Join renowned author Ben Macintyre as he delves into the captivating world of his latest book, "Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle," at the Jaipur Literature Fest. In conversation with Narayani Basu, Macintyre explores the gripping tales of resilience, courage, and daring escapes from one of World War II's most infamous prisoner-of-war camps, Colditz Castle. Don't miss this insightful discussion on history, heroism, and the enduring human spirit.
#JFL #JaipurLiteratureFest #JFL2024 #JaipurLiteratureFest2024 #Jaipur #JaipurDiaries #Book #Colditz #AuthorTalks #Oneindia
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#JFL #JaipurLiteratureFest #JFL2024 #JaipurLiteratureFest2024 #Jaipur #JaipurDiaries #Book #Colditz #AuthorTalks #Oneindia
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NewsTranscript
00:00 We have so much of individuals, of class, of race, of geopolitics in one book.
00:12 And we're going to go into that one by one.
00:15 But what I want, what I would like Ben to do first is, what is interesting to me is
00:22 that Kuldits is featured in TV shows.
00:25 It's been a central character for so many books.
00:28 It's even a board game.
00:30 So what led you to revisit Kuldits in 2023, 2024?
00:36 Why is that story still something that you found worth telling?
00:40 Oh, thank you.
00:42 Welcome everybody.
00:43 It's fantastic to be back in Jaipur.
00:45 This is my third Jaipur.
00:46 It's just wonderful to be here.
00:48 Kuldits, I grew up with Kuldits.
00:51 Now if you are British of a certain age, the word Kuldits has an absolutely specific meaning.
00:58 If you say, "Work was terrible today.
01:01 It was like being in Kuldits."
01:03 Everybody knows what you mean.
01:04 So it's deeply embedded into our language, in Britain.
01:08 And I grew up with it.
01:10 I mean, I literally grew up with it because in long, rainy weeks in Scotland, where I
01:15 mostly grew up, we would play Kuldits the board game, which was an exciting adventure
01:20 game and the point was you were either British, Dutch, French, or Belgian, I think, and you
01:26 had to try and escape from the castle.
01:27 And it was not a complicated game.
01:29 It did go on for about a week.
01:31 So in one way, it was kind of the boredom element of Kuldits came out quite strongly
01:36 in the board game.
01:37 But I loved it.
01:38 And then there was a very successful 1970s television drama series.
01:44 In fact, there were two seasons of it.
01:46 And it was then the most popular drama series ever made by the BBC.
01:51 And it was wonderful.
01:52 It was mostly fantasy.
01:54 And that, to answer your question, is really why I decided to write this book, is like
02:00 many stories from that period, the Kuldits story is encrusted with myth and legend.
02:08 And it tells, or it told when I was growing up, a very simple story of daring do.
02:14 It was a story of brave British men with mustaches, usually, digging their way to a different
02:23 sort of victory.
02:24 So the attempts to escape from Kuldits, which are the sort of central element of this story,
02:30 became a form of resistance.
02:32 We were talking about this earlier.
02:34 And it became another way of telling the resistance story.
02:37 It became a way of dignifying what, for many, many people, had been a horrendous experience.
02:43 350,000 people were held in different prisoner of war camps in Germany and Poland and other
02:49 places.
02:50 And for many people, it was a terrible experience, as it was for many in Kuldits.
02:54 But the myth of Kuldits painted a quite different story.
02:59 And the story that I found, and this is true of many of that era's legends, the real story
03:04 is much more complicated than this kind of straightforward, heroic myth.
03:09 The real story of Kuldits is a story about class, about race, about sexuality, about
03:17 mental health, about many of the things that interest us today, that we would see as sort
03:22 of contemporary subjects.
03:25 And this is not an attempt to sort of foist a 21st century template on a mid-20th century
03:33 story.
03:34 It's really an attempt to relook at a story through slightly different eyes.
03:39 And I found it much -- I took the subject on with some trepidation, I have to say, because
03:45 people constantly said to me, "There are many books about Kuldits."
03:48 There are, in fact, dozens of books about Kuldits, most of them written in the 1950s
03:52 and '60s, most of them more or less identical.
03:55 Why are you writing a book about Kuldits?
03:57 And I began to wonder whether I was taking on something that was already so well-known
04:01 that I was going to be telling the same story.
04:03 I ended up writing a book that is completely different from any other book about Kuldits,
04:06 I hope.
04:07 What I enjoyed most about your book is that there are so many different individuals across
04:16 different nationalities.
04:17 I think one of the most arresting for me was Pat Reid.
04:21 And he is one of the first officers of the Royal Army Corps who was captured in May.
04:25 He's sent to Kuldits.
04:27 And he's sort of the guy who puts Kuldits on the map, so to speak.
04:31 You tell us about him.
04:32 Absolutely.
04:33 So perhaps I should sort of explain what Kuldits is, because there may be people who don't
04:38 know.
04:39 Kuldits was and is an enormous 11th century Gothic castle in East Germany, near Dresden.
04:47 It has 700 rooms.
04:49 It was built by the electors of Saxony over a very, very long period, many centuries.
04:56 And it's a huge castellated thing that sits on a hilltop.
05:00 But it's extremely imposing to look at.
05:03 It's actually now a hotel, believe it or not.
05:05 You can go and stay in Kuldits if you want to.
05:07 I spent most of one summer in Kuldits.
05:10 I don't necessarily recommend it as a holiday destination.
