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.
Macintyre offers a more complete and complex account than is typical in popular histories from the Nazi era. Read in that light, this is less a fairy tale than an honest account of heroic but fallible men in captivity, made more compelling through the acknowledgment of their flaws and failures ... sometimes reads like A Thousand and One Nights meets Groundhog Day, with evermore baroque attempts to exit the same dull trap. But the near whimsy of Colditz took more than one grim turn, and in narrating those darker developments, Prisoners of the Castle works to undo some conventions of World War II escape stories ... With so many absconding prisoners to cover, Macintyre keeps things moving and does not get in the way of his material. He seems aware that this is not a story for literary flourishes but one whose strength resides in the stitching together of voices from disparate historical records ... He knows how to layer dramatic details and doesn’t shy away from sharing the worst things his imprisoned protagonists did, including the degree to which Colditz prisoners quickly replicated the most atrocious aspects of their home societies — from classism and exclusionary social clubs to virulent racism ... Some portraits are particularly moving ... With dozens of characters, Prisoners of the Castle risks becoming a grab bag of vignettes. However, each detainee is memorable enough that readers are unlikely to get lost. And a treasure trove of details is arrayed on the page. Macintyre so seamlessly fuses so many different accounts that their compilation creates something more profound than a simple escape yarn: a biography of the prison itself and the world detainees built there.
Writing a book about PoW escapes is easy since wonderful anecdotes abound. What makes this book so special is that Macintyre looks beyond the sensational into the murky micro-society that was Colditz ... Macintyre has a knack for undermining tales of derring-do ... despite removing the gloss from this subject, Macintyre produces a highly nuanced and often disturbing tale of men struggling to get along in captivity. He’s especially astute when examining the handful of prisoners who had a pathological desire to escape, some of whom were eventually driven insane ... The Colditz story is told with sensitivity and insight, with an eye for telling detail.
