The Colditz craze
By Herbert von Nostitz
Assistant Attache 1961-1976
One of my jobs in the Press Office was to reply to the many letters which we received from the British public, dealing for example with the popular TV-series "Colditz". For us Germans it was difficult to understand the romantic attachment to a War we preferred to forget. Colditz, at least, was less objectionable from our point of view, because the German camp commander was presented as an anti-Nazi and a gentleman.
The stories about those daring escapes (they actually rarely took place) certainly lived up both to the British sense of adventure and its liking for old ramshackle castles, so that ultimately Colditz became, like the "Red Baron" (von Richthofen) in World War One and the "Desert Fox" (Rommel) in World War Two, part of a better image of Germany rather than the usual negative one.
Among the requests I received to which I was unfortunately unable to respond was one for an exact plan of the sanitary installations at Colditz. The writer thought, imaginatively, that the loos would provide particularly suitable escape routes.
