Description
The myth of Colditz, the most infamous prison in history, has stood unchallenged for 70 years: prisoners of war, mustaches firmly set on stiff upper lips, defying the Nazis by tunnelling out of a grim Gothic castle on a German hilltop. Like all legends, that story contains only part of the truth. In Ben Macintyre's brilliant, cliché-smashing new history, he offers a vision of Colditz previously unimagined, a story of much more than an escape, just as the prison's inmates were far more complicated than the cardboard saints depicted in post-war pop culture.
Colditz was a miniature replica of upper-class society at the time, only far more lethal—a high-stakes boarding school surrounded by barbed wire. It initially held prisoners from all Allied nations but eventually contained only Britons and Americans, a heavily guarded cage with its own culture, eccentricities, and internal tensions. In intimate and compelling detail, Macintyre explores what happens to people when they are locked up without committing a crime and with no idea when or if they might be liberated.
Colditz, then, is a tale of the indomitable human spirit, but also one of snobbery, class conflict, hidden sexuality, bullying, espionage, boredom, insanity, and farce.
With access to declassified archives, private papers, and never-before-seen photos, the author reveals a remarkable cast of characters previously hidden, from Indian doctor Birendranath Mazymdar, the only non-white prisoner, whose ill-treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America's oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture escape aids for POWs, from maps hidden in playing cards to a compass secreted inside a walnut; and many others.
A definitive and surprising new narrative of one of history's most famous prisons.
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New York Times bestseller