Colditz beyond the myth

Ben Macintyre's book takes in the stories of those excluded from the manly myth of Colditz, the storied Nazi POW camp at the heart of many daring escape plots

Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

Author: Ben Macintyre

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 353

Price: Rs 799

Ben Macintyre has a knack of publishing a book every two years, most of which demand painstaking research, site visits and interviews that would take most other authors at least five years per book to write. His classics — Agent ZigZag, Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross, A Spy Among Friends and Agent Sonya — centre on wartime espionage. The stories he chooses are well-known page-turners but in Mr Macintyre’s hands they acquire a fresh vividness, his research uncovering novel angles that make these books compelling reading. Colditz: Prisoners of The Castle follows this pattern. It would be of special interest for Indian readers for reasons explained ahead.

Colditz was a storied Nazi prisoner of war (POW) camp, an 11th century castle that housed Allied soldiers who had been caught escaping from other POW camps. Known as the “bad boy’s camp” it was perched on a hilltop 150 feet above a tributary of the Elbe river, with formidable 90-foot walls and surrounded by a moat. It was considered impregnable.

Those who managed to escape or nearly did — and there were few — acquired legendary status. Those who wrote about their experiences in Colditz later (understandably) burnished the post-war Allied image of indomitable derring-do and ethics. Chief among them was Pat Reid, later an MI6 officer, whose 1952 book The Colditz Story — which did much to create the myth of intrepid iron-jawed officers standing up to pantomime villain German guards — was made into a film and, later, a BBC TV drama.

Unlike The Bridge on the River Kwai, which former Allied POWs quickly exposed as an inaccurate depiction of their experiences, the myth of Colditz — of “prisoners of war, with moustaches firmly set on stiff upper lips, defying the Nazis by tunnelling out of a grim Gothic castle on a German hilltop, fighting the war by other means” as Mr Macintyre writes —has endured for seven decades.

This is not surprising since some of the prisoners were famous — among them the wooden-legged Ace Douglas Bader and David Stirling, founder of the SAS. Others earned post-war fame, such as Airey Neave, who became a lawyer with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, later one of Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted advisors on the Irish question. He was assassinated by the IRA. Then there was Giles Romilly, a committed communist and nephew of Winston Churchill, one among the Prominente or prisoners of special value who were housed separately in the vague hope that they could be used as bargaining chips (ironic since Churchill had only the faintest recollection of the boy).

All of this was overseen by Hauptmann (Captain) Eggers, a World War I veteran of Ypres and the Somme and an Anglophile, Eggers, a schoolmaster in civilian life, was blessed with a finely honed instinct for discovering escape attempts. He even created a museum of these attempts in the castle.

The narrative that Mr Macintyre builds is no less fascinating though more nuanced. At once chilling, hilarious, farcical and essentially human, his books, which includes well-captioned photographs, takes in the stories of those excluded from the manly myth: Communists, scientists, homosexuals, women, traitors, poets. “Colditz was a miniature replica of pre-war society, only stranger. It was a close knit community intensely divided over issues of class, politics, sexuality and race,” he writes. Colditz had its complement of “other ranks” and officers and, just as in the regular army, the former were expected to wait on the latter and were excluded from the myriad escape plans being hatched at any given moment. This unsavoury fact was true of all POW camps but is discreetly ignored including in such heroic stories as The Great Escape or The Wooden Horse.

Colditz housed Dutch, British, French, Polish and Czech POWs. Among this overwhelmingly white population was Birendranath Mazumdar, the only non-white doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corp, who was captured leading a convoy of ambulances with injured soldiers when Germany invaded France. Mr Macintyre doesn’t include his story here for the sake of political correctness. Mazumdar’s story portrays the dilemma of Empire at the cusp of its dissolution — and the good doctor turns out to be one of the more honourable men at Colditz.

Mazumdar, an anglicised scion of a moneyed zamindari family, who like many rich Indians in that era was a beneficiary of the Raj. He was also a deeply committed nationalist, a follower of Gandhi and Netaji Subhas Bose. Educated in England and imbued with Victorian values of fidelity and duty, he took his oath to the British army seriously.

At a time when the very British William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”) was broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the British, Mazumdar, nicknamed “Jumbo by his camp-mates for reasons that aren’t clear, staunchly declined German offers of freedom if he did the same. More interestingly, he was taken to Berlin to meet Subhas Bose who invited him to join his Indian National Army on the Axis side. Despite his visceral opposition to the British Empire, Mazumdar refused to break his oath of fealty. If Bose was ambivalent about this principled stance, British co-prisoners did not appreciate it at all, and subjected him to suspicion and mockery in the standard racist terminology of the day. It is fitting that Mr Macintyre ends his book with an uplifting story of Mazumdar defending the rights of his countrymen against British officers in an Indian train.

For this and a thoroughly enjoyable book, Mr Macintyre deserves the same kudos that he reserves for Mazumdar: Shabash.