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The next book in my Ben MacIntyre mini-kick was Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison.
Colditz Castle was a grim medieval schloss in Saxony–well, technically it still is a grim medieval schloss in Saxony, although recent restoration work has sought to make it less grim and more Renaissance–that was used in World War II as a POW camp for “incorrigible” Allied officers, by which they mainly meant ones that had tried to escape from other camps. Somewhat predictably, a camp peopled exclusively by people who had already tried to escape from other camps became a laboratory of escapology, with the inmates and the guards in a continually escalating dynamic of finding security leaks and plugging them.
For a few years the camp was international, with Polish, French, British, and Dutch officers (and their orderlies) competing in national teams, or occasionally collaborating, to escape. At some point mid-war it became a camp for British and other English-speaking countries’ officers. It was eventually liberated by an American unit.
MacIntyre takes us on an emotional rollercoaster of daring escape attempts, crushing brutality, big personalities, strict rule-following, and a large and varied cast of characters. The inmates are sometimes heroic and sometimes huge assholes. The Wehrmacht prison guards, especially head of security Reinholdt Eggers, are pretty terrible, obviously, but the look at the tensions and differences in operation within Nazi Germany between the by-the-book career military types who love rules more than murder and the paramilitary psychos who love murder more than rules (these appear to be the top two German psychological traits) could be interesting. In classic Ben MacIntyre fashion the whole thing has the vibes of a screwball comedy, though with interludes of Nazi horrors that simply cannot blend in with the general air of Daring Shenanigans even when they are themselves sort of absurd. But most of it manages to keep, if not a lighthearted air, at least a very easy-to-read, fast-paced, dryly humorous sort of tone that meant I could read it in basically three evening sessions of 100 pages apiece.
For me the biggest surprise in this book was learning that apparently Colditz Castle is, or at least at some point in Britain was, a very famous piece of WWII mythology. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about World War II but I had never heard of it. Maybe because baby me’s WWII education was mostly focused on reading Holocaust memoirs and not on military history, and adult me’s WWII education has mostly been leftist analyses of the rise of fascism and also only a little bit of military history (and that largely in podcast form–thanks, Dan Carlin!), and also I guess it was more of a thing in Britain? Every time I think I am familiar with British culture I learn about something else I’d never heard of that was apparently huge over there (see also: my current mini-obsession with the Franklin expedition).
Anyway this is basically a very good trashy spy thriller except you get to also feel like it’s not trashy because it is nonfiction, you are learning very serious World War II history things, I swear.
Colditz Castle was a grim medieval schloss in Saxony–well, technically it still is a grim medieval schloss in Saxony, although recent restoration work has sought to make it less grim and more Renaissance–that was used in World War II as a POW camp for “incorrigible” Allied officers, by which they mainly meant ones that had tried to escape from other camps. Somewhat predictably, a camp peopled exclusively by people who had already tried to escape from other camps became a laboratory of escapology, with the inmates and the guards in a continually escalating dynamic of finding security leaks and plugging them.
For a few years the camp was international, with Polish, French, British, and Dutch officers (and their orderlies) competing in national teams, or occasionally collaborating, to escape. At some point mid-war it became a camp for British and other English-speaking countries’ officers. It was eventually liberated by an American unit.
MacIntyre takes us on an emotional rollercoaster of daring escape attempts, crushing brutality, big personalities, strict rule-following, and a large and varied cast of characters. The inmates are sometimes heroic and sometimes huge assholes. The Wehrmacht prison guards, especially head of security Reinholdt Eggers, are pretty terrible, obviously, but the look at the tensions and differences in operation within Nazi Germany between the by-the-book career military types who love rules more than murder and the paramilitary psychos who love murder more than rules (these appear to be the top two German psychological traits) could be interesting. In classic Ben MacIntyre fashion the whole thing has the vibes of a screwball comedy, though with interludes of Nazi horrors that simply cannot blend in with the general air of Daring Shenanigans even when they are themselves sort of absurd. But most of it manages to keep, if not a lighthearted air, at least a very easy-to-read, fast-paced, dryly humorous sort of tone that meant I could read it in basically three evening sessions of 100 pages apiece.
For me the biggest surprise in this book was learning that apparently Colditz Castle is, or at least at some point in Britain was, a very famous piece of WWII mythology. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about World War II but I had never heard of it. Maybe because baby me’s WWII education was mostly focused on reading Holocaust memoirs and not on military history, and adult me’s WWII education has mostly been leftist analyses of the rise of fascism and also only a little bit of military history (and that largely in podcast form–thanks, Dan Carlin!), and also I guess it was more of a thing in Britain? Every time I think I am familiar with British culture I learn about something else I’d never heard of that was apparently huge over there (see also: my current mini-obsession with the Franklin expedition).
Anyway this is basically a very good trashy spy thriller except you get to also feel like it’s not trashy because it is nonfiction, you are learning very serious World War II history things, I swear.