935: Ben Macintyre | Escaping from a Nazi Fortress Prison

24:19The Red Cross is sending chocolate packages to the British and the Americans and the French, and they're just sitting there eating it in front of the guards and smoking their cigarettes. And the guards are like, oh, man, I wish I got a package from the Red Cross. It was so weirdly civil. It was just a bizarre juxtaposition. That's absolutely right. And towards the end of the war, the prisoners were far better nourished than their captors. They were getting things that the Germans only dreamed of getting. And of course, they used these to bribe and barter and to get escape equipment from the Germans.

24:51It made the Germans much more vulnerable to corruption in some ways. But you're absolutely right. I mean, the Red Cross parcels that were brought into these prison camps, and particularly cold hits, stopped them from starving. I mean, without them, many of these prisoners would have starved to death, particularly at the beginning of the war. So the Red Cross played an absolutely vital part. But one of the reasons why cold hits was particularly able to get this kind of stuff was because they were officers. I mean, this is, again, a very important distinction. These were not ordinary soldiers. These were all men of rank.

25:23And that meant that they had additional privileges under the Geneva Convention. It was a very class stratified world in those days. And these officers were treated differently. If you were an ordinary soldier in an ordinary prisoner of war camp, you didn't have a lot of these privileges. And the other thing about these officer prisoners was that they themselves, believe it or not, had servants to look after them. And those servants were also prisoners of war. They were British, French, Dutch, but they were ordinary soldiers. They were privates, and their jobs were to cook and clean for the officers.

25:59And get this, Jordan, they were not allowed to escape. If you were an ordinary soldier, you were not on the escape list. I mean, that shows you just how class stratified the whole thing was. That was the most British part of this whole thing that I couldn't really wrap my head around as an American. I mean, not that we didn't have slavery in our country here. It's still a thing. We're sort of dealing with the reverberations from that. But it's very odd to me that you would be in a prison and you'd have somebody of your own nationality and you're just bossing them around and waking them up. And then you're like, I'm getting out of here.

26:34Oh, you're not coming with me. I don't care about you at all. you're basically disposable to me. And then you try to get out of a tunnel and you either escape and never think about that person again, who possibly is going to die after just working for you, or you get caught and then you're back and the first thing you say is, go get me my shoes or my food or light my cigarette. It's just so weird that that even existed. It doesn't sound weird to our modern world. But in truth, Jordan, it's not really about nationality this. It's about military discipline and the way that armies were organized in the middle part of the 20th century.

27:09And it'll come as a shock to you to hear this, but not only did the French and the Poles and every other officer in Colditz had servants, but so did the Americans. The Americans were not immune to this. They also had so-called orderlies who were doing the menial work. I mean, in part, the undeclared ban on ordinary soldiers escaping from Kolditz, obviously that didn't apply in other prison camps. Ordinary prisoners in other POW camps could escape, and many of them did attempt to do so. In Kolditz, it was slightly different because there was a danger that if they were captured on the outside, the orderlies were much more likely to face lethal reprisal than the officers.

27:51The officers, again, because of this sort of code of honour, were really, certainly at the beginning of the war, were more likely to be returned to Kolditz. If you were an ordinary soldier caught outside the walls, you were much more likely to be shot. There was a good reason. There was a good practical reason why they didn't. And there's no recorded attempt by any orderly, any orderly soldier ever to get out of cold hits. Wow. Again, the civility slash incivility inside is such a juxtaposition. There's, you mentioned in the book, one French officer escapes. They shoot at him, but he makes it to Switzerland.

28:21They shoot at him on his way out. Then he writes to the prison and he asked the Germans, hey, can you mail me all my stuff? I left a lot of stuff in my cell and I kind of want all that stuff back. And of course, what you're expecting is them to just burn the letter like tough crap. Meanwhile, they mail his stuff to him at their own expense. And I just can't wrap my head around it. I'm just imagining this frustrated German commander like, damn it, he's alive. Fine, Viva, send you your things. You know, like that would just never happen. Now we have Abu Ghraib and Russian concentration camps and genocide in Europe and Africa.