05:14 But I became sort of embedded in the place, really.
05:17 I say it's a hotel.
05:18 It's more of a kind of youth hostel.
05:20 But so it was always intended to be a place to impress and to awe and to cow, in some
05:28 ways, the surrounding countryside.
05:30 And it's an extraordinary place.
05:32 So at the beginning of the war, it was set up as a particular kind of prison camp.
05:36 It became Offlag 4C, an officer's camp.
05:40 So it's a very important distinction, this.
05:42 This wasn't a prisoner of war camp where all prisoners were held.
05:45 It was a prisoner of war camp specifically for Allied officers who'd been captured.
05:50 And not only that, they had to be officers who had been defined in the great sort of
05:54 German nomenclature as "Deutschfeindlich," which literally means "German unfriendly."
06:00 Only the Germans would have a word that actually means "German unfriendly."
06:05 And these were people who distinguished themselves by trying to escape from other prison camps.
06:10 Or they had just made themselves extremely difficult for their captors.
06:14 So they were already problems for the German Reich.
06:18 And so the idea was that this would be a prison that would be impossible to escape from.
06:22 Now it was a really bad idea because, as I've just explained, Kolditz is a rabbit warren.
06:26 I mean, it's a vast great thing, and it's full of holes.
06:30 It has six different sewer systems.
06:33 So in fact, it's a really stupid place to put a prison camp.
06:37 The best place to put a prison camp is in a large field surrounded by barbed wire.
06:41 That's quite hard to escape from.
06:43 Kolditz was actually, at least to begin with, a comparatively not easy place to escape from.
06:48 But there were different ways you could do it.
06:50 So that was a bad idea.
06:51 And the second bad idea was that if you put all the most difficult prisoners in one place,
06:57 people who've all tried to escape from somewhere else, what do they try and do?
07:00 They immediately try to escape.
07:02 So the whole conversation inside Kolditz for five years was about how to get out of the
07:08 place.
07:09 So it's not a good place to have a prison camp.
07:12 And the very first arrival, which was your question, was a man called Pat Reid, who was
07:15 a kind of irrepressible Irish rugby international.
07:20 He was one of those slightly annoying people who never got depressed.
07:23 He was up the whole time.
07:25 And he was one of the first people to escape from Kolditz.
07:28 He became the first escape officer.
07:29 So he was helping others to escape.
07:31 And he also wrote the first book about Kolditz.
07:34 He actually patented the board game, too.
07:37 He made a mini industry out of Kolditz.
07:40 He became quite wealthy as a result of Kolditz.
07:43 But he also painted this very specific picture of Kolditz.
07:47 And he gave the wrong impression, which was that everybody in Kolditz had been just like
07:52 him, which they were not.
07:55 What I find interesting also about that, you're talking about what you do when a bunch of
08:01 people get put together.
08:02 They immediately want to escape from prison.
08:05 But a curious theme that comes up in this book is honor.
08:10 And the different ways in which, say, the Geneva Convention was adhered to, a promise
08:15 given to a security guard that we are going on this walk, but nobody can run away from
08:21 it, right?
08:23 There was nobody who actually broke that promise also.
08:25 So honor features in a very curious way in a curious place.
08:30 You make a very good point.
08:31 And this is another important distinction about Kolditz.
08:34 Kolditz was run by the Wehrmacht.
08:37 It was run by the German army.
08:40 It wasn't a brutal, concentrated...
08:42 When we hear the word Second World War prison camp, we automatically and rightly summon
08:48 to mind the terrible Holocaust camps, the brutal SS extermination camps.
08:55 Kolditz wasn't like that.
08:56 It wasn't a holiday camp by any degree, but it was run by the German army.
09:00 And the German army were not all Nazis.
09:03 Some of them were, but the majority of officers were not.
09:07 And Kolditz was run according to the rules.
09:10 The rules were laid down by the Geneva Convention.
09:13 And so these officers had certain rights, which they were prepared to stand up for.
09:20 And what's even more interesting, I think, and again, this is completely against the
09:23 myth that we all inherited, the German officer class inside Kolditz were very assiduous about
09:30 sticking to the rules.
09:31 In fact, they took deep offense at the idea that they were somehow maltreating these officers.
09:37 And so there was a kind of honor between the different officer classes, and it became a
09:42 game of sort of cat and mouse.
09:45 There's a particular German character who was head of security at Kolditz, who I came
09:50 to really like, actually.
09:52 He's a wonderful character.
09:54 He was called Reinhard Eggers, and he was a schoolteacher.
09:58 He came from not far from Kolditz, and before the war, he had been a schoolteacher in Britain.
10:03 He taught at Cheltenham, a rather distinct, sort of refined part of Britain.
10:08 And he was there for two years, and he developed the completely erroneous belief that all British
10:16 people were like the people he'd met in Cheltenham, who were very polite and kept buying him beer
10:20 and looking after him.
10:22 So he couldn't kind of get over the fact that all the Brits in Kolditz were incredibly rude
10:25 to him, but all the people in Cheltenham had been frightfully nice.
10:30 But he treated them with great respect, really, in lots of ways, and he wrote a wonderful
10:34 diary in which he's like a sort of tutting schoolmaster.
10:37 He's sort of shaking his head the whole time.
10:39 He can't get over the fact that these naughty boys are still trying to break out and set
10:43 fire to his classroom.
10:45 So he's a wonderful character, and he's also...
