Prisoners of the Castle by Ben Macintyre

Author:Ben Macintyre [Macintyre, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

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By October 1943, the prison population numbered 205 British officers, 14 Australians, 15 Canadians, 33 “Fighting French”—(formally a British auxiliary force)—and 2 ghosts. When RAF pilot Jack Best and navy lieutenant Mike Harvey vanished back in April, the Germans thought they had escaped. In fact, they were hiding in a secret compartment under the chapel pulpit that had once been part of the great French tunnel. At night, they would emerge and be replaced by two other prisoners, while Harvey and Best slept in the vacated beds: the Germans sometimes conducted head counts of sleeping prisoners. They both took the names of other officers, in case they happened to be intercepted by the guards, and circulated like normal prisoners, until the next roll call: Harvey was “D. E. Bartlett” and Best became “Bob Barnes.” After an escape, a ghost would take the place of an escaper, to buy time, before disappearing back into the hole. This troglodyte existence took a toll. Best was a chain-smoking ex-farmer from colonial Kenya; a photograph from the time shows a man with the staring eyes of one who has spent too long underground, reading by the dim light of a candle made from cooking fat. In recognition of their sacrifice, the ghosts were bumped to the top of the escaping list.

As autumn turned to winter, into the drab confines of Colditz fluttered a creature of dazzling color and flamboyance: Micky Burn was a journalist, novelist, and poet, a former Nazi sympathizer who had since embraced Marxism, a spoiled, louche, funny, good-looking, feckless man who had displayed astonishing bravery during one of the most daring commando raids of the war. He was also bisexual, openly and actively. The rest of Colditz never quite knew what to make of Micky Burn.

Burn’s rich father was the royal family’s solicitor. His mother’s family had developed the French gambling resort of Le Touquet. Burn grew up, in a grace and favor house provided by the royal family opposite Buckingham Palace, in a world of parties, smart weekends, fast cars, and unmerited admiration. “I only had to lift a finger and it was all laid on.” He went to Oxford, where he did no work whatever and was sent down after a year, before breezing into a job at The Times, the establishment newspaper. He began a passionate affair with Guy Burgess, the Foreign Office official and communist later exposed as a KGB spy. When Burn confided to his father that he was sexually attracted to men, he was sent to George V’s doctor, who gave him Benzedrine injections: these made him hyperactive, but not heterosexual. A love of Wagner’s music drew him to Germany in 1933, where he fell under the Nazi spell. “My mix of ignorance, blindness and semi-criminal benevolence, let loose in a world of intensely organized falsehood, turned me into a dupe,” he later wrote. The fervent British fascist Unity Mitford introduced him to Hitler, who signed a copy of Mein Kampf for the smitten young Englishman.

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