28:53I mean, we don't have this kind of weird code of honor at all, seemingly, anymore. You're right. I mean, that was a particularly extraordinary case, I have to say. I mean, one doesn't want to make the Germans all sound like cuddly, friendly, tearful fellows, because they definitely weren't. In that particular case, that was one of the very early escapes. It was an escape of such bravery and ingenuity. I mean, this one character who went by the wonderful name of Pierre Mérès Lebrun, who was a cavalry officer, a rather sort of handsome cavalry officer, literally vaulted over the fence and ran up the hill being shot at and then stole a bicycle and bicycled 250 miles to the Swiss border and managed to get across.

29:36The Germans were sort of so impressed by what he'd done, they couldn't help admiring him. And I think the decision, I mean, I think if it had been anyone else or if the escape had not been quite such a feat, I don't think he would have had his rather the smart Chanel suits returned to him in France. I just don't think that would have happened. I meant to tell you earlier, the one German guard who was the commander in the castle, you said he was an Anglophile, so he loved all things British. And he organized an exchange student program from something called a gymnasium, which is essentially a high school in a city called Halle.

30:10He arranged a student exchange with a school in the United Kingdom. By pure ridiculous coincidence. That school, Johann Gottfried Herder Gymnasium in the former East Germany, was where I did my exchange year in the 90s. And I was the first exchange student that they'd ever had, or so they told me. So that was my high school. How fantastic. That's a wonderful coincidence. How interesting. I think some British students did go there before the war. That's what I was going to ask you. I think some of them did. We know for a fact that the character we're talking about is called Reinhold Eggers. And he's one of my favourite characters in this book.

30:46I mean, he's a rather punctilious, rather fastidious kind of German, quite sort of serious and very serious-minded, very cultured. But he was also a man of great sort of civilisation and great sort of tact and politeness. And he had taught in Cheltenham in Britain before the war in 1933. And he couldn't ever quite get over the fact that all the people in Cheltenham had been very polite to him when he was there in 1933, whereas the prisoners in Colwitz were all incredibly rude to him all the time. He couldn't work out this kind of dissonance between the Brits he'd known back in Britain and the ones that were suddenly he was having to try and keep inside.

31:21But what a strange, strange coincidence. I bet you at the gymnasium, they would have remembered Reinhold Eggers. I mean, they would have remembered him. Yeah, I should have asked. I mean, the headmaster back then was also, as you might expect, a very stringent, sort of strict German German man with a lot of rules who was very unhappy looking a lot of the time. And only towards the end was he just really, really amused that I could speak German. He just didn't ever, he never expected it to happen because I walked in not speaking a word of German. It was very funny for him. And he'd said in his whole career and in any memory he had, there were no exchange students there.

31:58But I figured if there was an exchange in the 30s before he was born, he might just not know about that. But yeah, it makes me wonder if there's a bust of Eggers somewhere in my old high school, somewhere in the basement, there's a painting or something like that. I don't really know. I mean, it's a very old school. I wouldn't be one bit surprised. I mean, there were considerable cultural exchanges between Britain and Germany in the run up to war. For many people in Germany and in Britain, the fight with Germany came as an enormous surprise and a shock. Eggers remembered his time in Britain with great affection.

32:32In fact, one of the lucky breaks I had with this book was that when I was researching it, I contacted the grandson of one of the American prisoners in Colditz, a man who went by the wonderful name of Florimund Duke III, who was a kind of East Coast wasp who had ended up in Colditz. Wait, that was an American guy? Yeah, yeah. Florimund Duke III? Florimund Duke, believe it or not. Absolutely. He'd been an advertising manager for Time Life before. He'd fought in the first world, would have been an ambulance driver. He was head of a sort of failed mission, a spy mission that attempted to send four American OSS officers, the forerunner of the CIA, into Hungary on a secret mission.

33:14It failed spectacularly. And poor old Floriman Duke was locked up with the rest of the Coldest prisoners. But his grandson revealed that he had a scrapbook that had been given to his grandfather by Reinhold Eggers, by this security officer. And it contained all the photographs that Reinhold Eggers had taken of different prisoners in Kolditz and their escape attempts and their failed escape attempts. Eggers even persuaded these guys to reenact their escape attempts so that he could take photographs of them and keep a historical record. And a lot of those photographs appear in the book. But it also contains photographs of Eggers' own time in Britain as a schoolteacher.