10:48 He sort of bucks the idea of the sort of brutal, one-dimensional sort of Nazi...
10:53 There were some pretty unpleasant Nazis in Kolditz, don't get me wrong.
10:56 And it was a very nasty place.
10:58 It was boring.
10:59 It was cold.
11:00 They were hungry.
11:01 There was very little to do apart from trying to escape.
11:04 So it developed its own sort of internal chemistry, really.
11:09 And that's one of the things that I loved about it.
11:11 It was a sort of...
11:12 It was an international camp.
11:13 Now, if you were British, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was only British people
11:17 in it.
11:18 It wasn't.
11:19 For most of its life, the majority of prisoners, the largest section, were Poles.
11:22 So there were many Polish prisoners, all officers, all with the same sort of rights, French,
11:28 Dutch, Belgian, latterly Americans.
11:31 So it really was a sort of strange kind of cosmopolitan microcosm, really, of Edwardian
11:37 society.
11:38 And these were people, particularly on the British side, who had arrived with very...
11:42 They'd often come fresh from British boarding school.
11:45 And they treated, many of them, Kolditz, as if it was just an extension of their school.
11:51 And so they teased the masters, they made stink bombs, they did all sorts of stupid
11:55 and puerile things that kind of kept them going through the horror of Kolditz.
12:02 Let's just stick with the stupid and puerile for a minute.
12:08 You've written...
12:09 Very interestingly, I mean, you've talked about when prisoners don't have anything to
12:14 do, they invent things to do.
12:16 And a couple of the things that they invented were really brutal games.
12:21 Goon baiting, for one.
12:24 Tell us about stool ball and goon baiting, which seemed insane to me when I was reading.
12:29 Sort of insane.
12:30 No, I think that's exactly right.
12:31 I mean, it sort of became an art, goon baiting.
12:34 So a goon was the slang word for a German prison camp guard.
12:40 And so goon baiting was a sort of competition to try to drive the guards completely mad
12:47 by teasing them in various complicated and obscure and very babyish ways.
12:54 And of course, humor is absolutely vital.
12:57 You find it in every prison.
12:59 Black, dark humor is one of the ways that people get through this experience.
13:04 And so goon baiting could take many forms.
13:07 Whistling on parade, the French developed a way of being able to sing without opening
13:11 their mouths, which drove the commandant mad.
13:13 One of the things they loved doing, the Brits, was waiting until the commandant came out
13:17 for the daily roll call and then staring fixedly at his fly buttons in the hope that eventually
13:25 he would become self-conscious and check them.
13:28 And when he did that, that was considered to be an enormous moral victory.
13:32 And a great cheer would go up.
13:34 My own favorite of the goon baiting stories is the great wasp goon bait of 1942.
13:40 That was when the prisoners discovered a large wasp's nest in one of the walls of the castle
13:46 and began systematically capturing wasps and hiding them in matchboxes.
13:52 Before doing that, they would tie little messages to their legs with cigarette paper saying
13:55 "Deutschland kaputt" on them.
13:59 On a given signal at one roll call, they all released these wasps simultaneously, the idea
14:05 being that a vast cloud of wasps, angry wasps by this point, would take off, fly outside
14:10 the castle, sting Germans, and pass on this very important propaganda message.
14:15 There's no evidence that a single one of these things ever happened.
14:19 But it was a...
14:20 But to...
14:21 Semi-seriously, it was a way of bonding.
14:25 It was a way of keeping their spirits up in a very gloomy and grim place.
14:29 And it was a sort of exercise of the imagination.
14:32 And so while it seems incredibly silly, which it was, it nonetheless served a strange purpose
14:38 inside the chemistry.
14:40 And very quickly, you mentioned stoolball.
14:42 As I said, it was a sealed society, and so they began to invent their own traditions.
14:46 It's a very strange sort of British habit, but that every time two or three Brits are
14:52 gathered together, they will invent a new sport.
14:55 And they did that in Kolditz.
14:56 They invented a sport called stoolball, which could only be played inside Kolditz and was
15:00 only ever played inside Kolditz.
15:02 I wanted to see if we could reenact a game of stoolball.
15:04 It was incredibly violent.
15:06 And essentially, it was like a cross between rugby and cage fighting.
15:11 And you played it inside the inner courtyard, which was about the size of a tennis court,
15:15 covered in very slippery cobbles.
15:18 And you had two teams of about 30 people who simply had to kind of fight their way, holding
15:23 a ball from one end of the courtyard to the other, where there was a stool.
15:26 And if they could knock the person off the stool with the ball, then they got a point.
15:29 And it was incredibly violent, and the Germans found it utterly baffling.
15:34 People were quite badly injured sometimes.
15:35 But it was a great way of sort of blowing off steam as well.
15:38 I think one of the reasons there were so few actual fistfights in Kolditz was because they
15:42 played a lot of stoolball.
15:43 >>I mean, speaking of ways to exercise the imagination, theater was also a big part of
15:52 how prisoners kept themselves occupied at Kolditz.
15:56 And you've written about Mickey Burns, who became a sort of philosopher-poet almost of
16:00 Kolditz.
16:01 And, I mean, interestingly, Mickey Burns is also the father of Audrey Hepburn.
16:07 But tell us about theater and how that was sort of a way to keep people occupied and
16:15 a sort of another release of pressure and tension.
16:18 >>Absolutely.
16:19 I mean, it was some...
