Oflag IV-C, generally known as Colditz Castle, was a prominent German Army prisoner-of-war camp for captured Allied officers during World War II.

Known for its seemingly impenetrable structure, Colditz Castle became a site of numerous escape attempts, some of which were successful, earning a reputation for the ingenuity and daring of its prisoners.

The camp's history and the elaborate escape plans conceived there have been widely covered in postwar memoirs, books, and media.

Today, Colditz Castle has become a popular tourist destination, with guided tours, exhibitions and a museum dedicated to the prisoners' life.

In October 1940, Donald Middleton, Keith Milne, and Howard Wardle (a Canadian who joined the RAF just before the war) became the first British prisoners at Colditz.

On 7 November, six British officers, the "Laufen Six", named after the camp (Oflag VII-C) from which they made their first escape, arrived: Harry Elliott, Rupert Barry, Pat Reid, Dick Howe, Peter Allan,[3] and Kenneth Lockwood.

The interrogating Gestapo officer was so confident the war would soon be won by Germany that he told Larive the safe way across the border near Singen.

The coats in Dutch field grey in particular remained unchanged in colour, since it was similar to the tone already in use by the Germans, thus these greatcoats were nearly identical with very minor alterations.

On 23 August 1944 Colditz received its first Americans: 49-year-old Colonel Florimond Duke, Captain Guy Nunn, and Alfred Suarez.

On 19 January 1945 six French Generals — Lieutenant-General Jean Adolphe Louis Robert Flavigny, Major-General Louis Léon Marie André Buisson, Major-General Arsène Marie Paul Vauthier, Brigadier-General Albert Joseph Daine, and Brigadier-General René Jacques Mortemart de Boisse — were brought from the camp at Königstein to Colditz Castle.

On 5 February, Polish General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, deputy commander of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) and responsible for the Warsaw Uprising, arrived with his entourage.

After the prisoners erected US, UK, and French flags on the castle walls, on 16 April 1945 Oflag IV C was captured by American soldiers from the 1st US Army.

After war broke out Burn shifted politically to Marxism and gave lectures to prisoners at Colditz, but due to his pre-war interest in Nazi philosophy he was widely regarded with distrust and scorn.

Another officer, not listed as among the Prominente but who became famous after the end of the war, was French military chaplain and Catholic priest Yves Congar, who was captured as a POW and later sent there after repeated attempts to escape.

[10] At 1:30 a.m. on 13 April 1945, while the final battles of the war approached the area, the Prominente were moved under guard and the cover of darkness, over the protestations of the other prisoners.

But they reached the American lines alive a couple of weeks later, an action aided by the SS head of POW camp administration Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, which contributed to his lessened sentence after his war crimes verdict in 1949.

Between 1939 and 1945 more than 70 German officers and enlisted men worked in a wide variety of staff positions, as well as overseeing prisoners' labour.

Because Colditz was a high security camp, the Germans organized three and then later four Appells (roll calls) per day to count the prisoners.

If they discovered someone had escaped, they alerted every police and train station within a 40 km (25 mi) radius, and many local members of the Hitler Youth would help to recapture any escapees.

Events were held in football (soccer), volleyball, boxing, and chess, but the closing ceremony was interrupted by a German fire drill.

[1] The British put on homemade revues, classical plays and farces including: Gaslight, Rope, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Pygmalion, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Initially started by the Polish contingent using a recipe of yeast, water, German jam and sugar from their Red Cross parcels, and then taken up by other prisoners, it did not take long for stills to be secreted all across Colditz (one of which remained undiscovered until a tourist trip in 1984).

British Flight Lieutenant Pete Tunstall especially tried to cause havoc by disturbing the roll call even if nobody was trying to escape, so that the guards would not become suspicious when somebody was.

In spite of this claim, there were many well-documented escapes and failed attempts by British, Canadian, French, Polish, Dutch, and Belgian inmates.

Burn's two articles in The Times on 19 and 21 April 1945 were the first detailed descriptions of a prisoner-of-war camp, and his fictionalized account Yes, Farewell appeared in 1946.

Oflag IV-C provided the inspiration for both television and film because of the widely popular retellings by Reid (The Colditz Story and The Latter Days) and Neave (They Have Their Exits).