33:54And these are other touching photographs of his former pupils, his former British pupils that are part of his scrapbook. I mean, it's the most amazing historical artifact. The internal divisions between the French and the Belgians and the Polish and the Brits were also quite funny. The British resent the French for not putting up a resistance. Right. That's still a meme or a trope we have is like, oh, they surrender on day two. The French, they never fight. The Belgians were pissed off that everybody thought they were French. and they're like, we're not French, okay? It's different. It's a different country, okay?

34:25And then everyone liked the Yugoslaves because they were just this jovial bunch of guys. It's funny how these stereotypes almost still are fully in play, absolutely front and center inside this prison where you'd think like, okay, they'll get over it. Nope, not even close. Not even close. I mean, interestingly, while some of it was sort of jovial, sort of national banter, some of it was pretty sinister, actually. I mean, there was an incident at the beginning of the Kolditz experience when some anti-Semitic French officers announced that they refused to be barracked, as it were, with Jewish people.

35:03Their own compatriots, French Jews, they said, we don't want to be with them. And these were people who were sympathetic to the collaborationist regime in France. And they had adopted quite a lot of the Nazi attitudes. And that created a real division within Caldys because many of the other prisoners led by the British were absolutely scandalized that this kind of discrimination could be exercised by French officers against their own people. And so there were distinctions between the nations that were just sort of national stereotype rivalries. But there were others that were extremely serious and based on real ideological and racial distinctions.

35:45That is kind of gross, especially imagine being in a Nazi prison and you're basically saying the same things as the as the Nazis that are outside fighting against your country. It's just that's a weird take from those guys. It's a weird take. And in a way, it was these were French officers who were pro-Nazi. Clearly, yeah. As some French people were, you know, and I think it was also in a way a sort of way of them trying to curry favor with the German authorities. I think they thought if they could show that they were, in a way, more Nazi than the Nazis, that that would help them in some way. It didn't.

36:16I mean, it didn't help them at all. But it led to real conflict inside the castle. Some of the ways that they try to escape really are like cartoons. They steal a key while the guard is napping and they press it into a bar of soap and they make a copy of the key. I didn't even think that was a real thing. It sounds like something you'd see in a Disney cartoon or a movie, a bad movie. Absolutely. I mean, I think that's in a way that's partly because a lot of the escape stories that we got became familiar as part of sort of culture after the war were kind of borrowed from cold. It's I mean, it became the kind of, you know, all that stuff about pressing keys into soaps and so on.

36:50That all happened in cold. It wasn't made up. I mean, those were real stories and they were new at the time, if you see what I mean. To us, they now seem sort of cartoonish and slightly hackneyed. But people hadn't really done anything like that before. You know, there wasn't a sort of escape from prison culture, if you like. It became thoroughly embedded in the way that we saw the prison experience after the war. And you're absolutely right. I mean, some of them seem outlandish, mad even. But they were quite brave. I mean, certainly towards the latter end of the war, if you were still trying to escape from Kolditz, you were taking your life in your hands.

37:24I mean, and many did not, not many, a number did not survive. And bear in mind that for all the attempts to escape from Colditz, only 16 people achieved what was called a home run. Only 16 people actually managed to get down. And think of it that an escape is taking place once every three days, but only 16 men actually managed to get across the borders and back to their home countries. So the chances of success were very low indeed. Some of the escape attempts were quite funny. Besides, of course, the one where they dressed up like the prison warden or the guard commander or whatever, there's this kilt-wearing Scotsman who's, I guess, really short.

38:00So they sewed him inside a mattress and then just threw him away with the garbage. Tell me about this. That's ridiculous. I mean, this was one of those sort of impromptu escapes when they spotted that old mattresses were being dragged out of an attic and put on the back of a cart, a horse and cart, and being taken down to the town dump, effectively. And so just thinking on their feet, they, as you say, sewed this very small Scotsman into a mattress filled with kind of rotting straw and dumped him in the back of this cart. And sure enough, he was wheeled out through the prison gates. The only problem, as he wrote afterwards, the only problem was that the straw inside it made him want to sneeze.