16:20 The theater in Kolditz is actually rather beautiful.
16:23 It's quite small.
16:24 It can seat about 200 people, and it has rather lovely sort of paintings on the walls.
16:28 And it became absolutely sort of cultural focus of the whole castle.
16:34 And in the first two years of the existence of Kolditz as a prisoner of war camp, there
16:38 was a new production of some sort in Kolditz theater once every three or four days.
16:44 And the different nationalities, wonderfully, would compete with each other to put on plays
16:50 and pantomimes and ballet and concerts.
16:56 There was a Polish pipe band.
16:57 There was a...
16:58 And one of the odd things, again, because they were officers, they were allowed to bring
17:04 in costumes and scenery paint and equipment to build proper scenery inside this theater.
17:13 But they had to do it on...
17:15 Again, it brings back your question of honor.
17:18 They had to promise that they wouldn't use the equipment they brought in for theatrical
17:22 purposes to try to escape.
17:24 So the drills and the hammers and the nails, and they were only...
17:27 And there's no evidence they ever did use this for any kind of escape.
17:32 So the theater is a fascinating thing.
17:34 And there's a wonderful photograph I found of a sort of a review, as it were, that was
17:39 put on in Christmas 1941, and it's called "Ballet Nonsense."
17:44 And it was a set of sort of skits and sketches and mad things.
17:49 But the central element of it was apparently rather a good ballet performance by the corps
17:55 de ballet, led by Pat Reid, this enormous burly rugby player.
18:00 And they're all dressed in tutus.
18:02 They're dressed in these kind of frilly skirts.
18:05 Cross-dressing was also a big thing in Kolditz.
18:11 Inventiveness also went to escape.
18:13 And we can't talk about Kolditz without talking about these numerous attempts to escape.
18:18 And also, these guys are very inventive about how they tried to escape.
18:21 I think one of the most...
18:23 Well, it's not a fun story, but it was an interesting story, was the glider that they
18:29 actually pulled together.
18:31 And that was one of the most sort of out there, outlandish methods of escaping, where you
18:37 basically cobbled it together from old headboards and stuff like that.
18:40 It was also...
18:41 You pointed out...
18:42 I mean, I obviously want you to tell us more about that, but you've also used a beautiful
18:47 metaphor for it, which is that it sort of represented a sort of metaphor for hope and
18:52 freedom for everyone who was in Kolditz.
18:54 So apart from the stupid and the puerile, there was also a sense of very real sort of
18:58 desperately clinging on to, "Someday there's going to be escape."
19:03 I think that's absolutely right.
19:04 I mean, this is an escape attempt.
19:07 And as I say, there were many, many escape attempts.
19:10 At the beginning, I mean, they were happening at least once a week.
19:13 In fact, there were so many different tunnels being built out of Kolditz in the first year
19:18 that they were quite literally undermining each other.
19:23 They kept tripping over each other as they were trying to escape.
19:25 So they had to set up a kind of international committee.
19:28 Committee, yeah.
19:29 So there was a...
19:30 It was a bit like the EU, really.
19:32 They had a sort of talking shop thing, and then they elected an escape officer for each
19:37 nationality.
19:38 And the idea was that they would sort of inform each other when they were going to attempt
19:41 an escape so they didn't trip each other up.
19:43 And it worked brilliantly.
19:44 Of course, the French wouldn't do it at all.
19:46 They sort of pretended they were doing it, but they really weren't.
19:49 And again, like the EU, the British sort of stayed in until they sort of walked out.
19:55 But it worked for a bit.
19:58 But the one you refer to is, I think it's the most astonishing of all the attempted
20:02 escapes.
20:03 Towards the end of the war, they built an entire glider in the attics of one of the
20:10 buildings in Kolditz.
20:11 And it was...
20:12 It had a wingspan of 30 feet.
20:15 It was constructed from bits of old sheeting, matting.
20:21 They used all the sort of bed springs they could get their hands on.
20:24 It had 600 different parts.
20:26 And the idea was that when the moment came to use this thing to escape, it was a two-man
20:31 glider.
20:33 They built a kind of temporary launch pad, which was going to sit on the apex of the
20:38 longest roof in Kolditz.
20:40 Then they were going to bring the glider out, reassemble it on the roof.
20:44 Then they had a system of ropes and pulleys, and believe it or not, a bath filled with
20:48 cement.
20:50 They were going to drop the cement-filled bath off the end of the roof, and then catapult
20:54 this thing into the air, with the idea that if the wind was in the right direction, it
21:00 would stay aloft just long enough to get them across the river and land on the other side.
21:06 It was an astonishing feat of engineering.
21:08 And it was built.
21:09 There's one photograph of the Kolditz glider.
21:12 It never flew because the war ended before it could be used.
21:17 Whether it would have worked, I mean, I've talked to quite a few aeronautical engineers
21:21 who said that this thing, with two men in it, would have gone straight to the end of
21:25 the roof and then plummeted 90 feet, killing both of them.
21:28 But in a way, as you sort of alluded, it wasn't really intended in some ways to fly.
21:36 It was a way of everybody who was left in the castle in 1944 to work together on one
21:42 project.
21:43 And in some ways, they were very clever, the engineers.
21:47 I think they knew that this was literally a flight of fantasy.
21:50 A flight of fantasy.
21:51 It was a way to imagine, for all of the people in the castle, to imagine themselves soaring
21:56 outside the castle to freedom.
