 one person tried to escape from Colditz. Michael Sinclair had been there for two years and had attempted several unsuccessful escapes. On September 25, he tried again. Sinclair got over the first wall and was running for the second one when he was shot and killed.
There was a nice funeral for him in the local cemetery that was attended by ten prisoners. The POWs filed a complaint with the Red Cross about the shooting, but it was determined that Sinclair had been given several warnings before the shooting, so it was justified. He came from a military family, and many of his relatives had died in action. He joined them.
The local resistance to the Nazis was growing. People in the village had organized a secret government to take over once the Germans started to leave, which they felt would be soon. The locals were passing valuable information to the Allied troops who were on the way.
Food was getting scarce for everyone as the war wound down. Both prisoners and guards had to be creative to keep from starving.
There was one more big escape attempt in the works. A group of pilot POWs were building a glider that they were planning to launch from the top of a wall and fly away. It sounds crazy but they did almost complete the task before they were liberated. The author observed, “The Colditz glider was a tour de force of inventiveness, a remarkable combination of lateral thinking, technical creativity, and collective endeavor. It was also extremely unlikely to work.”
About one-quarter of the prisoners worked on the project in the attic, and they almost got it done. They managed to hide the huge glider (with a 33-foot wingspan) from the Germans, a remarkable feat. Although most of the POWs didn’t think that the thing would work, it was a great symbol of hope and escape.
Early in 1945 the Germans had been defeated, but no one knew exactly when the “Master Race” would figure that out. Adolph Hitler became more unhinged and vindictive as the war turned on him. He ordered more and more executions of Jews, political prisoners, POWs, disloyal Germans, and anyone else. Several French generals who were captured were executed.
Late in the war, women journalists covered more and more of the conflict. No woman was ever officially accredited to a fighting unit, but in 1944, Lee Carson, a correspondent for the International News Service, talked her way into covering live war action. She covered several battles, including the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944, the Nazis last gasp. She was hurt in several situations but she stayed in the field, reporting what was going on to the world. Carson was tall, smart, tenacious and very attractive. She got noticed. Her professionalism impressed those around her. She was with the Allied troops as they moved towards Colditz.
The castle was becoming home to many high-ranking American and British officers, again with the idea that the Colditz crew could bargain for their safety with the elite prisoners. Former Colditz guest Pat Reid, who had escaped and was helping British intelligence, was sure that the people in charge of Colditz would take the high-end prisoners to negotiate with the Allies.
There were rumors that the SS – “We do not negotiate!” -– was coming to town to execute the prisoners before they could be liberated. That order was made, but castle commander Prawitt thought that made no sense in terms of preserving the lives of the soldiers who guarded the prisoners. The Allies would not look kindly on those who carried out mass executions of POWs. No one was executed.
But the German high-command staff saw a role for the prominente, the high-value prisoners of British royalty, Allied command officers, and other celebrities who were housed at Colditz. They were removed from the castle and sent off to Hitler’s redoubt in the Bavarian Alps where they could be used to negotiate with the Allies or be executed depending on Hitler’s whim.
Once the prominente were gone, the Colditz senior leadership team decided that the only thing that made sense was to turn the prison over to the prisoners. The Allies were only a few miles from the castle, and the local SS nuts were not willing to take responsibility for managing the POWs. The prisoners drew up a formal article of surrender which Colonel Prawitt, the top military official, signed.
Lieutenant Eggers, who had been there since the beginning, had a sense of history. He gathered 1,400 artifacts - pens, knives, British banknotes, escape paraphernalia - because he thought that one day people would be very interested in what happened at Colditz. He was right.
By mid-April 1945, American forces, led by Colonel Leo Shaunessy, were a few miles away from the prison. Correspondent Lee Carson was with them. As the Allied troops surrounded the castle, SS soldiers opened fire and caused a lot of damage and death, prompting the Colonel to pull back and regroup for an assault the next day.
The Germans ran a slave labor factory near the castle that produced ammunition. The conditions were deplorable, with many workers dying every day. The average lifespan there was three-and a-half months. The US and British soldiers couldn't believe the horror of the camp as they liberated it.