38:40So he spent most of the time as he was trying to escape, trying to stifle the sneezes that were caused. He got a long way, actually. I mean, he got as far as Vienna before he was recaptured. It was one of the very early and very nearly a successful escape attempt. Didn't he give himself up, though? He made his way to the American consulate, and I guess the guy there wouldn't help him, which is really disgusting, actually. He just wouldn't help him get anywhere. It's not a particularly noble moment, it has to be said. I mean, by this point, he was very hungry, and he'd been on the run for more than two weeks by this point.

39:11And he just thought that if he could get to the American consulate there, they might help him. And I'm afraid he just ran into one of those sort of bureaucrats who said, no, we, you know, you have to fend for yourself. Bear in mind, I mean, America was not in the war at this point. It wasn't as if America was sort of turning in an ally. I think it was just one of those people who was sort of sticking unfair, you know, ruthlessly to the rules. I think had he got a different sort of bureaucrat on a different sort of day, he might well have been helped to escape. I think he was just hugely unlucky.

39:41Yeah, such a ridiculous bout of bad luck. After all that good luck, a terrible bit of bad luck. And then there's this French officer who dressed up as a woman. How did they get that idea? How did they get women's clothing? Did they make the clothes? Yes, they sewed this entire outfit. The French spent months on kitting out this French lieutenant as a woman. And believe it or not, there is a photograph of him, which again, I found in Eggers' scrapbook, which shows him in drag in his full... And he's rather convincing. Not convincing enough, apparently. Not quite convincing enough. Well, the story of how he got rumbled is itself quite amusing.

40:22As I say, they'd spent a long time doing this. And women were not unknown in cold hits. They were very rare because there were no women prisoners, obviously. But the wives of senior German officers were sometimes seen in the castle courtyard grounds. There were women from the town who were brought up to do laundry and do some of the cooking and so on. So there were women around. So it wasn't as if she was going to be completely extraordinary, this figure. But I'm afraid it was the British who put pay to this escape attempt by accident, really. As they were coming back from the exercise yard and they were allowed to exercise in a special yard under guard, they passed what appeared to them to be a German woman going the other way.

41:03And she dropped her watch as she was passing this line of British soldiers. And one of the British officers picked it up and ran after her and said, Mein Frau, you've dropped your watch. At which point, everybody suddenly realized this wasn't a woman at all. This was a man with a sort of homemade wig and a kind of sort of medium length skirt and a sensible pair of shoes on. So poor old Louis de Bray, the French officer, was taken into custody immediately. The Germans were furious, of course. They found this whole thing to be ridiculous and extremely offensive. But I love the idea that Ryan Holdegger's then managed to persuade this French officer to dress up in his kit again so that he could take a photograph of it.

41:43Like, all right, we have a drag band now. But first, I really want to see you completely kitted out and get a photo of this for the record book because it's so ridiculous. Absolutely. Yeah, that's really funny. If they had a better quality watch band, he might have been home by now. Yeah. Yeah, that's entirely right. I think that's true. I mean, you needed a lot of luck to get out of this prison. I mean, getting out of Kolditz was hard enough. Getting out of the castle was tricky enough. Getting out of Germany was even harder because you had to get across miles of country. You had to try and get to a neutral border and into Switzerland or try and get yourself on a boat to Sweden.

42:21You know, you needed to have papers. You need to have disguises. You need to have money, you needed maps, you needed compasses. There was a whole set of escape kit that without which it was really hard to get out of Germany. And it wasn't, you know, just getting beyond the castle walls was only the first stage. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ben McIntyre. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors, all of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are all in one place over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

42:59You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ben McIntyre. You'd said something like 20 some odd tunnels were discovered and that's just the tunneling ideas, right? The tunnel escape attempts, lots of escape equipment, maps, money, fake workers overalls. How did they get the maps and the money? That's not something you can make because you don't know how to draw a map from memory. How did they get that stuff? Well, this, again, is one of the untold stories of Cold It's is that there's a particular character called Christopher Clayton Hutton, who was actually, believe it or not, one of the models for Q in the James Bond stories.

43:44And he was a sort of mad inventor based in Britain. And his job was to create escape kit for prisoners to try and get out of occupied Europe. He was able to create tiny maps that could be hidden inside other objects. He worked out ways to send money to the prison camps hidden inside gramophone records or playing cards or board games. The Monopoly sets that were sent to Kolditz, and they were sent as part of the Red Cross parcels, or rather as sort were part of the charity parcels that were sent to imprisoned soldiers contained real money. It was real German money hidden inside the Monopoly boxes.

