The two soldiers in greatcoats carried dummy rifles with wooden barrels polished with pencil lead, bolts fashioned from bits of a steel bedstead and tin triggers formed from metal cutlery. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. Horrific video shows subway carriage chanting 'F*** the Jews, long live Palestine, we are Nazis and proud'. In Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes us inside the walls of the most infamous prison in history to meet the real men behind the legends. He was primarily responsible for writing the coded letters that were being sent back to MI9, the branch of British intelligence that was concerned with prisoner affairs.

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Mcintyre says there was an inner castle that had walls 27 metres high, a series of terraces covered in barbed wire and machine gun placements, and later, listening devices installed in the walls. Eventually, Colditz even had its own ‘Bullingdon Club’, modelled on the all-male Oxford University private dining club that has since become a byword for elitist philistinism. The men of Colditz probably practised exactly as much, if not more, than one would expect, but as in the wider world where homosexuality was still illegal, they did so in secrecy, in closets and in perpetual fear of being caught. There were orchestras in Colditz, there were chamber groups, there was a Hawaiian string band, there was a Polish choir. They were treated differently with better food and separate quarters, but if they ceased to be of value to the Nazis, they would have been murdered.Macintyre says there is an acronym, MICE, that roughly describes the four elements drawing people into spying: money, ideology, coercion and ego. 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. One night, Neave and an accomplice got themselves through the theatre floor, went along this corridor, unpicked the lock into the German guard house and strode out of the front door wearing fake German uniforms – they had managed to produce replicas that were virtually identical to the real thing. Macintyre, who prides himself on his attention to detail, is able to visit his ancestral home this year with his head held high.

Colditz by Ben Macintyre review — starvation, snobbery and

Gordievsky would go on to meet his British handlers once a month; he didn’t want money and said he was spying out of ideological conviction. There was the middle class — officers from minor or major public schools — and then there was an upper class, which included Lords of the Realm.

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Kirkus Reviews PRISONERS OF THE CASTLE | Kirkus Reviews

One of the most extraordinary things about Colditz, he says, is the way prisoners manufactured escape equipment from within the castle. Shani Louk's brother reveals 'our whole family crashed' when they saw her being paraded by Hamas 'spitting. The Geneva Convention covering the treatment of prisoners reinforced class divisions so that, while officers could not be put to work, other ranks could. They were the most difficult prisoners: people who had demonstrated, in other camps, that they were going to try to escape, and going to make trouble. When you drive up to it, even today, there’s something extremely sinister about it,” says historian and author Ben Macintyre.

The prisoners were geniuses in developing tactics to confuse their captors, and instruments that were used to make their escape attempts possible, including a glider that was completely built, but never used. STEPHEN GLOVER: Instead of this giant blame game, the Covid Inquiry should really be examining whether. very focused and wanting to win, the French being very laidback about it all, the Brits just not caring and laughing at everybody.