The Nazis thought escape was impossible. Colditz is the true story of the Allied prisoners held there and their (sometimes successful) efforts to escape, written by one of the POWs.

"Reinhold Eggers one of the German staff who was Security Officer during the last years at Colditz. It is a compilation of the most spectacular escape attempts written by the escapers themselves. Eggers supports the stories with extracts from his Colditz diary which ran to 26 copybooks, with stories about the German staff and their characters, and a short account of the end of his war when he became a prisoner himself. It has some memorably funny moments (especially the tale of Max and Moritz, who filled in on parades), some very sad moments, and some descriptions of escapes that are truly astonishing"--Publisher's description.

Under cloudless blue skies, the Oakwood Cemetery Annex in Montgomery, Alabama hosts the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the United States. Most of the graves contain young RAF trainee pilots killed during their flying training at nearby Maxwell and Gunter airfields during the Second World War. However, there is another grave, located at the edge of the plot, not from the early 1940s but, from 1954. The grave marks the final resting place of a 44-year-old senior RAF officer, Air Commodore Geoffrey Stephenson CBE. It begs the questions who was he and why is he buried there? This book sets out to answer both these questions. As a result, this is the remarkable story of not only Stephenson’s life but the people, planes and places that would leave an indelible mark on a seasoned fighter pilot. After growing up in Lincolnshire and Ireland, 18-year-old Stephenson joined the RAF in 1928 alongside Douglas Bader who would become a life-long friend. After leaving Cranwell, the pair both joined 23 Squadron. In the 1930s, Stephenson rose through the ranks to command 19 Squadron, a Duxford-based Spitfire unit, that would see his baptism of fire over Dunkirk in late May 1940. Following the downing of a Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, Stephenson was himself shot down and crash landed on the beach at Sangatte. After a brief period on the run in France and Belgium, Stephenson was taken into captivity, spending the next five years as a prisoner of war, ending up at the iconic Colditz Castle where, ironically, he was reunited with his old friend Bader. Upon his release in April 1945, Stephenson quickly resumed his RAF career commanding, instructing, and flying the latest jet fighters, both at home and overseas. He was aide-de-camp to two monarchs, including escorting a young Queen Elizabeth II during her 1953 Coronation Review. However, his already eventful career would take a tragic turn. In 1954, Stephenson flew to the United States to review their latest acquisitions, which included a flight in the supersonic F-100 Super Sabre. It would be his last flight. Nevertheless, Stephenson’s legacy lives on at his former base at Duxford in the guise of the Imperial War Museum’s immaculately restored Spitfire Mk.I N3200. This was the very aircraft in which he force-landed on 26 May 1940. Recovered from the French beach, N3200 was painstakingly rebuilt and returned to flying condition. Today, N3200 is often referred to as a ‘National Treasure’. This is the biography of a remarkable pilot, husband and father, revealing the planes he flew, the places he visited, and the incredible people he met along the way.

Though only one among hundreds of prison camps in which British servicemen were held between 1939 and 1945, Colditz enjoys unparalleled name recognition both in Britain and in other parts of the English-speaking world. Colditz remains a potent symbol of key virtues--including ingenuity and perseverance against apparently overwhelming odds--that form part of the popular mythology surrounding the British war effort in World War II. Colditz has played a major role in shaping perceptions of the POW experience in Nazi Germany, an experience in which escaping is assumed to be paramount and "Outwitting the Hun" a universal sport. The story of Colditz has been told in a variety of forms but in this book MacKenzie chronicles the development of the Colditz myth and puts what happened inside the castle in the context of British and Commonwealth POW life in Germany as a whole. Being a captive of the Third Reich--from the moment of surrender down to the day of liberation and repatriation --was more complicated and a good deal tougher than the popular myth would suggest. The physical and mental demands of survival far outweighed escaping activity in order of importance in most camps almost all of the time, and even in Colditz the reality was in some respects very different from the almost Boy's Own caricature that developed during the post-war decades. In The Colditz Myth MacKenzie seeks, for the first time, to place Colditz--both the camp and the legend-- in a wider historical context.

Through first-hand accounts of hundreds of ordinary prisoners of war, Paul MacKenzie strips away the mythology and presents the real picture of what it was like to be captured and interrogated and to endure the physical and mental hardships of captivity. Colditz is placed in a wider historical context.

In her acclaimed 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt called putative WWII historian David Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." A prolific author of books on Nazi Germany who has claimed that more people died in Ted Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Irving responded by filing a libel lawsuit in the United Kingdom -- where the burden of proof lies on the defendant, not on the plaintiff. At stake were not only the reputations of two historians but the record of history itself.

At a time when the world, Europe especially, is once more threatened by murderous conflicts between groups of people claiming ethnic and national identity as a basis for sovereignty over specific territories, it is timely to consider the part that literature has played and is playing in the creation of ethnic and national stereotypes. What role do such stereotypes have in literature? How are they created? From what materials are they constructed? What purpose do ethnic and national stereotypes serve? Can it ever be a useful one? Are they avoidable? Can we live without them? What can be done about the deleterious effects they may be thought to produce? Stereotyping is worldwide — is there a tribe, race and nation in existence which escapes being stereotyped by its neighbours? In what sense are these stereotypes accurate? How are these stereotypes reflected in and reinforced by literature? Should and can literature do anything about them? In Beyond Pug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, literary scholars, as well as academics engaged in sociological and psychological research, consider these and other questions by examining the work of specific authors and the circumstances in which stereotyping plays such a crucial part.

The sacrifice of the "Glorious Glosters" in defense of the Imjin River line and the hilltop fights of Australian and Canadian battalions in the Kapyong Valley have achieved greater renown in those nations than any other military action since World War II. This book is the first to compare in depth what happened and why. Using official and unofficial source material ranging from personal interviews to war diaries, this study seeks to disentangle the mythology surrounding both battles and explain why events unfolded as they did. Based on thorough familiarity with all available sources, many not previously utilized, it sheds new light on fighting "the forgotten war."