Acclaimed historian Ben Macintyre: Colditz Prison

Colditz is an 11th Century Gothic castle with 700 rooms atop a cliff overlooking the town of Colditz in Saxony, Germany.

During World War II it was used by Germany as a prisoner of war camp, housing their most difficult and trouble-making prisoners. 

“When you drive up to it, even today, there’s something extremely sinister about it,” says historian and author Ben Macintyre. 

The Nazi’s thought the castle would be impossible to escape from but there were more escape attempts from Colditz than any other prisoner of war camp. 

Macintyre details the escapes in his new book Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle. 

“The Germans made two essential mistakes here, the first one was to assume if they put all the most difficult prisoners in one place, they’d be easy to control,” Mcintyre tells Kathryn Ryan. 

“In fact, it was far harder because the prisoners just encouraged each other...it became a kind of university of escaping.” 

The second big mistake was to assume that because the castle looked terrifying, it would be secure, Macintyre says - in fact, it was one of the worst places to have a prison camp. 

Colditz was run by the German army, it wasn’t a concentration camp or run by the SS. It was used to house officers from the allied forces. 

The myth of Colditz is that it was a band of brothers, with all of the prisoners working together but it was a place deeply divided by race, sexuality, nationality, politics and class, Mcintyre says. 

The office class prisoners had servants to look after them, he says. 

“Those servants, that were brought in to cook and clean and polish the boots and so on, were themselves prisoners. These were prisoners of war, but they were known as orderlies, they were ordinary soldiers.” 

Believe it or not, Mcintyre says, there was an international escapers league at Colditz Castle, where prisoners kept tally of which country was getting more of its people out. 

“At one point there were so many different escapes being attempted from around the castle that they were quite literally undermining each other. There was something like five tunnels being dug simultaneously.” 

So they set up a bureaucratic system, a type of committee where each nation provided a senior escape officer to liaise with the others.  

The system worked well, until it didn’t, Mcintrye says. “Like most international agreements, it was sort of half successful.” 

One of the most extraordinary things about Colditz, he says, is the way prisoners manufactured escape equipment from within the castle.  

These included creating fake uniforms and stamps carved out of lino but also infiltrating the parcel office. 

The first of the British soldiers to escape was Airey Neave, who later became one of Margaret Thatcher’s senior advisors.  

“He and a Dutch accomplice Madwe themselves a pair of uniforms that looked almost identical to German officer uniforms. 

“What they did was they prize up the floorboards of the stage in the Colditz theatre, slipped down underneath, broke through to the ceiling below and entered something called the witches walk, which was a kind of passageway that ran across the top of the main entrance to Colditz.  

“At the end of that was a very ancient, medieval door which they picked and then dressed in these German uniforms they went down a spiral staircase, past the German guardhouse and walked out of the front gate of Colditz where they were saluted by two German [guards].” 

They walked down into the moat, climbed a wall, stripped off their uniforms down to civil clothes and caught two trains to the Swiss border where in the middle of a blizzard they stumbled across the border to safety, he says. 

A French cavalry officer escaped by vaulting himself over a four-metre barbed wire fence using only the cupped hands of a fellow officer to spring off.  

“He then ran up the hill while being shot at by German guards, mugged a German for a bicycle and then cycled along the autobahn for 100 miles all the way to Switzerland to escape.” 

What Mcintyre particularly loves about this story is that the officer left a note to the German commandant on top of his clothes telling him that he’d escaped and asking him to return his clothes to France – which the commandant did. 

Another of the successful escapes took place during a game of rugby. Rugby was very popular in Colditz and in the middle of an exercise yard the prisoners discovered an unused drain, Mcintyre says. 

“In the course of one rugby match, one Dutch and one British prisoner managed to slip into this drain when a scrum was taking place over the top of it...so they slipped inside, reattached the manhole cover, hid inside there...and then at night those two climbed out of the hole, climbed over a fence and actually managed to get to Switzerland.” 

Getting out of the castle was tricky enough, he says, but getting out of Germany was even trickier. 

“In order to get to a neutral border, you needed to have disguises, you needed to have false paper, you needed money – you had to pay your way out,” he says. 

Over time it became more impossible to escape Colditz Castle. Mcintyre says there was an inner castle that had walls 27 metres high, a series of terraces covered in barbed wire and machine gun placements, and later, listening devices installed in the walls. 

“It had become almost totally sealed off, he says. 

“There were traitors in the French camp. Famously, one Frenchman revealed to the Germans the existence of a tunnel the French had built, 140 metres long...it had its own ventilation system, and it had its own telephone, believe it or not. 

“The British group was also infiltrated by a British Fascist, a man called Walter Purdy, who was put in there by the German authorities as what is known in the spy trade as a stool pigeon. He was there to find out about escape attempts and report them back to the German authorities.” 

Prisoners even built a two-person glider in a secret attic.  

“It was built from 600 individual pieces of wood, struts made out of metal bedposts, it was wrapped in mattress ticking soaked in porridge to make it taut.  

“The whole idea was when the moment came, they would build a runway on the apex of the longest roof in Colditz and then by means of come rope and pully mechanism, and a bath filled with cement, they were going to drop the cement filled bath off the edge of the roof and then with the weight of that, catapult this glider into the air.” 

The war ended just before it could be used. 

“In a way the great fight in Colditz was against boredom, as in all prisons.”