21:58 So it had a kind of psychological effect, in a way, that was, I think, probably greater
22:04 than its practical effect.
22:06 And that was the last gasp.
22:08 But there were many, many other astonishing...
22:10 I mean, the tunneling that went on in Kolditz was absolutely extraordinary.
22:12 It was like a Swiss cheese by the end of it.
22:16 I mean, I think there are so many fascinating stories of the individuals in Kolditz that
22:22 we could probably be here all afternoon discussing this.
22:25 I would strongly suggest that you buy Ben's book rather than we do that.
22:29 But talking about things that are less unifying was the question of class.
22:37 As you mentioned, Kolditz was primarily an officer's prison.
22:41 But there were privates, there were NCOs who were also there, who were allowed to be there
22:45 under the Geneva Convention, but they weren't allowed to leave, unlike the officers.
22:51 And one great example of that was Douglas Barder.
22:57 So if you could...
22:59 Yes, this is one of the sides of Kolditz that I had no idea about before I started looking
23:05 into this subject, which is that there was a rigid class division running right the way
23:10 through the middle of Kolditz because they were the officer class.
23:14 But under the Geneva Convention, as you say, those officers had the right to have servants.
23:20 They were each allowed to have a servant, and those servants were ordinary prisoners.
23:24 They were privates who'd been captured.
23:25 They were prisoners of war just as much as the officers, but they were not allowed to
23:30 escape.
23:31 Their job was to be in Kolditz and to cook and clean and to generally look after the
23:38 officers.
23:39 And it's a different world from ours, the idea that somehow one set of people had the
23:44 right to escape and another set of people did not, it was denied to them.
23:50 But even more extraordinary, the British class system, as we all know, is a completely mad
23:54 thing that sort of continues...
23:55 You had clubs as well.
23:56 You had clubs.
23:57 So you had, as it were, you had the ruling class, who were the officers, then you had
24:00 the working class, who were the privates, but then you had an aristocracy above that.
24:05 There was a separate group called the Prominente, who were individuals selected by the Germans
24:12 as being people of particular social or political value.
24:16 So there was a nephew of... two nephews of the king, there was Winston Churchill's nephew
24:22 was in there, there was the son of the American ambassador.
24:25 So these were the kind of...
24:26 And they lived separately, they had separate provisions, they had their own gramophone
24:32 record, they lived under perfect sort of very, very tight security.
24:36 They were really...
24:37 They were more hostages than they were prisoners in a way.
24:39 And believe it or not, within them, there was yet another group.
24:43 There was...
24:45 Some of you may have heard of the Bullingdon Club.
24:48 There was a Bullingdon Club in Kolditz and in order to belong to the Kolditz Bullingdon
24:52 Club, which is a very exclusive Oxford dining club, famous for smashing up restaurants in
24:58 the 1960s and then...
25:00 I mean, I wasn't a member, but very, very exclusive.
25:04 So it's a weird thing about Brits.
25:07 Whenever three are gathered together, three male Brits, they will form...
25:11 Two of them will form a club to exclude the third.
25:14 And so the Bullingdon was a kind of, if you like, it was a club within a club within a
25:19 club and rigidly maintained.
25:23 So there was a sort of snobbery element inside Kolditz that shouldn't be forgotten.
25:29 And I could find no evidence of any orderly, any of these sort of POWs, private POWs ever
25:35 attempting to escape from Kolditz.
25:38 So it was purely an officer...
25:39 It was an officer pastime.
25:40 I mean, when you talk about snobbery and exclusion, I think nobody would have felt that more than
25:46 Birendra Nath Mazumdar, who was an amazing...
25:49 I mean, the story of Birendra Nath Mazumdar, he's essentially an officer with the Royal
25:55 Medical Corps in the army.
25:57 And he comes into Kolditz, it's the height of the war, and he basically refuses offers
26:05 to actually leave because...
26:07 And this is where Kolditz, for me, offered a sort of sense of a wider geopolitical landscape
26:14 against which a prison was functioning.
26:18 He was actually asked by Subhash Chandra Bose's men whether he wanted to join them.
26:24 You know, I mean, that in itself is an amazing story.
26:27 I don't think we hear too much of that here at all.
26:30 Well, it's really never been told before.
26:32 I mean, the story...
26:33 Birendra Nath Mazumdar was the only non-white officer in Kolditz.
26:41 He was an Indian doctor, he grew up near Calcutta, he was educated both in India and in Britain.
26:48 He was an extremely good doctor.
26:49 He was with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
26:51 He was captured at Dunkirk.
26:53 He was a tricky character, Mazumdar.
26:56 He was great.
26:57 I mean, he didn't take anything from the Germans at all, and they quickly labeled him "Deutsch
27:02 Feindlich" and took him off to Kolditz, where he suffered terribly.
27:08 Not from the Germans, the Germans regarded Mazumdar as a propaganda opportunity, but
27:13 from his fellow officers, not just the Brits.
27:16 He was treated, because he was a person of color, he was treated as a second-class citizen,
27:20 and he was told that unlike all the other officers, he was not allowed to escape.
27:26 They said, "Biren, you're the wrong color.
27:27 As soon as you get out of here, you'll be captured.
27:29 There are no Indians in Germany," which was not true, actually.
27:33 And so Mazumdar's story is both very poignant, I think, and incredibly inspiring, because
27:39 Mazumdar wasn't taking any of this.
