Colditz TV show to portray British officers as racist
Celebrated Spitfire pilot Bader described by author as a ‘horrible monster’ in retelling of PoW’s story
A NEW television series will dismantle the “mythology” of Colditz and show the racist side of British officers imprisoned there.
The adaptation of Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, by Ben Macintyre, will “dig a bit deeper” to offer a “21st century narrative” view of life within its walls. One former PoW whose story will be retold is Douglas Bader, the flying ace who lost both legs in a crash in 1931 but became the RAF’s most celebrated Spitfire pilot during the Second World War.
“Bader was the most famous prisoner in Colditz. He was the most famous fighting soldier on either side during the war. He was an extraordinary man, remarkably brave; he could inspire courage in others.
“But he was also horrible. He was a monster. Bader was racist, snobbish, brutally unpleasant to anybody he considered of lower socio-economic order,” Macintyre said.
Another story told in the book, which will be included in the series, is that of Birendra Nath Mazumdar. Indian-born, but trained as a doctor in London, he joined the British Army in 1939 as a medical officer and was captured in Normandy.
As the only Indian in Colditz, he was shunned by fellow British Army officers. Macintyre said: “He suffered terribly in a way that was shaming, really. He was treated with appalling racism. He was regarded as a second-class citizen… told he had to make curry for everyone. Even for the time, it was pretty brutal, racist behaviour.”
Mr Mazumdar eventually became a GP in Somerset and married an Englishwoman. He recorded his experiences on micro-cassettes around 10 years before his death, which Macintyre used as research material.
“Joan, his widow, had never heard them before. It is an astonishing firstperson account. He was still furious but there was forgiveness,” said Macintyre.
The series is being adapted by the same team who produced one of Macintyre’s earlier books, A Spy Among Friends, which was recently turned into a drama series for ITVX.
“The idea, a brilliant idea if it works, is to try to tell this story in a series of episodes, taking a different vantage point for each episode,” he explained.
“So one will be told through the eyes of Mazumdar, one perhaps through Reinhold Eggers… There is a way of taking the mythology that we all remember and playing with it, and creating a quite different 21st century narrative.”
Eggers was the security chief at Colditz, described in Macintyre’s book as an “ardent Anglophile” who “made no secret of his admiration for the British countryside, courtesy, language, food and good sportsmanship”, having spent time in Cheltenham in the 1930s. The writer and journalist said that the “myth” of Colditz was partly formed in the national psyche by the 1972 BBC series of the same name.
He said: “One-third of the entire British population watched that TV series and it told a story that was dated in the way we saw the war.
“The story of the escapes from Colditz are fabulous: the ingenuity, the courage, the lateral thinking that went into them is extraordinary.
“But, like all myths, it is partial. It doesn’t tell the whole story. Very early on in the project I thought, ‘There is an entirely separate set of stories that have never been told.’”