Thread: The Colditz Castle

"Colditz was situated in the middle of the triangle formed by the three great cities of Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz, in the heart of the German Reich and four hundred miles from any frontier not directly under the Nazi heel."

"The Castle was built by Augustus the Strong, an ancient King of Saxony and Poland, who was reputed to have had three hundred and sixty-five wives, one for every day of the year. It had seen many battles and sieges in a long history, and the present name, Schloss Colditz, testified, not to it's origin, but to a time when it was under Polish domination. The 'itz' is a Slavonic not a Tuetonic or Saxon ending. The original spelling was Koldyeze."

"It was built on the top of a high cliff promontory that jutted out over the River Mulde at a confluence with a tributary stream. The outside walls were on an average seven feet thick, and the inner courtyard of the castle was about two hundred and fifty feet above the river level." "The River Mulde, we later learned, was a tributary of the Elbe, into which it flowed forty miles to the north."

"In such a castle, through the centuries, everything had happened and anything might happen again. To friendly peasants and trades people in the houses nestling beneath its shadows it may have signified protection and home, but to enemies from a distant country such a castle struck the note of doom and was a sight to make the bravest quail. Indeed, it was built with this end in view. Being about one thousand years old, although partly ruined, built over and altered many times, its inherent strength had preserved it from destruction through the centuries."

'The Colditz Story' by P.R.Reid, M.B.E, M.C.

Colditz Castle, a forbidding medieval edifice near Leipzig, Germany, was supposed to be the Nazis' most escape-proof prison. Incorrigible Allied officers who had repeatedly escaped from other camps were sent to Colditz, the only German POW camp with more guards than prisoners. Yet English, French, Polish, Dutch, and other inmates managed to sneak out in surprising numbers.

Escaping from the castle was only the beginning, however, and while at least 130 got out during the course of the war, only 30 got clean away. When captured, those attempting to escape were given up to three weeks in solitary confinement. Yet for the most part their German captors led by the good-natured head of security Reinhold Eggers took a light-hearted approach to dealing with their capers, even taking photographs of the prisoners' disguises and other escape paraphernalia for the castle's escape museum.

June 5th 1941

Prisoners on their supervised daily walk to the park near the castle paused by a gate leading out to let a German woman through. The German guards said nothing, but as the woman walked away from the castle, one of the prisoners noticed she had dropped her watch. "Hey, Fräulein, your watch!" he said. She didn't respond, so a guard went after her and found "her" to be Lieut. Chasseur Alpin Bouley, a Frenchman. Untimely chivalry cost Bouley his freedom.

Lieut. Bouley in disguise

April 12, 1941

After the daily walk to the park, the Germans did a head count and found one prisoner missing. They checked all inmates against their photo identity cards and discovered that a French Lieutenant named Alain Le Ray had earned the distinction of being the first prisoner to get clean away from Colditz. After hiding in a cellar of a house that stood along the park path, Le Ray had climbed over the park fence and disappeared. He eventually made it safely to Switzerland.

Alain Le Ray in 1940

May 8, 1941

At the Germans' request, prisoners brought unused straw mattresses down from an attic, loaded them onto a cart, and dumped them in Colditz Town. Stepping onto a mattress lying on the ground, a German officer felt something hard. Inside was English Lieut. John Hyde-Thomson, in civilian clothes. Lieut. Peter Allan, in another mattress, managed to get away, but was later caught in Vienna and returned to Colditz.

Peter Allan got as far as Vienna before he was captured.

Mid-May 1941

Polish Lieuts. Niki Surmanowicz and Mietek Schmiel, doing time in solitary confinement, somehow managed to get out of their locked cells and into the prison yard. Friends in the Polish quarters in floors above lowered a rope, which the pair used to get into the adjacent guardroom's attic. Putting the same rope out the attic window on the castle's western side, they began sliding down, but the nails in Schmiel's boots scraped on the wall, giving them away.

The rope of bedsheets used by Surmanowicz and Schmiel.

January 6, 1942

On this night, four officers, operating in pairs, slipped through a specially cut hole in the British theater floor, dropped into a unoccupied room, and walked out into a corridor that led over the main gate of the prisoners' yard and into an attic over the German guardroom. Dressed as German officers, first one pair and then the other descended into and walked out of the temporarily unoccupied guardroom, strolled under the archway into the German courtyard, and exited the main gate. Fearful of being stopped at the final gate beyond the moat, they turned east out of the main gate and, under cover of darkness, clambered over the unguarded wall along the park road. Though the Germans captured one pair, they did not get the other: Dutch Lieut. Tony Luteyn reached Switzerland with his partner, English Lieut. Airey Neave, the first Brit to flee successfully.

Hole and bedsheet rope beneath the theater's stage.

May 1941

British prisoners bribed a German guard to turn a blind eye at the eastern gate on an upcoming but unspecified night. The guard told his superiors, and the Germans were there when a patch of turf suddenly rose up off the grass terrace outside the British canteen, and Captain Pat Reid appeared. He and his accomplices had slipped out of the canteen through a drain cover, which the Germans had earlier cemented but the British had loosened before the cement had dried. (For the German view of this attempt.

The canteen's "sealed" drain cover.

June 1941

Not long after Bouley's "womanly" escape attempt (Here), two prisoners went missing after the daily stroll in the park. The Colditz security apparatus swung into action: Local police headquarters, railway stations, and foresters were notified, and guards searched the surrounding landscape on bicycle and foot. But while examining the park walk with a fine-toothed comb, one German suddenly remembered an air-raid shelter situated in an old house along the park path. The Germans found the door unlocked -- and inside were Captain Harry Elliot and Captain Janek Lados (Here) The Germans determined (rightly) that this must have been the way Le Ray (Here) and at least one other French officer had escaped.

The path to the park offered many opportunities for escape.

One night while in detention for his air-raid-shelter attempt (Here) Captain Janek Lados, who had somehow gotten hold of a hacksaw, cut through the bars of a window in his cell on the castle's western ramparts. He shimmied down the length of his bedsheet and dropped the final 20 feet to the ground, breaking a bone in his ankle. Astonishingly, he made it as far as the Swiss frontier before being captured and hauled back.

Colditz from the west today.

July 2, 1941

On a walk in the park, one French officer helped another wearing only a T-shirt and shorts get over the wall and away amidst shots fired by startled guards. The escaper had left a note in his room: "Should I succeed, I should be obliged by the dispatch of my effects to me at the following address, Lieut. Pierre Mairesse-Lebrun, Orange (Vaucluse). May God help me!" He did succeed, and the Germans obliged.

One of the many French POWs in Colditz helped Mairesse-Lebrun get over the
park wall.