27:42 At the beginning of the war, not the beginning, in about late '41, Subhas Chandra Bose, who
27:49 many in the audience will know about, the sort of nationalist leader of India, who was
27:54 making, at that point, it has to be said, common cause with the Nazis.
27:58 He was taking German money.
28:00 He was trying to get backing from Germany.
28:02 He was raising Indian troops to fight on the Axis side.
28:07 And they saw Birendra Nath Mazumdar as a huge opportunity, and they tried to recruit him
28:13 to broadcast to India to try to persuade Indians to rise up against British rule.
28:19 I mean, it was in a way that simple.
28:21 And Mazumdar was flattered.
28:24 He was offered his freedom.
28:25 He was offered an apartment in Berlin.
28:29 And twice they brought him to Berlin to try to persuade him to join them, to join Subhas
28:35 Chandra Bose's sort of campaign.
28:38 And he thought very hard about it.
28:39 He was a great admirer of Subhas Chandra Bose.
28:41 He was himself a very fervent Indian nationalist.
28:45 He was a great supporter of Gandhi.
28:47 And so this was a really sort of dark night for him, I think.
28:51 And he thought long and hard.
28:52 And in the end, he decided that he couldn't go against his word.
28:58 He'd given an oath to the British crown, and he was going to stick to it.
29:01 Honor comes back here.
29:02 Honor comes back again.
29:03 And so he returned to Kolditz.
29:04 He was beaten up in Berlin.
29:06 He was brought back to Kolditz, thinking, well, now my fellow officers will treat me
29:10 with some respect.
29:11 On the contrary, they now regarded him as a spy.
29:16 They believed that he must be on the other side because he'd been looked after in Berlin.
29:20 So he went on a hunger strike.
29:22 At the same time as Gandhi, he followed Gandhi's hunger strike.
29:26 And eventually, the commandant became so panicked by this hunger strike because Mazumdar said,
29:32 "Unless you release me from this prison and put me in the only all-Indian prison"--there
29:37 was one in occupied France--he said, "Unless you remove me and put me in this other prison,
29:43 I'm going to starve myself to death."
29:45 And he got out, and the commandant moved him.
29:48 And I'm not going to give away what happens, but he escaped.
29:52 I mean, Mazumdar's escape is an astonishing achievement.
29:58 I'm going to give it away, actually.
29:59 Buy the book anyway.
30:02 With a Sikh cavalry officer, the two of them broke out of this all-Indian prison and walked
30:07 900 kilometers to neutral Switzerland and across the border, at which point Mazumdar
30:13 was arrested by the British, who said that he had to be a traitor.
30:16 He couldn't have done this.
30:17 And he ended up as a GP, as a general, as a doctor in Somerset, where he spent the rest
30:22 of his life.
30:23 And he never talked about this story, except that I found--one of the lovely things I found
30:28 when researching this book was I found some tapes that he'd recorded just before his death
30:32 in 1996, which his wife, who's still alive--she's wonderful, Joan, she's 96--had never listened
30:38 to either.
30:39 And we sat there listening to these tapes in which he described his experience in cold
30:42 it's and the two of us were in floods of tears by the end of it, because it's a perfectly
30:48 hidden story of a man who had to escape twice, once from cold it's and once from this kind
30:53 of rigid racial system that he found himself in.
30:56 And this is just such a great example of the kind of stories that this book has, right?
31:04 And I mean, espionage and you go hand in hand.
31:07 So I mean, there was espionage at some point happening within cold it's as well, right?
31:12 And information began flowing out.
31:15 And these officers found ways of getting information that was crucial for the Allied effort back
31:20 home.
31:24 How did that develop?
31:25 Cold it's had its own intelligence system, astonishingly.
31:29 And at this point, I'm delighted to be able to introduce a female character into this
31:32 story.
31:34 There was a wonderful Czech flying officer in cold it's called Czecho-Chalupka, who was
31:39 a kind of loose debonair man with a sort of twinkly eyes and a thin mustache.
31:45 And he'd flown for the Czech Air Force, then for the French, then for the British, and
31:48 he was captured, brought to cold it's.
31:49 Amazingly, on his way to cold it's in the train, chained up with two soldiers on either
31:55 side of him, he happened to find himself opposite a very attractive young woman called Irma
32:01 Wernicke, who was from cold it's.
32:04 And he said, "Oh, I'm being taken to cold it's."
32:06 And they got into conversation.
32:07 And as I say, he was a sort of Lothario Czecho.
32:10 And by the end of it, they had established a kind of tendress.
32:14 And she whispered to him, "I'm the dental assistant in cold it's town.
32:18 If you can fake a dental emergency, you can come down and visit me in the town."
32:22 So sure enough, that's what Czecho did.
32:24 By the extreme expedient of chipping one of his teeth with a rock, he managed to get himself
32:30 taken down to cold it's, where he bribed the town dentist to give him some time alone with
32:35 Irma.
32:36 And it's the only example of a heterosexual love affair in cold it's.
32:40 Czecho managed to get himself down to see the dentist no fewer than 10 times.
32:46 By the end of the war, his teeth were in a terrible state.
32:49 But his love life was going gangbusters.
32:52 But Czecho and Irma, between them, founded what became known as the cold it's intelligence
32:57 system.
32:58 So Irma amazingly turned out to be an anti-Nazi resistance operative.
33:04 There was a small cell of young Germans in cold it's was a very Nazi town.
