Join Ben Macintyre as he presents the undisclosed story of life inside Colditz, where prisoners lived in close proximity to their captors, participating in a thrilling game of cat and mouse. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?

Colditz drama included Communists, scientists, women, aesthetes and philistines, aristocrats, spies, workers, poets and traitors. Forests, empty meadows, and farmland were settled next to the pre-existing Slavic villages Zschetzsch, Zschadraß, Zollwitz, Terpitzsch and Koltzschen. I’ve read so much about it before, from Pat Reid’s The Colditz Story (first published in 1952), The Latter Days at Colditz (1953), from Padre Ellison Platt (Padre in Colditz, 1978), Colditz The German Viewpoint, penned by Rheinhold Eggers, who became the German Security Officer (first published 1961 and Pat Reid’s Colditz The Full Story (1984).For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Yet, as Macintyre will reveal, the story of Colditz is also one of snobbery, class conflict, homosexuality, bullying, espionage, boredom, insanity and farce. The world would have been a much better place if the ingenuity and cunning of the inmates had been put to use during a peaceful era.

Many of the emotions felt by the men incarcerated in the medieval castle were the same as those felt by all prisoners of war. The first soldiers to be imprisoned at Colditz were a handful of Poles in November 1939 but by the middle of 1941 the castle held more than 500 prisoners of which the majority were French and Polish.There was also the crushing boredom of a daily ritual that remained the same month in, month out; year in, year out. K.) and the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. In 2012, Channel 4 commissioned a team of engineers and carpenters to build another full-sized replica of the glider at Colditz Castle, and launch it (unmanned) from the same roof as had been planned for the original.

The story of the lived experience of prisoners and guards is powerful stuff, but it needs to be told well to make that power tangible and moving for the reader. Continuing the war by other means and the displays of ingenuity accompanying it were not limited to escaping. The Red Cross parcels ceased to arrive, but the inmates still fared better than their guards, who had no extra supplies to add to their now-miserable diet. Neither will be satisfied if they bother to read the book as they will discover that Ben Macintyre is not an iconoclast as his eloquent defence of his approach in The Times made clear.And then there was the fact that everyone housed there was classed as deutschfeindlich, ‘German-unfriendly’, and had been sent there because they had tried to escape from other camps. But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches).