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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “entertaining [and] often-moving account” (The Wall Street Journal) of the remarkable POWs whose relentlessly creative attempts to escape a notorious Nazi prison embodied the spirit of resistance against fascism, from the author of The Spy and the Traitor
“Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history.”—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. 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. But as Macintyre shows, 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. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle 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. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “entertaining [and] often-moving account” (The Wall Street Journal) of the remarkable POWs whose relentlessly creative attempts to escape a notorious Nazi prison embodied the spirit of resistance against fascism, from the author of The Spy and the Traitor
“Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history.”—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. 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. But as Macintyre shows, 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. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle 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. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.
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En raison de restrictions imposées par l'éditeur, la bibliothèque n'est pas en mesure d'acheter des exemplaires supplémentaires de ce titre et nous vous présentons toutes nos excuses si la liste d'attente est longue. N'oubliez pas de regarder s'il existe d'autres exemplaires, car d'autres éditions sont peut-être disponibles.
Extraits-
From the cover1
The Originals
On the afternoon of November 10, 1940, Captain Pat Reid gazed up at the castle on the cliff and experienced the combination of admiration and anxiety its builders had intended. “We saw looming above us our future prison,” he later wrote. “Beautiful, serene, majestic and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink . . . a sight to make the bravest quail.”
Quailing was not in Pat Reid’s nature. Indeed, he saw faint-heartedness of any sort as a moral failing, and refused to countenance it, in himself or anyone else. An officer in the Royal Army Service Corps, he had been captured in May, one of thousands of soldiers unable to get away after the fall of France. Initially held in Laufen Castle in Bavaria, he had immediately supervised the digging of a tunnel from the basement to a small shed outside the prison walls, and then made a break for the Yugoslavian border with five other officers. They were on the run for five days before they were caught and sent to Colditz, a new camp for incorrigible prisoners, and therefore a place for which Reid was amply qualified.
Born in India to an Irish father, at twenty-nine years old Reid was a natural contrarian and a born exhibitionist, a most dependable ally and, as an opponent, obstinate and insufferable. He had once climbed the rugby posts during an England-Ireland international at Twickenham to plant a bunch of shamrocks at the top. Described as “a thick-set, wavy-haired fellow with a mischievous look in his eyes” by one fellow inmate, Reid spoke and wrote exclusively in the argot of the Boy’s Own Paper. He displayed, at all times, a relentless, chirpy optimism. With a strong sense of his own place in the drama, Reid would become the first and most extensive chronicler of Colditz. He hated the place on sight and spent most of the rest of his life thinking and writing about it.
The British officers, later known as the “Laufen Six,” were marched across the moat, and then under a second stone archway, “whose oaken doors closed ominously behind us with the clanging of heavy iron bars in true medieval fashion.” In peacetime, Reid had been a civil engineer and he cast a professional eye over the battlements. The ground fell away in a sheer precipice on three sides, below terraces festooned in barbed wire. As the day faded, the castle walls were lit by a blaze of searchlights. The nearest city was Leipzig, twenty-three miles to the northwest. The closest border to a country outside Nazi control was 400 miles away. “Escape,” Reid reflected, “would be a formidable proposition.” The little group was marched under another gated arch, and into the inner courtyard. Only the sound of their boots ringing on the cobbles broke the silence. It was, wrote Reid, “an unspeakably grisly place.”
Colditz Castle stands on a hilltop 150 feet above the Mulde River, a tributary of the Elbe in the east of what is now Germany. Before it became a German province in the tenth century, the Serbian Slavs who inhabited the area had called it Koldyese, meaning “dark forest.” The first stone of what would become a mighty fortress was laid in about 1043, and over the next millennium it was repeatedly expanded and modified, destroyed and rebuilt by the great dynasties that tussled for power and prominence in the area. Fire, war, and pestilence changed the castle’s shape over the centuries, but its purposes remained constant: to impress and oppress the ruler’s subjects, demonstrate his might, frighten his enemies, and incarcerate his captives.
The hereditary rulers of the...
Critiques-
July 11, 2022 In this riveting history of Nazi Germany’s most notorious POW camp, bestseller Macintyre (Agent Sonya) spotlights the indomitable will and creativity of the inmates who tried to escape from it. Colditz, a “grim Gothic castle on a German hilltop,” was where the Nazis sent the most “unruly” Allied prisoners, including journalist Giles Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew, and Birendranath Mazumdar, an Indian doctor who volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps and endured the racism of his fellow POWs until he staged a hunger strike that secured his release. The book’s colorful cast also includes Christopher Clayton Hutton, an inventor hired by British intelligence to create “escape equipment” for POWs, who became the inspiration for the fictional character Q in the James Bond novels and movies; Julius Green, a “Jewish dentist from Glasgow” who gathered intelligence from prisoners and guards he treated in POW camps across Germany; and Reinhold Eggers, the “humorless” security chief of Colditz who “treated escape prevention as a branch of logic.” Though attempted “home runs,” or clean getaways in the lingo of Colditz POWs, provide much of the book’s drama, Macintyre also sheds light on how the prisoners relieved their boredom through theatrical productions, reading, and writing poetry. This is another engrossing tale of WWII intrigue from a master of the genre.
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Bahreïn, Égypte, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israël, Jordanie, Koweït, Liban, Mauritanie, Maroc, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Arabie saoudite, Soudan, République arabe syrienne, Tunisie, Turquie, Émirats arabes unis, et le Yémen
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Narrated with the skill of an experienced audiobook narrator, Ben Macintyre's chronicle of life for prisoners of war at Colditz Castle is a fascinating story of survival during WWII. The German army used the castle, known for its exceptional architecture, for four years to house what it considered to be the prisoners most likely to rebel and escape. The stories are captivating, and the many Allied and German characters who populated the prison come to life because of Macintyre's thorough research and dynamic presentation. He seems to relish creating the many personalities, including Pat Reid, a British captive bent on escaping, and Birendranath Mazumdar, an Indian doctor who discovered that prejudice came from many sources, not just his captors. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
