German Forces

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Daily Mail newspaper (collection)

Well, no, not exactly a holiday camp. Colditz Castle, Saxony, Germany or - in WW2 terms - Oflag IV-C, high security officers PoW camp for those overly inclined to mount escape attempts from less secure camps. Having served as a royal and Electoral residence of the rulers of Saxony in the Middle Ages, the medieval castle was destroyed in an accidental fire at the beginning of the 16th century. Following the fire, the castle was rebuilt and expanded to a prodigious size in the 16th and 17th centuries even though, by this period, the military usefulness of such constructions was declining sharply. By the 19th century, the fortunes of the castle had declined, not least I think, because a forbidding anachronistic fortress like this no longer supplied the standard of comfort required by its noble owners. The castle, however, did have its uses. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, it had an extraordinary record of use as a prison, or mental asylum, or "secure hospital", or at times a combination of these uses simultaneously. It may not have been defensible in modern terms; however, its forbidding location and medieval defences were good when it came to securing that nobody confined there could get out without permission. When the Nazis came to power, they followed the prevailing fashion by turning the place into a prison for political "offenders". Then the war came along, and the castle was converted to a PoW camp for serial escapers. It is hard to know whether this was a particularly good idea, at least for the Heer personnel who had to guard it. Contrary to what I have posted elsewhere In Here, the Castle/camp had a notably high rate of escape, and an enormous rate of escape attempts. I suppose if a large number of serial escapers are locked up in one place, such an outcome should hardly surprise. Inmates included RAF ace Douglas Bader, and Lieutenant (later Major) Airey Neave. The latter became the first person to make a successful escaping "home run" when he made it all the way from Saxony to Switzerland in 1942. Best regards, JR.