Qualla: Colditz Castle

Colditz Castle: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. military or Department of Defense employee, Public domain. By the spring of 1945, in a remote attic of Colditz Castle, a group of British Royal Air Force officers had built an aircraft. It had a fabric skin made from prison bedsheets stiffened with boiled millet. Its airframe was fashioned from floorboards. Bill Goldfinch, a flight lieutenant, had designed it from memory, and the plan was to launch it from a roof above the chapel using a bathtub full of concrete as the counterweight. The two-man glider — the Colditz Cock — was meant to carry escapees over the River Zwickauer Mulde and into the surrounding fields. They never had to fly it. American troops liberated the castle on 16 April 1945 before the launch could happen. But the Cock existed. War correspondent Lee Carson photographed it the day she walked in with the liberators, and the photograph survived to prove that what sounded like a tall tale had been entirely real.

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Image: U.S. military or Department of Defense employee | Public domain

Colditz Castle: The Wrong Castle for the Job

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jiuguang Wang, CC BY-SA 2.0. Colditz had been many things before it became Oflag IV-C. A Renaissance castle on a rocky hill spur above the Zwickauer Mulde, between Leipzig and Dresden in Saxony, it had begun as a medieval lookout in the eleventh century and ended up as a Hohenzollern hunting lodge under Augu...

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Image: Jiuguang Wang | CC BY-SA 2.0

Colditz Castle: The Incorrigibles

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit File:Schloss colditz wappen.JPG: Z thomas derivative work: Georgfotoart, CC BY 3.0. Colditz received its first British prisoners on 7 November 1940 — the Laufen Six, transferred after their first attempt to escape from another camp. By policy the prison was reserved for officers who had become particular escape risks, men who had already broken out of other camp...

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Image: File:Schloss colditz wappen.JPG: Z thomas derivative work: Georgfotoart | CC BY 3.0

Colditz Castle: Tunnels, Disguises, and Forged Papers

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SKOMP46866, CC BY-SA 3.0. The escape attempts were continuous and inventive. Pat Reid, one of the Laufen Six and the British escape officer at Colditz, succeeded in October 1942 — he later wrote The Colditz Story and The Latter Days at Colditz, books that became the source material for the 1972 BBC televi...

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Image: SKOMP46866 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colditz Castle: What the Cock Proves

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DJHLvbSachsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bill Goldfinch took his glider drawings home after the war and kept them. For decades, with Colditz behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet zone and then in East Germany, the story of the attic glider sounded like exaggeration. When Lee Carson's single photograph finally surfaced, ...

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Image: DJHLvbSachsen | CC BY-SA 3.0