Prisoners of the Castle

The definitive and surprising true story of one of history's most notorious prisons--and the remarkable cast of POWs who tried relentlessly to escape their Nazi captors, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor

In this gripping account, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. The legend of the German prison at Colditz Castle was built into its very conception: designed as the most secure prison imaginable, to hold--with varying success--some of the greatest escape artists of World War II. But as Macintyre reveals, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape, and its prisoners were far more complicated than the cardboard heroes they became later in popular culture.

Colditz was a miniature replica of officer-class society at the time, only far stranger: a lethal, high-stakes boarding school surrounded by barbed wire, a heavily guarded human cage with its own culture, eccentricities, and internal tensions. With access to declassified archives, private papers, and never-before-seen photos, Macintyre reveals a remarkable cast of characters previously hidden from history: 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; Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture escape aids for POWs, from maps hidden in playing cards to a compass secreted inside a walnut; and many others.

In intimate and compelling detail, Macintyre explores what happens to people when they are locked up without committing a crime and with no idea when or if they might be liberated. This, then, is a tale of the indomitable human spirit, but also one of snobbery, class conflict, hidden sexuality, bullying, espionage, boredom, insanity, and farce. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed stunning new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.