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| Colditz Diagram Note Lados cell on the west side - Original image from war44 |
On 4 August, the
daily exercise party trailed up the zigzag path from the park to the
castle. The summer heat had slowed everyone down, when jogging along the line back towards the park came two Hitler Youth dressed in sports shorts and vests with
a swastika on the front. The pair reached the German NCO at the end of the
column, giving the Hitler salute as they passed. The NCO ordered them to halt immediately,
berating the men for an appalling salute at the wrong angle. Flying Officer Don
Thom and Lieutenant ‘Bertie’ Boustead were convincingly dressed, but were
unable to sufficiently answer his questions in German. The game was up.
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| Flt Lt Donald Thom pictured in Colditz is front row far right - IWM |
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| Hitler Youth (Thom and Boustead were dressed in sports kit) |
The relentless drive to escape continued despite disappointments, setbacks and failures. The slim chance of success did not seem to deter POWs in Colditz, despite dips in morale. Paymaster Lieutenant James Mike Moran RN did not arrive at the castle until the following year, but his thoughts and observations provide a valuable insight into the difference between Colditz and other camps both in conditions and the POW’s psyche.
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| Paymaster Lieutenant (later Commander) James Mike Moran- You Tube |
'Colditz meant
nothing to us; we’d never heard of the damn place. When we got outside the
station, there were two lines of guards and there were machine guns there and
dogs, and we were lined up between these and marched off. The first thing you
could see was this damn great castle stuck on top of the hill and it was
completely floodlit, and we still had no idea where we were…
There were two
problems, one was how closely confined we were, not only in our living quarters
but in our exercise quarters, because all we had was that fiddling little
bloody courtyard which was not much bigger than a tennis court, we had anything
up to 350 chaps and this was their sole exercise space…. And the guards were
there with you all the time…with their rifles slung over their shoulders
In previous
camps, particularly at Marlag (POW camp for men of the British Merchant Navy
and Royal Navy), the chap who wanted to escape was the odd man out. You soon
learned in Colditz that if you didn’t want to escape, you were the odd man out.
You felt a compulsion to find some way of getting out, to look around and you
found a compulsion of being one of the chaps there, you had to adopt a
different approach altogether. In Marlag you had to virtually excuse yourself
for digging tunnels of for making a nuisance of yourself, and that was how it
was thought of there.
In Colditz, you
were engaged in some escape activity, even if you knew right from the beginning
it was just a waste of bloody time, it would be abortive and it would get you
nowhere. Even if one knew that - you had to present yourself to the rest of the
chaps as being that sort of chap….I spent weeks and weeks and weeks on the
entrance to a tunnel. I knew it would get us nowhere…I couldn’t see that it was
going anywhere, but you felt that you had to do this. …the very fact that you
were engaged in something, if you had at least an inkling of a hope that it
would be successful, well, it kept you occupied and at the same time your
approach to things was the general approach in Colditz.’
Sources
The Colditz Story - Major P R Reid MBE MC
Colditz The Full Story - Major P R Reid MBE MC
Colditz The German Viewpoint - Reinhold Eggers
IWM Interview with James Michael Moran
Author's Notes
©Keith Morley
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