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Fully illustrated with photographs and historical artifacts, this detailed history reveals what life was like inside the infamous Nazi POW camp. During the Second World War, the centuries-old Colditz castle took on an infamous new purpose. It became the site of Oflag IV-C, a prisoner of war camp designated for Allied officers who had escaped from other camps, including such famous names as Douglas Bader, Lorne Welch and Jack Best. This authoritative history reveals the secrets of the Sonderlager—or “Special Camp.” Historian Michael Booker draws on forty years of research into the subject, including interviews with former prisoners, as well as the German commandant Gerhard Prawitt and the head of security Captain Reinhold Eggers. He relates stories of British, Polish, and French prisoners, and their many and varied attempts to escape. These narratives are supported throughout with rare wartime photographs as well as a priceless collection of artifacts and memorabilia from the castle, some of which have never been seen before.
The Nazis thought escape was impossible. Colditz is the true story of the Allied prisoners held there and their (sometimes successful) efforts to escape, written by one of the POWs.
Espionage fact and fiction collide in this thrilling compendium of spy writing, where some of the greatest spy stories ever told meet the genuine agent records and instructions that altered history. Ian Fleming's genre-defining genius and John le Carré's iconic George Smiley are interspersed with real-life stories of derring-do inside Bolshevik Russia. Literary classics by Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham appear next to never-before-published reports from two of the Cambridge spies. Fully updated with tales of agent-running from the first female Director-General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, and Andy McNab's chilling account of a top-secret mission deep inside IRA territory, this compelling anthology is proof that truth really can be stranger than fiction. With expert commentary, former intelligence officer Michael Smith takes us on a fascinating journey inside the mysterious world of British intelligence. The Secret Agent's Bedside Reader is a must-read for every espionage enthusiast and aspiring agent.
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.
The Secret of the Dragon's Teeth continues the adventures of Gavin Kane, Emily Scott, and Bunty Digby, sixteen-year-olds who struggle with their daily lives in England during the pivotal year of 1944. Cornwall is now an armed camp, with thousands of Americans and Canadians, as well as men from throughout the occupied countries, all training and preparing for the invasion of the European continent. The war has reached a brutal climax and the Allies now have the upper hand. In Nazi Germany, however, Heinrich Himmler is far from admitting defeat, as he prepares to unleash whatever horror he can devise to delay the inevitable.
The Special Operations Executive was one of the most secretive organizations of the Second World War, its activities cloaked in mystery and intrigue. The fate, therefore, of many of its agents was not revealed to the general public other than the bare details carved with pride upon the headstones and memorials of those courageous individuals.Then in 2003, the first batch of SOE personal files was released by the National Archive. Over the course of the following years more and more files were made available. Now, at last, it is possible to tell the stories of all those agents that died in action.These are stories of bravery and betrayal, incompetence and misfortune, of brutal torture and ultimately death. Some died when their parachutes failed to open, others swallowed their cyanide capsules rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo, many died in combat with the enemy, most though were executed, by hanging, by shooting and even by lethal injection.The bodies of many of the lost agents were never found, destroyed in the crematoria of such places as Buckenwald, Mauthausen and Natzweiler, others were buried where they fell. All of them should be remembered as having undertaken missions behind enemy lines in the knowledge that they might never return.
Colditz Castle was one of the most famous Prisoner of War camps of the Second World War. It was there that the Germans interred their most troublesome or important prisoners. Hundreds of ingenious escape attempts were made but the most ambitious of all was to build a glider and fly to freedom.Though the glider was built, the war ended before it could be used, and it was subsequently destroyed. Using the original plans and materials used by the prisoners, in March 2012 a replica of the glider was constructed in a bid to see if the escape attempt would have succeeded. The glider was then launched from the roof of the castle roof.Anthony Hoskins is the man who built, and helped launch, the glider. As well as examining the story behind the building of the original glider, he details the construction of the replica and the nail-biting excitement as the Colditz Cock finally took to the skies. Packed with photos of the glider and its flight over Colditz, this is the inside story of the recreation of one of the most intriguing episodes of the Second World War.
It is a tale which pits the serial escapers of Colditz against the traitor in their own ranks and the Gestapo against the double agents of MI9. Britain's hopes are pinned on two of the war's unlikeliest heroes - a Jewish Glaswegian dentist and an East End black-marketeer in a story which ranges from Auschwitz to the Cabarets of Berlin. Colditz is an iconic part of the British WW2 story, up there with Spitfires and D-Day and the subject of many books, films and TV programs. This strangely neglected facet of the WW2 story, but with a bigger story which for all sorts of reasons (not least of which were live security issues) has never been told and which Robert Verkaik has uncovered for the first time.
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.