Raising hell at Colditz castle

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jan 30, 2000 | by Trevor Royle

Trevor Royle goes beyond the stiff upper lips of old war films and looks at the real story of the Nazis' most notorious prisoner-of-war camp

WHEN is a lookalike Count Dracula castle more glitzy than a five- star hotel? When is a glum prisoner-of-war camp a safer haven than a Gestapo cellar? For John Crawford, a former officer in the Cameron Highlanders, the answer to both is simple: when it's Colditz.

Taken prisoner when the 51st Highland Division was forced to surrender at St Valery during the retreat to the English Channel in the summer of 1940, he spent 18 months in German captivity in Poland: a season in hell that included 91 days in the hands of the Gestapo. For this quietly spoken Scot, being a PoW still carries a certain resonance.

"When I got to Colditz in the autumn of 1942, I felt I'd arrived at the Ritz," he recalls. "At last I was amongst friends and I felt safe. It was a tremendous psychological relief that at last I was in a place which felt secure."

Like every prisoner in that 18th-century castle in Saxony, Crawford was a one-man awkward squad, a habitual escaper and trouble- maker. Having slipped away from the notorious Posen PoW camp - "a gruesome, horrible place" - he spent 18 months with the Polish army of resistance before being betrayed in Warsaw in July 1941.

However, whereas most inmates were treated as officers and gentlemen by the German army - with the punishment for escape bids being a mere three weeks in solitary confinement - he had narrowly missed being sent to a Nazi extermination camp. He arrived at Colditz in a pitiful physical state.

What he found was a community of allied officers - British, Dutch, French, Belgian and Polish - that was dedicated to giving the German guards as hard a time as possible. Tunnels were dug into the castle's unyielding rock. With typical elan, the French decided to build theirs from the castle's highest tower in order to hide the debris in the capacious attics.

Counterfeit papers and civilian clothes were produced for use by escapees. Typically down-to-earth British PoWs hid their secret maps in H Upmann cigar tubes carefully secreted in a fundamental body orifice. There was even a glider with a 32-foot wingspan under construction in one of the attics.

In short, Crawford had matriculated into the "Colditz Escape Academy": a concentration of locksmiths, forgers and pickpockets, most of whom were British public schoolboys. It was a motif that resounded down the decades.

In the 1950s there was a vogue for PoW movies. Never mind that they showed our chaps in the dungeons, there was a certain stylishness to them that caught the dying echoes of the last blast of stiff-upper-lipped officers. From Albert RN to The Wooden Horse, they paved the way for the climax of the genre, The Great Escape, in 1963. The Brits were always portrayed as decent types who were keen to have a go at escaping, forever dreaming up ingenious wheezes for fooling the enemy. In that sense, life in a prisoner-of-war camp seemed to be a mixture of officers' privileges and afternoon sports and damned good fun it was too.

As for the Germans, they were either harmless boobies or cold- blooded psychopaths. The camp commandant was invariably a gentleman forced, however reluctantly, to do his duty - an English public schoolboy transformed into a different and faintly disagreeable idiom. This was not altogether fanciful: the German commandant at Colditz had taught at Wellington.

Throw in a cynical Canadian (usually an American for the box office), a polite Pole and a feline Frenchman and there you had it: a microcosm of the allied war effort in the goldfish bowl of the German prisoner-of-war camp system.

THEN there is Colditz, that potent icon of German invincibility and British refusal to surrender to overwhelming odds. In addition to countless books written by survivors, it spawned a 1950s escape movie, The Colditz Story, as well as a long-running BBC television serial in the early 1970s, which made great use of the audience- pulling charms of Robert Wagner and David McCallum.

Now it is the turn of the documentary makers, as a three-part series begins this week on Channel Four. Its object is finally to lift the lid on "the most notorious PoW camp in history".

For Kenneth Lockwood, the secretary of the Colditz Association, its screening has not come a moment too soon. He is only too well aware that he is looking after a steadily diminishing band of brothers - 58 British, 70 French, 11 Dutch, five Poles and two Belgians. His one wish is for their story to be told free of embellishment and false sentimentality.

"We've all become very tired of versions of life in Colditz which are thoroughly misleading," he says. "The BBC series was a wonderful piece of entertainment but a lot of it was factually incorrect. The inference was that it was all gung-ho but that simply was not true. We didn't look on escaping as a lark. Under King's Regulations it was our duty to try to get away - and in so doing to cause as much trouble as possible. Hopefully we achieved that."