44:24He was an extraordinary man. He was completely sort of lunatic, really, but he was incredibly inventive. And he managed to smuggle in hundreds of different forms of escape equipment. I mean, he even worked out how to hide a compass inside a bag of walnuts. One individual walnut in this bag of walnuts contained a compass. And again, there's a wonderful picture of it in the scrapbook that Eggers obtained. So Christopher Clayton Hutton is one of the great unsung heroes of the Second World War, in my view. I mean, he never fired a gun in anger, but there are other ways to fight a war. He was also helping downed Air Force pilots to get out, including a lot of Americans.

45:01So, you know, they would fly in the air with escape equipment already hidden in their boot heels or, you know, hidden in their buttons. So if they were shot down, they had a way to try to get out. one third of all the people who managed to escape from occupied Europe were carrying a map of some sort made by Christopher Clayton Hutton. That's really amazing because printing something small and then in a way that you can get it that's accessible but not obvious to somebody else, and then doing that at scale is a really big project. Oh, it was very difficult. He did a lot of the maps were printed on mulberry leaf cotton, which has a particular quality.

45:38You can scrumple it up until it's in a tiny ball, and yet it will reassume its original shape when you take it out and soak it. So he used to print maps on pieces of mulberry leaf cotton, which would then be scrunched up into tiny, tiny areas, and then often hidden in boot heels or coat pockets or sewn into the lining of uniforms. He also, which I think was rather brilliant, he invented a way of putting a compass inside a coat button, which you could unscrew, but it unscrewed the wrong way. He had the thread on it going anti-clockwise instead of clockwise or the other way around. I can't remember clockwise instead of anti-clockwise.

46:16On the impeccable theory that Germans were such a logical people, they would never imagine that you could unscrew something the wrong way. I mean, that's not a bad idea, right? Because if you're checking every button, you're probably turning it one way, going to the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one. You're not thinking... Why would you think someone would go to the trouble of creating a button that unscrewed the wrong way. You just wouldn't be looking for it. That's the kind of detail that Clutty, as he was known, went in for. How long did the tunnels take to dig? I can't imagine that's a quick process when you're trying to do it secretly.

46:47Months, months on end. I mean, the Metro Tunnel, the French one that I mentioned to you, took about nine months to build. And it was so elaborate and extensive that it started in the clock tower of Kolditz and went down the special sleeves that contained the mechanism of the clock tower. Then it went down three floors into the basement. Then it went through the basement into solid rock, which they had to chip out very, very slowly. And then it went under the chapel, where they cut out the ancient medieval beams holding up the chapel floor. They didn't cut them out completely, but they cut through them enough that an individual could wriggle underneath.

47:26And it was an astonishing thing. And all the spoil, all the earth and stone that was taken out had to be laboriously hauled up to the attics and hidden up there. And at one point, they feared that the attic roof might actually collapse with the tonnage of sort of waste stuff that was being stored up there. It reminds me of Shawshank Redemption, where they go out to the prison yard and he shakes his leg and the dirt falls out and they just do that every day for months. Absolutely. And that, of course, is taken from the great film The Great Escape with Steve McQueen, which is also partly based on the Colditz experience.

47:59These things have a kind of a life that relates back in a strange way. It must be so demoralizing when you're spending five months building a tunnel and they find it. That's just got to be the worst day of your entire decade. Well, that's right. I mean, and we, you know, we've sort of talked about Colditz as if it was a sort of cheerful, fun place of sort of jolly japes and so on. Actually, mental health in Colditz was very precarious. people suffered acute depression and the repeated failure of escape attempts. And bear in mind that the vast majority of them did fail, did have a kind of cumulative effect on the mental health of people inside Kolditz.