Early the next morning, four American soldiers including intelligence specialist Private Alan Murphey were ordered to do a little excursion to check out the neat-looking castle. They had no idea it was full of POWs. During the night, the German soldiers had left the castle so they wouldn’t be arrested once it fell. Murphey and one other man walked up to the door where they were greeted by a Yankee and a Scot, in full dress regalia, who informed the GIs that the commander of Colditz wanted to surrender. Alan Murphey, a low-ranking private, accepted the surrender of one of the most notorious POW sites in Europe. He and his scout team drank coffee with the prisoners. It was all very polite and civil as the 1,500 prisoners at Colditz were liberated. Dozens of very happy men swarmed the four Americans.
Lee Carson, the first woman most of the men at the prison had seen for a long time, covered the formal surrender a few hours later. While she was there, she took the only picture of the semi-finished glider in the attic. She also broke the story about the 20 prominente (high-value prisoners) that had left earlier to go to Hitler’s redoubt in the mountains.
A Swiss official, Rudolf Denzler, had accompanied the twenty men as they left Colditz. Along the way, the order came down from the Nazi high command to execute the prisoners. The Swiss diplomat resisted and insisted that the prisoners must be released. Executing them was against the rules of war. He was being ignored so he called up a casual acquaintance, General Gottlob Berger, who was in the regular German army and not an SS nut. Denzler convinced Berger that things would go better for officers who had done good things at the end of the war, something Denzler would attest to. Berger intervened and liberated the prominente. That night he threw a huge party where he, his command staff, and the POWs got drunk and ate a lot of fine food. The next morning, the former prisoners, who were very hung over, left in German cars and were brought to the American front lines. At about the same time, Allied jeeps transported the former Colditz residents to planes that flew them to freedom.
Many of the former POWs had successful lives back home. Some were elected to high political office. Many became established authors. Lieutenant Reinhold Eggers, the man who was directly responsible for the prisoner’s safety, had kept his integrity and was never charged with any war crime. He went back to his old job of teaching but he lived in East Germany that was ruled by Russia. He was arrested and tried for made-up crimes and served several years in a terrible prison before being released in 1955. He moved out of the Soviet zone and lived to be 85. He wrote a book on Colditz and kept in touch with many of his former charges.
General Gottlob Berger’s good deed in saving the prominente from execution helped reduce his sentence for war crimes down to six years instead of the twenty-five the prosecution wanted.
Colditz castle is now a museum, with many exhibits that explain what happened during the years when it was home to so many Allied POWs. Much of the material there was donated by former Colditz prisoners and by Reinhold Eggers.
Bob’s Take
This was a fascinating book. It started off with everything being done properly - prisoners receiving good treatment, honorable German military officers, decent food, freedom to write letters and to participate in many recreational activities. The German commanders expected the prisoners to try to escape so it was an ongoing game to try to prevent escapes. As the war turned bad for the Nazis, a lot changed. By the time the SS was running the place in 1944, things often got ugly and deteriorated.
The POWs were geniuses at developing clever plans to escape. They usually failed, but they really enjoyed the planning and plotting.
There were many honorable Germans. Lieutenant Eggers played by the rules as did the early castle commanders. As the war went on and Germany started to lose, the leadership at Colditz got nastier as the true believer Nazis were appointed to run the place. Eggers successfully pushed back on his bosses when they were going to do something they shouldn’t do. Most of the guards had the same professionalism. Of course, once the regular army soldiers were replaced by the SS and the Gestapo, things changed.
There was an impressive range of talent among the Colditz population. Many were skilled at acting, singing, writing songs and producing entertaining plays which even the Germans enjoyed. The prisoners also had a lot of technical and engineering skills that helped them make fake guns, passports, and uniforms that helped in escape efforts.
The development of the glider was proof of how good these guys were with technology. It was almost finished but the war ended. It’s pretty clear that the aircraft wouldn't have worked, but a good time was had by all.
