The story of Colditz prison, there were more escape attempts from this than any other POW camp. 4/11/22
Michael Sinclair an amateur actor had spent 4 months studying the gait posture accent and routine of the commander of Colditz, but the fake pass he had was grey when it was supposed to be yellow and the sentry was not conned.
Reinhart Eggers the deputy commander was a schoolteacher and anglophile who had been to Gloucestershire to learn English culture. He was not a Nazi supporter and thus not popular with the German establishment.
1929 Geneva convention on POWs signed by 37 nations including Germany.
1939 Some 420,000 Polish soldiers were captured by the Germans, there were 140 Polish officers at Colditz. The food they got from the prison kitchen was ersatz coffee thin soup and black bread.
1940 1.8 million Frenchman were made captive by the fall of France.10% of the entire male population. 2000 British officers and 39000 other ranks were captured. After the adrenaline of battle the boredom of prison.
Pat Reid believed that escaping was the sworn duty of all officers, they were there as they had escaped from other POW camps, the punishment for escaping was a month in solitary. If they were caught by the SS or Gestapo they might be tortured or shot. Some officers had batmen or orderlies to look after them who were never part of the escapes or never wrote memoirs on prison.
Colditz town had 6000 citizens and was dominated by Nazis. Prisoners received Red Cross parcels and would have died without them. There were 200 French officers which included 60 Jewish ones but the French had swallowed Nazi propaganda and refused to be with them. The British invited the Jews to dinner in their mess. Some of the French supported Vichy and others supported de Gaul. Many prisoner paired off to learn each others language. Robert Blum son of Leon Blum as well ass Elie de Rothschild were in Colditz. Anglo French relation were soured by the destruction of the French fleet at Mer- el Kebir.
The Frenchman made a "home run" and this encouraged other to try escape. Escape tunnels were kept secret as there were always stool pigeons. Peter Allen the smallest officer was packed into a mattress dressed as a Hitler Youth. He walked to the station with no papers. He got to Vienna and asked the neutral US embassy for help but was told that " the consulate exists under diplomatic privilege of te German government, so Allen gave himself up starving after 23 days.
Amongst the British officers the class system still existed separating the aristocrats or different Public school groups. 15000 Dutch soldiers were captured and most signed a pledge to take no further part in the war and were released. 68 Dutch arrival refused to do this. Escapees tried to get 400 miles to the Swiss border.
The Dutch officer Hans Lerive was caught trying to get into Switzerland on a train and the boasting SS officer told him about Ramsen salient that 300yards of Swiss territory jutted out into Germany and unguarded back door. This proved valuable knowledge to Colditz prisoners.
The Poles set up games and so they were given a wire enclosed soccer field outside the castle .
Birendranarth Mazundar and Indian doctor, was a Brahmin and spoke a refined English as well as Bengali , Hindu, Urdu and French and German. He was the only Indian officer in the corps and the only British officer, he had joined as a London resident. Subhas Chandra Bose was an Indian nationalist and Nazi collaborator, he had been under house arrest in Calcutta and escaped to Afghanistan where the Germans sent a plane to fetch him. He formed the Tiger Legion and his soldiers swore allegiance to Hitler. 2.5 million Indian served in the allied army in WW2. Several thousand Indians were captured in North Africa and the Germans tried to persuade them to switch sides. Mazundar refused to join the German Indian enterprise, to get away went on a hunger strike, after 2 weeks her was transferred to an Indian POW camp in Chartres, France. He escaped and found that poor French farmers were willing to help him, but to avoid the wealthy. He and a friend walked 900km through occupied France and into Switzerland. 1943 Hitler sent Bose in a submarine to Japanese occupied Singapore to head the provisional government of free Singapore.
Fascist William Joyce or "Lord Haw Haw" broadcast Nazi propaganda, a well spoken Indian could perform a similar role. Walter Purdey was an assistant of Joyce and was sent to Colditz to act as a stool pigeon but was found out, after the war he was jailed for 9 years.
Denholm Elliott (humour) , Clive Dunn,(Dad's Army) Donald Pleasence (actor) Talbot Rothwell (wrote the Carry On movies)
Prominente were people the German though could swop for German officers. Giles Romilly was related to Clementine Churchill. Elie de Rothschild married Liliane Fould - Springer his childhood lover, by mail while at Colditz. Douglas Bader with tin legs the pilot fighter later portrayed in Reach for the Sky was one of the best known in Colditz. Michael Alexander was caught in Libya on an SAS raid. He was supposed to be shot as a spy but he led Rommel to think that he was General Harold Alexanders nephew and so sent to Colditz. John Arundel as well as the son of the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, George Lascelles and John Elphinstone both nephews of King George VI, George Haig son of the late Field Marshal Haig, Max Hamel a distant cousin of Churchill.
John Winant J. the son of the US Ambassador to London.
1941 March. "Sparrow" was a group of 3 American sent to Hungary to encourage them not to join Germany, the Germans knew about this and immediately 16 German Divisions marched into Hungary.
