Rivalries, class conflict, anti-Semitism: The inside story of the Colditz prisoners

This story is part of the February 11 edition of Good Weekend.See all 16 stories.

Ben Macintyre has written more than a dozen books about World War II and the Cold War. Credit: Hambury/Eyevine/Australscope

Ben Macintyre smiles sheepishly as he apologises. He has spent the past 20 minutes spinning yarns about the daring exploits of a Soviet Cold War double agent. Now he wants to show me that the spy also has a wicked sense of humour. “Please excuse my Russian accent,” Macintyre says. He pauses, draws in his chest, looks away for inspiration and sets his jaw.

For a moment it feels like we’ve entered a James Bond film. “I don’t know why everyone is complaining about lockdown,” he declaims slowly, imitating ex-KGB spy Oleg Gordievsky, who has been living in hiding in England since he defected in the 1980s. “I have been in lockdown for 35 years.” Macintyre waits for me to chuckle, and I do. His accent is actually pretty good.

We’re sitting at a table in the white-walled meeting room at his publisher’s office in London’s Pimlico, to which he has been driven for a round of interviews about his latest book, Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle. Macintyre points backwards over his shoulder to tell me the office is just a 10-minute drive from MI6 headquarters across the Thames and slips back into relaxed Oxbridge English to reflect on the price paid by Gordievsky, whose revelations Macintyre detailed in his bestselling book The Spy and the Traitor (2019).

“Oleg is both the bravest and the loneliest person I have ever met,” he says. “He has that thousand-yard stare, sometimes, of somebody who has lived within themselves forever. He is literally a prisoner of history. There is a house very near his safe-house that has electronic eyes and ears on the house itself. I think it is much more closely guarded than even Oleg is aware of.” That may be because Gordievsky is now more of a target than when he defected, according to Macintyre. “Putin was a young KGB officer when Gordievsky escaped and a lot of his immediate colleagues and patrons were fired as a result of Oleg’s intelligence. His career was set back and I’m told he holds Oleg personally responsible.”

Described by a book reviewer as “the most significant British agent of the Cold War”, Gordievsky worked for MI6 while he was KGB bureau chief in London from 1974 to 1985. In 1985 he was suddenly ordered back to Moscow but in the same year MI6 spirited him out of the USSR after Gordievsky signalled he was ready to be extracted by wearing a grey cap and holding a Safeway supermarket bag. An MI6 officer was ordered to walk past him chewing a Mars bar or KitKat, triggering the plan to smuggle Gordievsky into Finland in the boot of a diplomatic car.

A few years earlier, while Gordievsky was head of the KGB rezidentura (spy hub) in the Soviet embassy in London, Macintyre recalls, there was the “extraordinary moment when Mikhail Gorbachev, the great new kind of grand hope of the Politburo, arrives in London, and Oleg is briefing both sides. The KGB resident designate is writing a memo for Gorbachev about what he should say to Thatcher but the memo has been dictated by MI6, and you’ve also got him advising MI6 how Gorbachev responds.”

‘Oleg has that thousand-yard stare, sometimes, of somebody who has lived within themselves forever.’

It’s this level of granular detail, the absurd ironies and an ability to get inside the characters behind these complicated narratives that have made Macintyre’s series of histories about World War II and the Cold War so compelling. Beyond the wispy hair, corduroy jacket and John Lennon spectacles, Macintyre is a gifted storyteller who draws readers into his world of war and espionage by a silken thread. With more than a dozen books to his name, he has become a one-man publishing industry.

His subjects include the British double-agent Kim Philby (A Spy Among Friends); the World War II plan to plant false documents on a corpse to trick the Nazis over the Allied invasion of Sicily (Operation Mincemeat); and the female Soviet spy who operated for years undetected in England as a suburban housewife (Agent Sonya). He retains a special affection for the Philby book. “He is the ultimate double-agent, the most successful spy in history. The complexity of that story and the character it reveals ... I loved doing that one.”

That story was recently adapted into a TV series and is among a raft of his books that have made their way onto the screen: a film of Operation Mincemeat is now on Netflix; this year SBS will screen a series based on SAS: Rogue Heroes, his book about the origins of the SAS; and Macintyre says another TV series, about Gordievsky, is in production.

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Although most of his books are set in the context of war and conflict, Macintyre says that is not what draws him to his subjects. “I’m not terribly interested in guns and battles. I’m much more interested in the hidden chambers of the human heart that tell you more about us.”

His latest book, Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, is a case in point. On one level, it takes a fresh look at the legendary high-security German POW camp, oddly located within a picturesque castle on a rocky hilltop in the town of Colditz, near Leipzig. It was here where “incorrigible” Allied officers who had repeatedly attempted to escape from other camps were sent. While there have been plenty of books, a film and TV series about Colditz over the years, they have largely focused on individuals and their attempts to escape.