33:09 But a number of the younger people were deeply opposed to the Third Reich.
33:12 And she began to feed information via Czecho back to cold it's, where it was being sent
33:19 to British intelligence in secret coded letters.
33:22 There was a very long established, brilliant, I reproduced the code in the book, there was
33:27 a very complex coding system where letters, again, an officer's privilege, could be sent
33:32 back to Britain but with hidden messages in it.
33:34 And by the end of the war, they were producing a lot of extremely useful intelligence, where
33:40 the local ammunition was being kept, local troop movements, those kind of really useful
33:45 things for when the allies were beginning to advance on cold it's.
33:48 And the story of the love affair between Irma and Czecho, it sort of has a happy ending.
33:55 Needless to say, Czecho at the end of the war sort of abandoned Irma immediately.
33:58 And Irma just got out of cold it's just before the Soviets arrived and she ended up in California,
34:05 where she married Ronald Reagan's bodyguard.
34:12 If you put that in a novel, people would say that's just completely inconceivable.
34:17 Absolutely.
34:18 All of this is inconceivable, really, especially sitting here.
34:20 Today, I'm going to ask one last question before we open the floor for questions.
34:25 And that is tied into the theme of espionage, which is to say that all of this functioned
34:32 within a larger sort of network of resistance that went all the way back to London, right?
34:37 So you had a unit, which you've mentioned in your book, MI9, but you also mentioned
34:43 the Polish underground resistance.
34:44 You also mentioned the efforts of a wonderful woman called Mrs. M in helping prisoners who
34:50 were escaping sort of to find safe passage.
34:52 So there was a whole sort of ecosystem within which cold it's and resistance to the Nazi
34:59 rule sort of functioned.
35:01 Absolutely.
35:02 I mean, you've put it very, very well.
35:04 I wish I'd put it that way in the book, actually.
35:05 I mean, this was cold it's became part of a much wider element of sort of holding out
35:11 against the Germans.
35:12 Of course, since the only parts of the British Isles that were ever occupied by the Nazis
35:16 were the Channel Islands, where the resistance was patchy, to put it mildly.
35:22 This was a way, the whole cold it's story became a way of sort of demonstrating British
35:28 resistance to Nazi rule, to immediate Nazi rule, as it were.
35:32 And as you say, yes, it was a huge system.
35:35 You mentioned Mrs. M, again, one of my favorite characters.
35:37 She was a Scottish woman who had ended up in Poland.
35:41 She spoke perfect Polish.
35:43 She was married to a Pole.
35:44 To all intents and purposes, she was Polish, but she wasn't.
35:47 And she was running an escape system out of Warsaw.
35:51 And that was the place where many of the escapees from cold it's, and this is another point,
35:56 there weren't that many escapes from cold it's.
35:59 I mean, there were many, many escape attempts, but only 16 people over the course of five
36:05 years actually made what they called a home run, actually got across the borders.
36:09 Because getting out of cold it's was difficult.
36:12 Getting out of Germany was even harder.
36:14 And Mrs. M, as she was called, ran one of the escape cells inside, or the key escape
36:21 cell really, for escaping prisoners.
36:23 And she would hide them in her parlor for weeks and then send them off on these sort
36:28 of established escape routes.
36:29 And it's thought that at least, not all from cold it's obviously, but at least 20 escaped
36:34 prisoners and downed airmen were, you know, they got out because of Mrs. M. And she's
36:40 a wonderful sort of redoubtable, tough Scotswoman.
36:43 I mean, she made them all sing the national anthem every time they came round and, you
36:46 know, constant toast to the king and all that sort of nonsense.
36:50 But she was made of a kind of strange resistance material.
36:53 She's one of my favorites in the book.
36:55 I think all of them were made of a strange resistance material, which is why this book
36:59 is so great.
37:00 The floor is now open for questions, not just about cold it's, but any of Ben's other incredible
37:05 work.
37:07 Second row.
37:13 Is there a mic for the gentleman?
37:31 I am the son of a creaky, which those you will know is what they called POW short for
37:40 Kegiska Fanger. My father was Canadian who joined the RAF in 1937.
37:49 And as a flight lieutenant was shot down over Hamburg into the Elbe River and spent three
37:58 years in Stalag Luft three.
38:00 And he was one of the people vaulting over the famous wooden horse.
38:06 But I have to say, among families of ex-Kegis, there's a certain this cold it's thing sticks
38:18 in our craw that it's taken over by the MOD.
38:22 Oh, Valor and Britain.
38:26 During the war, the MOD docked the officers, their POW officers, their pay, and they grieved
38:33 it after the war.
38:34 And the MOD, Ministry of Defense, slapped the Official Secrets Act on it.
38:40 And we did not get a settlement until the 1960s when we were able to prove that ex-POWs
38:48 died an average of 10 years earlier than the general veteran population.
38:57 The other thing that one word you never mentioned was Canadian.
39:03 Canadian.
39:04 Canadian.
39:05 Oh, right.
39:06 Right?
39:07 Who dug all those tunnels?
39:09 It was hard rock miners from Northern Ontario.
39:12 Not entirely.
39:13 Well, they were very prominent in it.
39:17 There are plenty of Canadians in my book.
39:19 In fact, it opens with the Canadians who are the first arrivals in cold it.
39:23 So I'll refute that allegation.
39:26 But you're right.
39:28 Escaped prisoners, not escaped prisoners, the prisoner of war story was not a story
39:32 that any allied country wanted to have after the war.