1941 June Soviet Union brought into the conflict
1941 Dec Pearl Harbor brought the US to war.
Some Poles people were skeptical of as felt they were Volksdeutshe. A Polish officer was accused of being a stool pigeon and was taken away the same day. Note Poland never formally surrendered. Later it was mostly British left at Colditz while the other nationalities were moved to other prisons, except for hardened escapers.
Letter were sent to England in a code and families that received them knew to take them to the war office and later send a letter back to the prisoners in the same code with observations of German troop movements in the area. M19 was set up to process this information. Getting the prisoners maps of enemy territory and compasses was priority. Red Cross parcels were never used to smuggle escape equipment. Hardback books were banned when one book was used to smuggle things. The Germans started x-raying parcels that were not Red Cross. The night before the parcels were x-rayed they was put into a cupboard , so the prisoner made a key to the cupboard and took out the contraband first. Till the prison cat was found locked inside.
Micky Burn was a journalist who had had a passionate affair with Guy Burgess the KGB spy. Earlier he had been a Nazi supporter and was introduced to Hitler by Unity Mitford, who became fascist Oswald Mosely's wife. When war began Burns volunteered and was in Operation Chariot, the Germans now tried to recruit him as a stool pigeon. He was the one who transcribed the BBC news onto paper to be circulated.
Prisoners had a hidden radio and were up to date with BBC news. Colditz was a highly literate place. Unlike convicts the release date of POWs is unknown and depends of distance world events. Reihnhart Eggers was waiting for the war to end and was secretly listening to BBC.
76 British officers who had staged a breakout from the Eichstatt camp Bavaria were brought to Colditz.
1943 July Operation Gomorrah dropped 9000tons of bombs on Hamburg killing 37000 people, in December bombing killed 1800 Leipzig residents.
1943 Aug Allied landing on Sicily.
The dentist Captain Julius Green was taken to other POW camps to treat both inmates and guards gathered information on troop movements and train timetables which he sent back home by code, till he was sent to Colditz where he continued this.
1944 March, From near Sagan, lower Silesia, 76 allied soldiers escaped 73 were caught and 50 were executed on Hitters orders by the SS. This was the story of "the Great Escape"
1944 June D day Normandy landings. Now only total capitulation of Germany would be acceptable to the allies.
Under Himmler the Gestapo and SS were starting to have a say in dealing with POW camps. A Czeck was no longer regarded as a POW but a German traitor in a RAF uniform, luckily Rudolf Denzler of the Red Cross was involved and he was returned to Colditz. At this stage best chance of getting home was to stay at Colditz till the allies arrived hoping the SS never came first. There started being a gentleness between guards and prisoners, while at the same time Germany was starting to starve .Personal packages were reduced to a trickle and letters stopped arriving.
1944 July Plot led by Claus von Stauffenberg, when this failed 5000 suspects were executed on Hitler's orders.
Rudolf Denzler the Red Cross representative found that the SS was starting to get involved and it was becoming harder to protect the POWs.
M-19 smuggled smuggled 5000 Allied soldiers and airmen out of Occupied Europe. This was run by Airey Neave who had escaped Colditz.
In the town of Colditz anti Nazis were planning to set up an alternative local council.
Lee Carson an American on of very few women war correspondents, persuaded an American pilot to hide her on a spotter plane plane so she reported on Normady landings and the bombing or Cherbourg, she was the first jounalist into Paris and later arrived with US troops at Colditz.
1944 December Malmedy Massacre where the SS slaughtered 84 American POWs in Belgium. Dresden till now unscathed was bombed killing 25,000people.
A prison camp east of Leipzig had a thousand French officers who were now moved ahead of the Russian advance into Colditz. Just before Christmas they received the last Rec Cross parcels. The Prominante were taken to Konigstein Castle.
The prisoners were given the keys to the ammunition depot as Prawitt the German in charge of Colditz realized he had more to fear the SS than the Americans, so they were now protecting their jailers against both the SS and advancing Americans. The "rule of law" was dissolving in Germany. Nobody knew of the slave labour camp of Hungarian Jews on the outskirts of the town of Colditz owned by HASAG manufacturing munitions. The SS guards had systematically murdered the prisoners here.
Rudolf Eggers was a historian and the artifacts he collected to form the Colditz museum were packed in boxes in the cellar. The SS now had fled south and in the Colditz town white flags started going up, swastikas' and copies of Mein Kamf started disappearing Guy Nun and David Walker were 2 of the "Sparrows " and both became novelists. Herr Schmidt who had set up the Anti Nazi spy network that supplied them with information prepared to become burgomaster of Colditz town. At Colditz Castle the American arrived and freed
By now Munich the capital of the Nazi movement fell without a fight. Berger now delivered the Prominante to the allies hoping to save himself from the hangman once the war was over.
1945 April 16th the American liberated Colditz Castle by they had to wait till it would be safe to send them out. A month later the Red Army arrived there and it would be part of the Soviet Zone of East Germany.
A total of 32 escapees from Colditz had made home runs.
2006 the Castle was refurbished to make a small museum in it and now many of the artifacts of WW2 were found.
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