Escape from Colditz | HistoryExtra
"By definition they were the most difficult prisoners. The German word is Deutschefeindlich which literally means uh German unfriendly. They were people who had demonstrated in other prison camps that they were going to try to escape, that they were recalcitrant, they were unruly um and they were going to make trouble. You know and so Deutschefeindlich was a was a a description, it was a sort of red tab that would be put on your file as a prisoner to show that you were trouble. And so the German idea was to sort of herd all these troublemakers together in one place in a castle that would be impossible to escape from.
Uh the only problem with that, well it was twofold. One is that actually colditz while it was very uh impressive to look at was full of holes. You know it was full of ancient cubby holes and holes in the ceilings and ways to get in and out and so on so it's actually not a very good place to have a security camp. Much better to have a field surrounded by barbed wire. And the second effect was that if you put all the the naughtiest, what they used to call themselves The Naughty Boy Club, you put them all together as we all know, if you if we put a lot of naughty boys together they egg each other on and pretty soon your house is on fire and that is pretty much what happened at Colditz is is it developed its own um, really its own sort of culture really of sort of defiance and and that was kind of central to it
And the other thing to say about the prisoners of Colditz was that they were officers. This was an officers’ camp. Which gave it a very particular kind of status if you like because officers under the Geneva Convention were treated differently and better than ordinary soldiers and ordinary privates... under the Geneva Convention these officers had ordinary soldiers, orderlies, prisoners to look after them. To look after them, to polish their shoes, to make their food, to bring up their bath water. So right through the middle of Colditz was this unbridgeable social division really between the officers who made up the majority and the orderlies who were as it were under them, under their command and were not allowed to escape and the orderlies were were not encouraged to get out. They were there to serve and that you know that's fascinating to me and there was very early on some of the orderlies went on strike. They just said we're not doing this anymore which again is a sort of way in which Colditz was a microcosm really of the outer world...
They did establish sort of International Escape committee which sort of worked. It's a little like the EU if you like. I mean it worked when it worked it worked brilliantly. When it didn't work it was it was it was a real problem… all the sort of national stereotypes you could you could wish for. You know the the Poles kind of very focused and and you know wanting to win, the French being sort of very laid back about it or the Brits just not caring and laughing at everybody… the French officers insisted that they would not be billeted with the Jewish French officers. It was a very shocking moment actually where they said you know and the, you have to bear in mind this is very early on in the war. Vichy um the collaboration with Vichy government is operating in southern France and quite a few of these prisoners are very pro-Vichy
And some of them are clearly extremely anti-semitic and the Germans of course saw this as a propaganda opportunity and immediately herded the French Jewish prisoners of which there were about 60 or 70 into a special uh sort of uh barrack really in the attic. It was much smaller, much more uncomfortable than the larger things and this immediately became called the ghetto and that that created a huge tension actually between the French and the British. Some of the British were absolutely scandalized…
The only non-white soldier in Colditz who was a man called Birendra Nath Mazumdar who was a an Indian doctor um who trained in London and volunteered he was in the Royal Army Medical Corps um and he was taken to colditz and he suffered terrible racism there. But but to our shame not really from the Germans, the Germans saw him as a propaganda opportunity, uh from the British. You know he was treated as a second-class citizen…
Colditz was run by the German Army. Uh it wasn't a concentration camp, it wasn't, these weren't SS Fanatics. These were professional army soldiers and actually they went out of their way to observe the rules of the Geneva Convention...
Goon-baiting. Now goon is a sort of slang term was a slang term for the German guards and ahuge amount of ingenuity went into trying to mock, tease, enrage, uh defy the the German the German sentries and officers and they they went to huge lengths to do this. Um you know teasing them, mocking them, whistling on Parade, refusing to stand up straight, wearing clogs to roll calls. Generally anything they could do to drive them mad. Really they did um and it was a very puerile and it came straight from a kind of English Public School tradition of ragging the Masters really and it was incredibly babyish but it's sort of in a way let off steam in a way that I think was extraordinarily therapeutic...
They were literally not allowed to work… the officers had nothing to do and were not allowed to do anything and so they responded to it in a huge variety of ways. Some as I say took to goon-baiting, some became obsessed by escaping, but quite a lot of them retreated into literature. You know books were plentiful in colditz. Various publishers were prepared to provide books for prisoners and they just sort of it gorged themselves on this. Just, some took correspondence courses many of course because it was so boring.
The drama played a huge part in Colditz and the theater became an absolute focal point. I mean there was it was virtually a new production there every few days and it was packed out and the Germans would come too and and sort of that was a way of escaping really. I mean it was it was another form of escapism if you like without actually escaping and they put on really dozens and dozens of different productions: plays, revues, pantomimes, skits and a lot of musical stuff as well. I mean there were orchestras in Colditz, there were chamber groups, there was a Hawaiian String Band, there were there was a Polish choir… the British being British they began to set up clubs… there was a Bullingdon Club...
Douglas Bader… was the most famous soldier on either side of the entire war. Really now Douglas Bader had lost both his legs in a flying accident before the war. Nonetheless he was an enormously brave Spitfire pilot. He was shot down over um France. Um indeed as he was bailing out of his Spitfire one of his prosthetic legs caught in the uh in the mechanism and was ripped off as he parachuted free and amazingly the Germans then contacted British intelligence and said Douglas Bader the famous um uh fighter pilot needs an extra leg and amazingly the British parachuted over spare legs for Douglas Bader'"