Macintyre’s Colditz offers an anatomy of prison life that depicts a microcosm of the British class system, subterranean currents of racism, anti-Semitism and homosexuality, and a surprising code of respect exhibited by their German captors.

Colditz Castle, where Allied prisoners who repeatedly attempted to escape from other German camps during World War II, were sent.Credit: Getty Images

As he chronicles the succession of ingenious attempts to break out of the “inescapable” fortress, Macintyre dissects the rivalries between the British, French, Dutch and other nationalities over which country can make more successful escapes, the reflexive anti-Semitism of French officers and the ugly class divides between British prisoners. Captured officers arrive with their own lackeys, ordinary soldiers who are effectively indentured to them and who at one point go on strike over their treatment.

One of Colditz’s most famous prisoners is Douglas “Tin Legs” Bader, the British Royal Air Force pilot who lost both his legs in an aerobatics show in 1931 but who went on to be a war hero during the Battle of Britain and the Battle of France. Bader’s exploits were later immortalised in the stirring 1954 book Reach for the Sky, which Macintyre and I – so we discover – both read as young boys. (The book was also made into a film of the same name, released in 1956.)

Bader is one of those officers with a lackey, a Scotsman named Alex Ross, who is forced, among other hardships, to carry him up and down the stairs, tin legs and all. At one stage, Ross learns he has been given permission to go home in a prisoner swap and asks Bader for permission. Bader refuses to let him go. Ross doesn’t question Bader’s decision, simply because he feels he can’t disobey an officer, and stays in captivity, accepting Bader’s humiliating treatment for another two-and-a-half years.

Bader may have been a national hero but Macintyre shows him to be a heartless, arrogant bully. How much is known about Bader’s true character? “Well, not as much as is in this book. Douglas Bader interests me because he’s a bastard, but on the other hand he was one of my childhood heroes. Yet he did incredible things for handicapped people.”

Much of the material comes from recordings made in the late 1980s and early 1990s by every surviving Colditz prisoner, which are held in the Imperial War Museum but hadn’t been listened to by researchers or historians. It’s through these archives that Macintyre learnt of Ross’s anguish and other prisoners’ private fears, including a chaplain’s anxiety over the men acting on homosexual urges. The book reveals a culture of homosexuality among the prisoners, including one who was openly bisexual. “No one has really written about that before,” says Macintyre.

Douglas Bader may have been a national hero but Macintyre shows him to be a heartless, arrogant bully.

Perhaps even more startling is his portrait of the soldiers who were guarding them. Colditz reveals the Germans running the prison to be civilised, respectful and sticking faithfully to the Geneva Convention rules on POWs. The prisoners were allowed to take walks outside the camp and to put on theatre shows. Their food was pretty good and they received no specific punishment for failed escape attempts. Indeed, only one prisoner was killed while trying to escape, and that was very late in the war.

British pilot Douglas “Tin Legs” Bader was one of Colditz’s most famous prisoners.Credit: Getty Images

The security officer responsible for dealing with the prisoners, Reinhold Eggers, was held in such esteem by the prisoners that when one of the first captives, British Flight Lieutenant Pat Reid, was feted after the war in the TV show This Is Your Life, Eggers was a surprise guest. Macintyre was also struck by the Germans’ civility and notes that Eggers was a career officer but not a Nazi. “I found myself feeling sort of sympathy for some of those German characters, in particular Eggers, who winds up spending 10 years in a Soviet gulag in the postwar reckoning.”

So how does he reconcile these Germans with the monstrous barbarity exhibited by the Nazis in the concentration and death camps? “One has to bear in mind that this was an officers’ camp and they were treated differently from soldiers in stalags [POW camps for enlisted soldiers]. Because of the intensely hierarchical nature of society at that time, German as well as British, they were … to be treated properly. It was a horrible place but it wasn’t a concentration camp. Colditz was run by regular army soldiers; they were professionals. They were not the SS; they were not fanatics.”

There’s another story Macintyre starts to talk about that is not in any of his books but is just as intriguing. “I’m an Aussie, too, by origin,” he says, almost nonchalantly. “My father was born on a sheep station at Quirindi [330 kilometres north of Sydney] in NSW. I’ve never been but I’m going for the first time [this year]. I’m really looking forward to it. There’s a Macintyre River up there that is named after one of my grandfather’s family. My grandfather was one of six brothers, each of whom had a sheep station.”

The family came from Scottish stock, who moved here in 1827 to buy land; both Macintyre’s paternal grandfather and father were born in Australia. His dad, Angus Macintyre, became a prominent historian, was appointed tutor in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and worked his whole career there until he died in a car accident in 1994, aged just 59.

