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Colditz: The Definitive History: The Untold Story of World War II's Great Escapes | 
 enlarge | Author: Henry Chancellor
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: £8.35
Buy Used: £4.59
You Save: £3.76 (45%)
Used (6) from £4.59
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 844159
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 496
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0060012862
Dewey Decimal Number: 940
EAN: 9780060012861
ASIN: 0060012862
Publication Date: February 2003
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Ships next business day. NEW/UNREAD!!! Text is Clean and Unmarked! --Be Sure to Compare Seller Feedback and Ratings before Purchasing-- Has a small black line on bottom/exterior edge of pages. May have light shelf wear to cover from storage, if any. Shipping time can take 2 to 3 weeks as item ships from USA.
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Claiming anything, let alone a book on the Colditz story, as "the definitive history", is certainly a bold move. But since Henry Chancellor was the man behind the acclaimed British television series, Escape from Colditz, it might just be true. Certainly it is an enthralling read, although given its subject matter it could hardly be anything else. Colditz, more prosaically known to the German military as "Oflag 4C", was the supposedly escape-proof medieval German fortress from which over 300 men during the Second World War attempted to escape, and from which 32 made a "home-run". A small but hugely morale-boosting figure. With tragic heroism, some of these successful escapees, having risked life and limb getting back to the home country, then returned eagerly to the war only to be killed in battle. Chancellor's book represents 76 interviews carried out over a course of 14 years, and so promises to be exhaustive. It also corrects some of the errors in the classic but not always flawless memoirs of former prisoners such as Major Pat Reid. He is also good on adding colourful if tangential details, such as the fact that the great expansion of castle took place under the reign of Augustus the Strong of Saxony in the 17th century, a man who fathered no fewer than 354 offspring. The heart of the book, however, is the accounts of escape by the men themselves who lived to tell the tale. This is a history book that will make your hands clammy with fear and excitement. One can also relish the humour with which these old soldiers recall their days and nights of danger. One of them attempted to escape disguised as a woman. "But I had made the great mistake of filling it [his bra] with biscuits, in an attempt not to waste space. Unfortunately by the time I had crawled through the tunnel the biscuits had turned to crumbs and everything was sagging." So, not only a thrilling and inspiring history, but a useful guide to cross-dressing too: don't keep biscuits in your bra.--Christopher Hart
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 An interesting read February 18, 2008
Gavin Worrell (UK)
The book accompanies a TV series made several years ago now but is still periodically shown on various UK cable channels. The book does not live up to the high standard set by the series as the programmes carried interviews with some of the veteran Colditz POWs as well as some rather interesting reconstructions at the castle. The book skims the surface and at times one may question the accuracy of some of the information given. That said, it is a brave attempt to cover a huge subject matter and what the author has achieved is to get more people interested in Colditz by providing them with a very interesting read. NB I meant to put 4 stars!
 Itz Cold. November 10, 2007
Andrew Moules (Albania)
I read this whilst ata conference that I didn't want to be at, and it fitted the mood perfectly as I considered the situation those in Colditz faced, year after year. I also thought, "not another book about Colditz", but this probably is the definitive history of a POW camp that found an almost romantic obsession especially in the early 1970's when holiday camps were offered complete with guards to stop the "holiday-makers" escaping during the week. All that came on the back of a TV series which ran and ran.So is this book, but with less propoganda and a refreshing nod in the direction of the other nationalities there, not only the British, whose later published accounts portrayed them as the great escapers. This account shows otherwise. It is slanted that way because Pat Reid, escape committee chairman for the British chose his account from the year 1942, whereas the French had already had greater escape successes in the years before that.
!942 was, it turns out, the boon year for escaping from Colditz, and all the relevant statistics are laid out here nicely. The stories of the indivuals who attemted to escape are also treated in a balanced way, as are those of the guards, not least taht of Priem, who started the escape museum from artifacts and clothing used in the failed attempts. He also photographed reconstructions of the escapes, immediately after the attempt using the actual culprits as models, and some of these photos are included.
Studies on the lives of the arch "goon-baiter" who recieved 5 court-marshalls and nearly a year in slitary, Mike Sinclair, impersonator of "Franz-Josef" with his red hair and home-made moustache, Pat Reid and his successful trip to Switzerland and of course the men who built a gilder in the loft. The account of producing moonshine alcohol to relieve the boredom, along with other pursuits provide a feel for the desparation felt there. Most Colditz stories remain within the castle walls, but this one gets to the bottom of how records containing maps of Germany were introduced to the in-mates via red-cross parcels (a brief history of MI9) or the Gestapo man who gave away the secrets of which trains required passes on the way to the Swiss border, and finally the whole political set-up of the neutral Swiss Government's requirement to look after the inmates, to the extent that the prisoners were better fed than the (nearly as numerous) German guards by the end of the war. Even motre amazing is the story of the Czech officer who managed to have a girl friend in the local town, who managed regular contact and recieved invaluable information from her Nazi-party member father. All these stories show the community that Padre Rev.Platt oversaw and build up with moral and spiritual support, and faithfully recorded in his diary throughout the years there
Fantastic Read April 6, 2007
Samantha Armitage (Plymouth, UK)
This book is fantastic from start to finish and you will be hard pushed to put it down.... All I can say is that if you are interested in finding out about Colditz Castle and the men who were imprisioned there, this is the book to read.
Hard to ESCAPE from this book. September 10, 2004
This one will have the midnight oil burning !! This is a genuine cant put down book that takes you through the history of Colditz and the POW's who made it their home for various length's of time. The author is not afraid to double back chronologicaly on himself at times. This does not detract from the story telling ,but enhances it by throwing up familier names and incidents already mentioned. All in all an excellent unbiased account of times at Colditz.
An interesting counterpoint to Pat Reid's books October 26, 2002
Peter Fenelon
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Chancellor takes a broader view of Colditz than Pat Reid, a historian's-eye-view rather than that of a successfully-departed inhabitant, and his account fills in a lot of background that Reid didn't descvribe, particularly about the levels of cooperation and collaboration between prisoners and guards, the class and social divisions between and pessures on the prisoners, and the high-level political games in which the Castle was a pawn at the end of the War.Somewhat like Reid's "Colditz: The Full Story" with a slightly less stiff upper lip; Chancellor is unafraid to pooint out character failings of the prisoners....
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