Many of the stories contained within the book I have never known before, and it tells the real story of life within the walls of the castle and some of the stories are quite sad not just the stories we all read about in years gone by. We all know of the many escape stories and how the planned meticulously each escape plan, but for many of those held at the castle it has become clear the psychological effect it would have on those. Outside, the flat terraces which surrounded the prisoners' accommodation were watched constantly by armed sentries and surrounded by barbed wire.

In a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, an unlikely band of British officers spent the Second World War plotting daring escapes from their German captors. Colditz Castle is an immense fortress in eastern Germany, for centuries a place of both refuge and imprisonment for a wide variety of inhabitants. I had to read it in small doses because reading about POWs’ imprisonment does not make for a happy subject.The castle gained international infamy as the site of Oflag IV-C, a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II for "incorrigible" Allied officers who had repeatedly attempted to escape from other camps.

The castle was home to several notable figures during its time as a mental institution, including Ludwig Schumann, the second youngest son of the famous composer Robert Schumann, and Ernst Baumgarten [ de], one of the original inventors of the airship. Imagining it to be escape-proof, the Wehrmacht selected it to host officer prisoners of war (POWs) in 1939. From the elitist members of the Colditz Bullingdon Club to America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent, the soldier-prisoners were courageous and resilient as well as vulnerable and fearful – and astonishingly imaginative in their desperate escape attempts. Then there was sexual frustration – hundreds of young men imprisoned without female company of any sort.For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. It was at the start of WWII that the famous castle was transformed into a Prisoners of War camp and in November 1940 the first British soldiers would arrive. The bestselling historian with the real story of WW2's "inescapable" Nazi prisonIn a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, an unlikely band of British officers spent the Second World War plotting daring escapes from their German captors. The castle thus functioned as a hospital during a long period of massive change in Germany, from slightly after the Napoleonic Wars destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and created the German Confederation, throughout the lifespan of the North German Confederation, the complete reign of the German Empire, throughout the First World War, and until the beginnings of the Weimar Republic.