Yahoo Sports New TV series will dismantle Colditz ‘mythology’ and show racism of British officers
A new television series will dismantle the “mythology” of Colditz and show the racist side of British officers imprisoned there.
The adaptation of Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, by Ben Macintyre, will offer a “21st-century narrative” view of life within its walls.
The book “digs a bit deeper” into the legend. One such legend is that of Douglas Bader, the flying ace who lost both legs in a crash in 1931 but became the RAF’s most celebrated Spitfire pilot during the Second World War.
“Bader was the most famous prisoner in Colditz. He was the most famous fighting soldier on either side during the war. He was an extraordinary man, remarkably brave; he could inspire courage in others.
“But he was also horrible. He was a monster. Bader was racist, snobbish, brutally unpleasant to anybody he considered of lower socio-economic order,” Macintyre said.
Brutal racism
Another story told in the book, which will be included in the forthcoming series, is that of Birendranath Mazumdar. Indian-born, but trained as a doctor in London, he joined the British Army in 1939 as a medical officer and was captured in Normandy.
As the only Indian in Colditz, he was shunned by fellow British Army officers. Macintyre said: “He suffered terribly in a way that was shaming, really. He was treated with appalling racism. He was regarded as a second class citizen… told he had to make curry for everyone. Even for the time, it was pretty brutal, racist behaviour.”
Mazumdar eventually became a GP in Somerset and married an Englishwoman. He rarely spoke of his wartime experiences but recorded his experiences on microcassettes around 10 years before his death, which Macintyre used as research material.
“Joan, his widow, had never heard them before. We were both in floods by the end because it is an astonishing first-person account. He was still furious but there was forgiveness,” said Macinture.
The television rights to the book have been optioned and it is being adapted by the same team who produced one of Macintyre’s earlier books, A Spy Among Friends, which was recently turned into a drama series for ITVX.
“The idea, a brilliant idea if it works, is to try to tell this story in a series of episodes, taking a different vantage point for each episode,” he explained.
“So one will be told through the eyes of Mazumdar, one perhaps through Reinhold Eggers. There is a way of taking the mythology that we all remember and playing with it, and creating a quite different 21st-century narrative to look at that story again.”
Eggers was the security chief at Colditz, described in Macintyre’s book as an “ardent Anglophile” who “made no secret of his admiration for the British countryside, courtesy, language, food and good sportsmanship”, having spent several months in Cheltenham in the early 1930s.
Macintyre said that many ex-prisoners had a level of admiration for Eggers, judging that he had retained his humanity during the war.
Pat Reid was one of the few prisoners to make a successful escape to freedom from Colditz, in 1942; when he was honoured on This Is Your Life decades later, Eggers was the surprise guest.
‘Myth of Colditz’
The writer and journalist said that the “myth” of Colditz was partly formed in the national psyche by the 1972 BBC series of the same name.
He said: “As many people did, I watched the 1970s black and white TV series on the BBC. It was almost a religious ritual in my family, that we sat down every week. It was proper appointment television.
“One-third of the entire British population watched that TV series and it told a story that was dated in the way we saw the war: a story of brave British men with moustaches digging their way out of this enormous Gothic schloss and, in a way, winning the war by different means.
“It was a way of dignifying the prisoner-of-war experience. It was a very familiar myth and, like all myths, it was partly true. The story of the escapes from Colditz are fabulous: the ingenuity, the courage, the lateral thinking that went into them is extraordinary.
“But, like all myths, it is partial. It doesn’t tell the whole story. Very early on in the project I thought, ‘There is an entirely separate set of stories that have never been told.’”
Macintyre said that The Great Escape, the 1963 film about a real-life escape from Stalag Luft III, was another example of our desire for history to be turned into an uplifting tale of British heroics.
“The Great Escape story is an astonishing story, but I always thought it should have been called The Great Tragedy. It was a terrible event. They were all captured and almost all of them were murdered.
“You get a sense of that right at the end of The Great Escape but it is a really shocking episode turned into heroism, because that is what we do,” he said.
Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle by Ben MacIntyre is published by Viking at £25. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books.