39:36 For many of the former prisoners, this was a source of shame, particularly the ones who
39:42 had been captured early in the war, the professional soldiers.
39:46 They felt, many of them, and this is vivid in cold it and all other prison camps, they
39:51 felt that they had failed in the duty that they had been appointed to do.
39:56 So there is a sort of psychological element that the MOD and indeed all countries that
40:01 fought in the war did not want to talk about the prisoner experience.
40:05 And you're right.
40:06 I mean, they were appallingly treated.
40:08 They were ignored largely.
40:10 And I make this point in the book.
40:13 Cold it was partly a propaganda exercise after the war.
40:16 It was intended to uplift this story.
40:20 And it does obscure the many hundreds, indeed hundreds of thousands of other prisoners whose
40:25 experience was very different.
40:27 As I said at the beginning, this was an officer's camp.
40:29 If you were in a Stalag Luft, they were better than some.
40:33 But if you were in an ordinary prison camp, this was a terrible experience.
40:37 And it was not properly looked at, excuse me, after the war.
40:41 So thank you.
40:51 Thank you very much for that really insightful talk.
40:54 I just wanted to ask, how does Germany remember cold it as well?
41:03 Because we've heard about allies, but it would just be great to know what Germany thinks
41:11 about it and how they remember cold it.
41:14 Well, the reality is that they sort of don't remember cold it.
41:19 I mean, cold it is a big myth for the allies.
41:24 Because it was in East Germany and it was taken over by the Soviets and it was sort
41:28 of run on communist lines, this wasn't a story that East Germany wanted to celebrate.
41:34 And in fact, many of the artifacts from cold it, which were gathered assiduously by Reinhold
41:39 Eggers, the officer I told you about, were dispersed immediately after the war.
41:42 They were sort of sold off.
41:43 So for many years, the cold it story in Germany wasn't really addressed at all.
41:50 That said, I was amazed by how many of the former German officers, the former German
41:55 guards, had written their own accounts of what cold it had been like for them.
42:01 And therefore it is possible, and I hope I've done this in the book, to look at it from
42:04 a quite different perspective, which was not just from the German officer class, but some
42:09 of the NCOs and indeed some of the ordinary guards wrote about the experience of running
42:15 this camp.
42:16 And it wasn't much fun for them either.
42:18 I mean, actually two of the guard troop committed suicide in the course of the war.
42:23 So the German perspective is fascinating.
42:25 And even today, if you go to cold it, the German authorities celebrate the story of
42:33 the electors of Saxony and this beautiful castle that was built and the years that it
42:37 was a sort of emblem of sort of that part of history.
42:42 The cold it museum, the little escape museum, is tiny.
42:45 I mean, it's about 10 feet, no, I'm exaggerating, maybe it's 20 feet square, but it's really
42:49 very small.
42:50 So they see that as just one element of this story.
42:53 And again, after the war, when the Soviets were running East Germany, they regarded the
43:00 people who had been running this castle, the German group, as being Nazis, which they were
43:06 not, most of them.
43:08 And Eggers was arrested and he was sentenced.
43:11 He spent 10 years inside a Soviet prison camp.
43:14 He suffered far worse, far more deeply than any of the prisoners that he had held in cold
43:21 it.
43:22 And what I loved about him was that he held no sort of resentment about this.
43:27 He was extremely welcoming to any of the former British prisoners that he'd known.
43:32 And in fact, Pat Reid, who we started the story with, there was an episode of This Is
43:36 Your Life, which was a British TV series where somebody's life would be sort of gone over.
43:42 And this was done for Pat Reid and the surprise guest was Reinhold Eggers, who turned up,
43:48 this German who'd locked him up for three years, turned up and they sort of embraced
43:52 each other, which I think is very, very moving.
43:55 So for Germany, it's a complicated story that is, it's sort of partly hidden.
44:01 >>Hello, sir.
44:03 Who has the mic?
44:06 Yes, sir, at the front there.
44:08 Yes, in yellow.
44:09 >>Yeah.
44:10 >>So, you're a big fan of the agents and gentleman criminals, Adam Wirth and all that.
44:13 So is your interest in them their outsize impact on society or perhaps history or what
44:19 is your allure in these smart and frankly sneaky men?
44:23 >>I'm very worried about it.
44:24 I mean, I only write about crooks and skulkduggery and these.
44:30 I think I prefer rogues to great men of history or men and women of history.
44:36 I just, I like the underside of history.
44:39 I've always felt, particularly with the wartime story, and Colditz is a good example of this,
44:43 it's often presented to us as a kind of moral fable that somehow there was a good side and
44:50 a bad side and of course, overall, that is right.
44:55 But on the good side, as it were, there were people who didn't behave well and lots of
44:59 people did the right thing for the wrong reasons and lots of people did the wrong thing for
45:03 the right reasons and the buzz is gone.
45:05 So but yeah, I think there's probably something wrong with me.
45:09 I kind of, I love the sort of twisted, I love the twisted material, the twisted timber.
45:15 I find that much more interesting than the sort of the straight planks.
45:19 Also I was very, when I left Cambridge, I was recruited very, very briefly by the intelligence
45:24 service so that I think gave me a taste for skulkduggery.
45:26 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much.
45:29 >>Thank you so much for a wonderful conversation, ladies and gentlemen.
45:32 Thank you, Ben.
45:33 >>Thank you.
45:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]