Ben was born in Oxford in 1963, the year his father became a tutor at Magdalen College. He went to Cambridge and then on to The Times, where he soon became a foreign correspondent, and started writing books after being posted to New York in his early 20s. “This particular genre is one that I never really meant to be part of,” he says. “I was recruited by MI6 when I was at Cambridge, nest of spies that it is.”

He pauses.

“It happened in the traditional way.”

The traditional way?

“I had a tap on the shoulder from one of my tutors, who said, ‘There’s part of the Foreign Office that is slightly different from the other parts.’ He never actually said what it was, but it became pretty clear. I did the first couple of interviews and I enjoyed talking to them. But they took one look at me and realised that here’s a man who can’t keep a secret, as I’ve just demonstrated by telling you the story, which I’ve told others before.”

You didn’t actually work for them?

“No. I have to tell you that, even if I did. But no, I didn’t.” The hint of a smile appears on his face and he again pauses. “But I was really fascinated by the idea of the double life.”

’Ego is absolutely part of it. A spy once called it, ‘The ruthless exercise of private power.’ ′

Macintyre says there is an acronym, MICE, that roughly describes the four elements drawing people into spying: money, ideology, coercion and ego. “I’ve always thought the most powerful is ego. I’ve never come across an important spy who didn’t also think they were motivated by some higher calling. But ego is absolutely part of it. A spy once called it, ‘The ruthless exercise of private power.’

“Secrets are very intoxicating and can also be very bad for you. If you do keep them, they have a corrosive effect over time. You often end up doing a bad thing for a good cause, in your own mind, breaking the law or manipulating people or deceiving the people you love.”

Oleg Gordievsky, the ex-KGB spy who defected to the UK in the mid-1980s and has been living in hiding since.Credit: Alamy

He’s referring here to the fact that when Gordievsky was safely ensconced in England, the Russian used his prodigious memory to pass on vast troves of intelligence to the West. Most notably, he revealed the extent to which the Soviets were paranoid that the US would launch a first strike against them.

“At that point, [then US president Ronald] Reagan’s speeches were incredibly incendiary; he was poking the bear very, very hard. Gordievsky’s information was, ‘They may be paranoid in the Kremlin but they genuinely believe you’re about to launch your first strike.’

“You can see the [White House] rhetoric begin to ratchet down [after reading Gordievsky’s reports]. Now, he’s not the only player in this scenario, and I wouldn’t give him singular credit, but the Cold War began to get warmer from that point onwards.”

One can only wonder what Oleg Gordievsky would make of the reaction to Mikhail Gorbachev’s passing in August 2022. The Soviet leader was venerated as a liberator in the West but held in contempt by many Russians for destroying the Soviet empire. Almost four decades later, realpolitik has turned full circle, with Vladimir Putin trying to resurrect the empire through his brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Gordievsky’s dramatic escape from Moscow allowed him to tell his remarkable story; others were not so lucky. Among the early successful escapes from Colditz, Macintyre describes one involving a flight lieutenant, Hedley Neville “Bill” Fowler, who was born in England, spent much of his youth in Australia, then returned to the UK and was shot down flying for the RAF. Fowler was sent to Colditz in December 1941, and was one of six prisoners who got out in September, 1942, disguised as labourers. Four were recaptured but Fowler and a Dutch officer made it over the border to Switzerland. Fowler got back to England only to die in an air-force training accident two years later.

Macintyre’s book is written for a British audience, so it is perhaps Antipodean nitpicking to point out that although Fowler’s escape (which has been chronicled widely in Australia before now) is described at some length, he is not mentioned by name – at least not in the proof version given to me before our interview.

Hedley “Bill” Fowler, one of the few Colditz prisoners who successfully escaped.

Towards the end of the book, Macintyre provides a tally of escapes. “The precise number of successful escapers is still debated … The best estimate is that a total of 32 men made ‘home runs’, with just 15 starting from inside the castle: 11 British, 12 French, seven Dutch, one Pole and a Belgian.” What about Bill Fowler, I ask? Macintyre stops and lets out a tiny gasp. “Let me have a check. I think I probably put the Commonwealth escapers in with the Brits.”

I’m more uncomfortable than he is. “I just thought Australian readers would notice it,” I fumble, half-laughing.

“I think you’re right; I think British is meant to include British and Commonwealth.”

When the book was launched last September, this detail remained unchanged. But when I went back to check the biographical details of Fowler, I could see that his mixed nationalities would make it hard to label him Australian and that Commonwealth is, in fact, the most accurate way to categorise him. Macintyre, who prides himself on his attention to detail, is able to visit his ancestral home this year with his head held high.

Ben Macintyre will appear at the upcoming Perth and Adelaide writers’ festivals.

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