Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

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Join Ben Macintyre as he presents the undisclosed story of life inside Colditz, where prisoners lived in close proximity to their captors, participating in a thrilling game of cat and mouse.

An amazing recount by BM of the heroics and deprivations of the famed prisoners of castle Colditz in wartime Germany. Heroes and bullies, lovers and spies, captors and prisoners living cheek-by-jowl for years in a thrilling game of cat and mouse - and all determined to escape by any means necessary. For some time after the war the glider was regarded as either a myth or tall story, as there was no solid proof that the glider had existed and Colditz was then in the Soviet Occupation Zone. The camp's first British prisoners were the Laufen Six on November 7, 1940, who were transferred to Colditz after their first escape attempt from the Laufen Camp.The international make-up of the prisoners at Colditz is well illustrated by the make-up of the successful escapers: of the 32 estimated to have made ‘home runs’ 12 were French, 11 were British, 7 were Dutch, one was a Pole and one a Belgian. Names are omitted that are identified elsewhere; like the majority of the tunnels under the place, leads are opened that end up nowhere or just simply dead-ended.

If this book was an escape attempt, it made it out of the castle, but was captured after a few days out. In Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle , bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes us inside the walls of the most infamous prison in history to meet the real men behind the legends. It was not until the middle of 1943 when the Germans moved almost everyone else to other locations that the British contingent, which had grown to about 230, became the biggest group and remained so for almost all of the rest of the war. K.) and the bestselling author of Agent Sonya, The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books.It was at the start of WWII that the famous castle was transformed into a Prisoners of War camp and in November 1940 the first British soldiers would arrive.