“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.
“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.
Critiques-
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April 1, 2022
After meeting 99-year-old Stella Levi at her Greenwich Village apartment to discuss the Juderia, the 500-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Rhodes where she lived until Germans deported the entire community to Auschwitz, the JQ Wingate Prize-winning Frank ended up spending One Hundred Saturdays visiting Levi to discuss her community and her resilience in the face of the Holocaust (125,000-copy first printing). Among the youngest survivors of Auschwitz still alive, 83-year-old Friedman, a retired therapist who actively campaigns against antisemitism, recounts her Holocaust experiences and the unerring instinct for survival that kept her alive in The Daughter of Auschwitz. In Bridge to the Sun, the New York Times best-selling Henderson (Sons and Soldiers) lays bare the plight of Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater even as their families back home faced racial hatred and imprisonment in concentration camps. Directly after World War II, four tough-minded Wise Gals--Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier--were instrumental in forging the CIA, and the New York Times best-selling Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) finally tells their story. Author of theNew York Times best-selling, multi-best-booked Agent Sonya, Macintyre relies on declassified archives, private papers, and previously unseen photos to introduce readers to the Prisoners of the Castle, that is, Colditz Castle, the high-security POW camp run by the Wehrmacht during World War II and, says Macintyre, organized according to its own officer-class structure. In Black Snow, Pulitzer Prize finalist Scott (Target Tokyo) chronicles the March 9, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo by nearly 300 U.S. B-29s, which left 16 square miles in ruins and 100,000 residents dead.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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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. -
August 1, 2022
Macintyre's latest nonfiction thriller takes us inside a notorious Nazi prison. World War II buffs know that Colditz was a castle deep inside Germany that housed Allied officer POWs who had tried repeatedly to escape. Numerous fictional portrayals of heroic prisoners outsmarting dastardly Nazis bear little relation to reality, but Macintyre tells an equally entertaining story that sticks to the facts. The author reminds readers that POW camps were run by the Wehrmacht, which mostly abided by the dictates of the Geneva Conventions. Prisoner abuse was rare, and escape attempts were punished by solitary confinement, not execution, although conditions deteriorated in the war's final year. Guards tended to be older noncombatants or World War I veterans whose enthusiasm for Nazism varied. As for the POWs, assignment to Colditz was a sloppy process; many were not escapees and never joined escape plots. Courage was plentiful, but there were also plenty of negative elements among the prison population. British prisoners, almost all upper class, treated the enlisted men who served them shabbily. Antisemitism was common among the French, many of whom preferred P�tain to de Gaulle. Macintyre emphasizes that Colditz was a titanic castle but a poor prison, replete with passages, drains, cellars, abandoned sections, and locks that could be easily picked. Having set the scene, he devotes most of the narrative to escape attempts in which spectacularly creative prisoners vied with increasingly skilled guards, who learned from their mistakes. At any given time, several tunnels were in progress because prisoners from each nation had their own projects. Although dazzling technical achievements, almost all failed. The only successful operations involved individuals or small groups. Unlike many fictional portrayals, Macintyre chronicles what happened once the men were outside the walls. The Swiss border was 400 miles away, and almost every escapee was caught before reaching it. Perhaps 30 made it out of Germany. A mixture of derring-do and a vivid, warts-and-all portrayal of the iconic castle.COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