48:39Again, it's one of those subjects that historians after the war didn't really want to look at because Kolditz was presented as if it was all a wonderful sort of story of courage and bravery and daring do. And a lot of it was, of course. But there's another story to Colditz. And these were tough times for many of these prisoners. And the disappointment played a huge part in that. There were, I'm sorry to say, instances of people attempting to suicide. There were stories of mental breakdown. There were stories of people actually attempting to appear to have had mental breakdowns, because that was one of the ways that you could get out of Colditz, possibly, was that if you were considered to be, as they would have said then, insane, there was a possibility you would be repatriated.

49:21And there's one very moving story about a soldier who decided that he would attempt to get out by pretending to go mad, and in fact did suffer a complete nervous breakdown from which he never recovered. You know, he writes very movingly about this, that in pretending to be mentally disturbed, he ended up being mentally very ill indeed. Oh, wow. He sort of method acted his way into it? Yeah. And he did manage to get out. He was repatriated under this scheme, but he was put straight into a hospital and didn't emerge for a long time. He writes very movingly about, you know, not being able in the end to tell the difference between where his pretended madness ended and where real madness began.

50:03The way that they set themselves up over time is hard to imagine. You mentioned there's a part in which they got a radio. They somehow furnished an entire office with chairs and insulation and a desk, and they would follow the war news all in this secret room in prison. And again, this castle sounds like one of the worst places you should ever put a prison. It sounds like the prisoners knew the layout far better than most of the guards did. It's not hard to imagine the guards freezing their butts off outside guarding this giant place while the prisoners are inside in upholstered armchairs listening to the BBC smoking, chatting, and eating chocolate and stolen beer.

50:39The contrast wasn't quite as sort of acute as that. This was a pretty horrible place, Colt. I mean, it was freezing cold. There wasn't enough to eat. But no, the radio gambit was extraordinary. It was the French, in fact, who managed to smuggle in the parts to build a secret radio, which operated in the attic. And they would pick up the BBC World Service. And so they were actually getting real news at a time when the Germans were not. They knew more about the progress of the war than their German guards. It was quite extraordinary. And in secret, for more than two years, they would listen to the nightly bulletin cramped into this tiny little secret compartment they'd built in the attics.

51:22And then the so-called scribes would write out the news, and then they would read it to the different messes, to the different nationalities in Kolditz. And it was a way of keeping morale up, really. It was a way of making the prisoners feel less lonely, less isolated, less cut off from the rest of the war. So it served a psychological purpose as well as a moral one. The cleverer guards, including Reinhold Eggers, realized that the prisoners knew more about what was going on outside the castle than they did. Eggers was convinced there was a radio, but he never found it. And in fact, years later, long after the castle was liberated and long after this story ended, they found the hidden radio set.

52:06They found it still in the attic where it had been left on the day that American forces came into Kolditz to liberate it and the prisoners all left. So it was still there. Wow. Wait, when did they find it? They found it about five or even later, five or six years after the liberation. Oh, wow. They were doing some routine maintenance work in one of the attics. They began to take plaster off a wall and discovered there was this hidden compartment inside it with the chairs and the table and the radio still sitting there intact. It's really incredible. That must have been such an exciting find for whoever found that.

52:38I mean, or they didn't care because they don't care about history. But that would be such an amazing. It's like finding a secret passage in your own home when you're a kid. Just the most exciting thing ever. No, I think they were pretty excited when they discovered that. In fact, it made the sort of international news, the discovery of the radio set. But how ingenious, how clever, how brilliant to have worked out that they could build a radio from different spare parts. You know, they had to get the valve smuggled in. But the rest of it was made out of, I mean, I'm exaggerating slightly, but sort of bottle tops and bits of string.

53:07I mean, they really cobbled this thing together. But it worked. What happened to Kolditz now? When I was in Germany, I stayed in a youth hostel that was in a castle, but I assume there's a lot of those, right? Yes. I mean, part of Kolditz is now a youth hostel. You can actually stay in Kolditz. Yeah. You can stay inside it. In fact, I lived there for quite a while while researching this book. I mean, Kolditz is a huge castle and the Germans are extraordinary in the way they preserve their history. It's been refurbished. It's kept up. There's a little museum in there about the wartime experience of Kolditz.

