Out of Colditz

Description

'A truly revelatory story of courage, treachery, intrigue, divided loyalties and vengeance' Damien Lewis, author of SAS Great Escapes 'A gripping, unsettling journey into the strange moral fog of the war's last days – and the shadows we inherit long after' Iain MacGregor, author of The Lighthouse of Stalingrad The nephew of the King. The son of the Viceroy of India. Churchill's nephew. Thrown together in late 1944 into the notorious prisoner of war camp at Colditz Castle, these men were among the Prominente: a small group of captives who were scions of the British establishment and pawns in the endgame being played by the Nazi leadership. As German defeat loomed, the head of the POW camps, SS General Gottlob Berger, made a pivotal decision: to disobey direct orders from Hitler to 'kill them all' and grant them safe passage back to the Allied frontline. This Nazi overseer, later convicted of war crimes, held the future of the Prominente in his hands. George Lascelles, Earl of Harewood, was one of the men who survived. Eighty years later, drawing on archives and family records from Britain and Germany, his son David retraces their extraordinary journey and asks what motivated Berger's fateful choice – remorse? Honour? Or simple self-interest?