The Dark Story of Colditz Castle - The 'Escape-Proof' Camp Where POWs Built a Glider
WW2 Ruins
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If you drove through the Saxon countryside south of Leipzig and looked up at the hill above the little town of Colditz, you might mistake the building on the cliff for a palace. White gabled towers. Renaissance stonework almost a thousand years old. A courtyard where a state music academy now rehearses, the sound drifting out over the river. It is a beautiful place. It was also, for six years, the most escape-proof prison the Third Reich believed it could build. The German High Command said so out loud. By many accounts, Hermann Göring himself called it escape-proof. The guards outnumbered the prisoners. The outer walls were two meters thick. The cliff below the windows fell away more than two hundred feet to the River Mulde. It sat four hundred miles from any friendly border, deep in the heart of Nazi Germany. And it became the most broken-out-of prison camp of the entire Second World War. This is the story of Oflag IV-C. The fortress the Germans filled with the men who would not stop trying to leave.
The plan was simple, and on paper it made perfect sense. Across occupied Europe, the German army held hundreds of thousands of captured Allied officers. Most of them waited out the war. A small number would not sit still. They tunneled. They climbed. They forged papers and walked out dressed as guards. They were caught, and they tried again. So the Germans made a decision. Gather all of them in one place. Every incorrigible escaper, every officer stamped deutschfeindlich — hostile to Germany — sent to a single medieval fortress that no one could break out of. It was meant to be the end of the road. Instead, the German army had accidentally built the finest escape academy in the world, and staffed it with the most determined students in Europe.
If this is your first time here, we tell the stories of the places history turned into cages. The prisons, the camps, the fortresses, and the men and women who lived and died inside them. If that is what you came for, take a second to like this video and subscribe. It helps more than you would think.
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Colditz is one place no one will ever forget as it symbolises so much bravery in trying times and the team work of the over coming of language barriers of men.to get a job done. ❤🙏
The French report 11-22 were successful.
The Dutch report: 6-15 as successful.
Britain and its Commonwealth: 10-14 successful.
The Polish: 2-5 successful.
130 managed to get past the immediate walls and grounds but recaptured.
So even records from archives are different. Another POW at Colditz was Major David Sterling of the SAS. He was sent there after 4 other attempts. He was kept under intense security.
Some other escapes not mentioned in this documentary was of a former British Olympic gymnast who on being processed immediately jumped down from a wall onto a small grassed terrace and ran the length of it and jump to freedom. The guards fired but didn't hit him and he was recaptured soon afterwards.
One escape attempt that Lockwood was in was in a drain from the kitchen to the outside wall where there was a grate and they bribed a German guard who in the end turned on them. For when they got to the grate and opened it there was a German guard pointing a rifle at them. So one of the them yelled "get back" and they all headed back to the kitchen where another German guard was waiting for them. The British now trapped all burst out laughing which floored the Germans for they couldn't understand why they were laughing.
MI9 sent a coded message saying "when a record arrives of the British Grenadiers smash it" inside the record was a detailed map of Germany. They prisoners got the record and broke it and out fell the map and then they had an orgy of breaking their remaining records to see if they held maps, but they didn't and now they had no records to play.
One way to pass the time was to get blasted out one's brains and the turnip jam supplied by the Germans had another sugar in it to make hooch. If they saw someone wobbling around in the exercise yard with glazed eyes and a black tongue then they'd been at the hooch which was nothing much more than methylated spirits.
Jellies arrived in the Red Cross parcels and the MI9 map was copied using lemon jelly. Lockwood said it would only do so many and then they had to start again but they always ate the jelly afterwards
In the last days of the war the Red Cross parcels stopped coming and the prisoner began to starve and word went around that the British cat had disappeared. They caught it, killed it and boiled it. Lockwood said it's a very greasy meal is cat but it certainly filled a spot. Others tried to entice birds to come but they would only come if they were offered food which the prisoners didn't have.
In a castle full of young men they had no sexual outlet for any of them and they don't remember any homosexual activity. But they made little telescopes out of eye glass lenses inside the cardboard for loo rolls and looked through them into windows in Colditz town. They said sometimes you may see a little bit of sexual activity and sometimes they wouldn't.
Lockwood said when they were liberated an American soldier with a machine gun pushed the main wooden entrance gate open and all the POW rushed at him and he raised his gun and yelled "get back". In true British fashion Lockwood said the prisoners said to him "hey it's alright we're one of you" and he added "and then it was all very jolly".
In the early 2000's a young German archeologists was doing research at the castle to find old "hides" where prisoners had hid items for later escape attempts. He found a German corporal's tunic under a floorboard put there by someone who made it during the war but never used.
The Dark Story of Colditz Castle - The 'Escape-Proof' Camp Where POWs Built a Glider
WW2 Ruins
79,900 views
👉 Hey guys! We're now live on Spotify. 🎧
Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2wie10j...
If you drove through the Saxon countryside south of Leipzig and looked up at the hill above the little town of Colditz, you might mistake the building on the cliff for a palace. White gabled towers. Renaissance stonework almost a thousand years old. A courtyard where a state music academy now rehearses, the sound drifting out over the river. It is a beautiful place. It was also, for six years, the most escape-proof prison the Third Reich believed it could build. The German High Command said so out loud. By many accounts, Hermann Göring himself called it escape-proof. The guards outnumbered the prisoners. The outer walls were two meters thick. The cliff below the windows fell away more than two hundred feet to the River Mulde. It sat four hundred miles from any friendly border, deep in the heart of Nazi Germany. And it became the most broken-out-of prison camp of the entire Second World War. This is the story of Oflag IV-C. The fortress the Germans filled with the men who would not stop trying to leave.
The plan was simple, and on paper it made perfect sense. Across occupied Europe, the German army held hundreds of thousands of captured Allied officers. Most of them waited out the war. A small number would not sit still. They tunneled. They climbed. They forged papers and walked out dressed as guards. They were caught, and they tried again. So the Germans made a decision. Gather all of them in one place. Every incorrigible escaper, every officer stamped deutschfeindlich — hostile to Germany — sent to a single medieval fortress that no one could break out of. It was meant to be the end of the road. Instead, the German army had accidentally built the finest escape academy in the world, and staffed it with the most determined students in Europe.
If this is your first time here, we tell the stories of the places history turned into cages. The prisons, the camps, the fortresses, and the men and women who lived and died inside them. If that is what you came for, take a second to like this video and subscribe. It helps more than you would think.