53:39I mean, of course, Kolditz is much more famous in Britain and France and America and so on than it is in Germany. I mean, the story is not well known in Germany because it's not something that is part of their sort of their national legend, if you like. And of course, as you know, that part of Germany became part of East Germany. Yeah. So it was behind the Iron Curtain. Oh, this is also in East Germany. Yeah. Let me Google this place because I'm curious. The place where I stayed was not – it didn't look like a castle. It was like a white house building. Colditz is white now. It wasn't during the war, but it was painted white soon after.

54:14It's very castle-like. Let me put it that way. I mean, it's right perched on top of a hill. And I don't think it became a youth hostel until quite late recently. I think that's only in the last 10 or 15 years. Okay. Yeah. Because this is in the 90s. It's hard for me to know what something looked like way back then. But no, it was deep in East Germany. It's about 10 miles from Leipzig. So it's quite near the sort of eastern border of Germany. So during the communist years, it was really shuttered up. And this aspect of Kolditz history was really forgotten by the local, or they tried to forget it, by the local German population.

54:49It wasn't much celebrated. Even today, the sort of guides to the Kolditz castle are a little bemused by the passionate interest shown in this place by visiting British, French, Dutch, and others who turn up to have a look at it. They probably want to go more for the before World War II stuff than they do the during I think that's pretty typical. That is absolutely right. They'd much rather talk about the electors of Saxony from the 12th century than the Nazi use of the castle in the 20th. They probably don't love it when people are like, show me the room where they built the secret radio to hide from the Nazi guards.

55:22And they're like, oh, not one of these guys again. Yeah, it's still a little bit sensitive. It's a bit sensitive. But, you know, the new generation of Germans are actually rather fascinated by their wartime history. You know, they are. It is not overlaid with the sort of shame of an earlier generation. There are increasing numbers of German visitors. And this book is actually going to be translated into German and published in Germany. So, you know, there is an interest in this sort of story these days. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is really interesting. It's not my typical type of show that I do, but it was a really fun episode.

55:52And the book has many more escape stories, including the prisoners putting on plays and using those as cover to escape. and just all kinds of wacky guys jumping on moving trains or whatever and trying to hide until they get to Switzerland. Just really a lot of daring escapes. So thank you very much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure, Jordan. Thank you for having me. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, you're about to hear a preview of my interview with a former FBI agent on how he gets people to reveal the truth. With elicitation, people don't realize that you're using elicitation techniques on them.

56:31You're just setting up a psychological environment that predisposes them to want to tell you information they wouldn't otherwise tell you. Typically, elicitation doesn't use questions. There's a human predisposition to correct others. If I want to get information from you, I will just give you what we call a presumptive statement. You're going to corroborate, say, yes, that's true. Or you're going to say, no, that's not true. It's this. will tell our students, see that person over there? Go get their PIN numbers for their bank accounts. If I can get some stranger to like me, the brain automatically ascribes all the rights and privileges of a friendship that took maybe years to develop.

57:10For more on how you can use elicitation techniques used by the FBI to negotiate better salaries and more, check out episode 467 on The Jordan Harbinger Show with Jack Schaefer. Again, not our typical episode. I hope you all enjoyed it, of course. So many of the things that these prisoners tried are now kind of the cliche things we see in movies, even cartoons, making fake prisoners using clay heads, trying to fish keys off of guards, hiding things in their butts like Pulp Fiction. Prisoners even put on plays in this prison, sometimes as a distraction. They would dress as guards and walk out of the guardhouse.

57:47They would make the uniforms out of regular local materials. they would use the stage bottom to try and form an escape and they did so on at least one occasion I definitely don't have time to do much history like this it's not my core focus but it is nice to switch things up every now and then and if you agree with me shoot me an email and let me know what you think of this episode all things ben mcintyre will be in the show notes at jordan harbinger.com or you can ask the ai chat bot also on the website transcripts always in the show notes advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

58:20Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also our newsletter every week, the team and I dig into a past episode of the show in takeaway lessons from it. Rethink it. If you're a fan of the show, you want a recap of some important highlights or takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next. The newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. And don't forget about six minute networking also on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn if you so choose.

58:51This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's really into history, World War II history, Nazi stuff, whatever it is, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

59:18And we'll see you next time. Wherever you go, whatever they get into, from chill time to everyday adventures, protect your dog from parasites with Crudelio Cuatro. For full safety information, side effects and warnings visit credelioquattrolabel.com consult your vet or call