Note: This is an encore edition of Reader's Corner. The episode originally aired in November 2022.
During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.
In his latest book, Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison, Ben Macintyre argues that 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. The book traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis.
Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (U.K.) and the bestselling author of many books, including A Spy Among Friends, Operation Mincemeat, and The Spy and the Traitor, which he discussed with us on the program in 2019. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.
