Much of the drama in MacIntyre’s account centers on the almost continuous succession of attempted escapes, many of which were extremely elaborate and required months of preparation. One British officer tried eight times, but many others were almost equally persistent. Few were successful. Although there are reports of 174 who made their way outside the castle’s walls, only thirty-two of them reached home. Colditz was 400 kilometers from Switzerland, and the route led through vast expanses of heavily policed Nazi territory. Among the prisoners in Colditz were the Prominenten who were related sometimes only distantly, to distinguished individuals in their countries, and who were now held as bargaining chips (for ransom, exchange or to extract concessions from their countries). They were kept under especially tight surveillance. They included Giles Romilly, a communist journalist and a nephew of Winston Churchill., and Michael Alexander who falsely claimed to be the nephew of General Alexander, the commander of the Allied forces in the Middle East.

The officers had a British “boarding school mentality.” They tried to recreate the traditions of Eton and other private schools coopting behaviors such as bullying, enslaving individuals on the lower rung of society, “goon-baiting” Germans, and diverse types of entertainment. Those who did not attend a boarding school were rarely included. The true story of one of history's most notorious prisons--and the remarkable cast of POWs who tried relentlessly to escape their captors. The saga of Colditz Castle and the truculent band of Allied PoWs banged up inside its towering walls has lodged itself deep in the national consciousness. Since the early 1950s there has been a stream of books, a film, and in the 1970s a long-running television series, leading one critic to groan “is there no escape from Colditz?” Contrary to popular belief, British officers had no specific duty to escape. Of the few who tried, most gave up after their first failed attempt. The tiny number who persisted were driven on by a variety of motives.The population was comprised of Americans, Dutch, French and Polish and the groups tried to keep each other informed of their escape plans and shared ideas. At one point they even constructed a glider but the camp was liberated before it could be used. A special intelligence operation in the UK, MI9, came up with dozens of ingenious ways of smuggling contraband and information to the Colditz prisoners. MI9 wisely equipped flyers with many hidden escape aids, in case they were shot down and captured. When you read about some of these bits of spycraft, you won’t be surprised to learn that their inventor inspired the creation of the Q character in the Bond films. Amazingly, Denholm Elliott, who played Q, was a POW of the Germans in WW2 (though not at Colditz). A radio was produced so they could keep up-to-date with what was happening on the outside. Magazines of the front were pilfered from guards. This gave the POWs ideas on how others were trying to escape from their respective prisons.

Having read many WWII books and memoirs, Prisoners of the Castle is a new and unique addition to my WWII library that helps to broaden my perspective and understanding of the war and lives of those touched by it. Food was used as a bartering chip, and they used some of the rations to make drinks. Alcohol production was made using the strangest of ingredients. One of them was a batch flavored with aftershave. It was said to have eaten a hole in the bottom of the plastic container it sat in overnight. Most officers could stomach this variety, but they succumbed to cataclysmic headaches, blurred vision, discolored teeth, and so on. It was not discouraged because it kept morale up, and any prisoner who was inebriated was easier to manage. The French had the first few successful attempts. Some vaulted over the wire and climbed the walls, while others dressed up and walked out during a large sporting match. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre's telling, Colditz's most famous names--like the indomitable Pat Reid--share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America's oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs.

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Though they were well-treated, the inmates naturally wanted to escape, and we get an account of a great many of their attempts, some of them very ingenious. By the end of 1941, 104 prisoners had tried to escape, but only 15 had managed it: ten French, four Dutch, one Pole – not a single Englishman. Some had been recaptured after they had made it as far as far as Vienna or Nazi-occupied Poland. Things improved in 1942, which saw seven successful British escapes. War stories are usually about what happened. The story of Colditz, by contrast, is largely a tale of inactivity, a long procession of duplicate days when little of note occurred, punctuated by moments of intense excitement.