Colditz Castle

Colditz enters the written record in 1046, in the charter by which Emperor Henry III granted the Burgwards of Colditz, Rochlitz and Leisnig to his wife Agnes of Poitou. In the 1080s Henry IV made over the Burgward to his ministerialis Wiprecht of Groitzsch, who developed the site into a castle, and in 1158 Frederick Barbarossa raised Thimo I of Colditz to imperial ministerial rank, which set the castle among the imperial holdings of the Pleissenland. Through the Middle Ages it worked as a lookout post for the German emperors and as the hub of those Reich lands. By 1200 the town around the market below was established, with forest, meadow and farmland settled beside the older Slavic villages of Zschetzsch, Zschadraß, Zollwitz, Terpitzsch and Koltzschen.

To escape the pressure of the increasingly powerful Wettin princes, the lords of Colditz commended their still imperially immediate lordship to the king of Bohemia as a fief. The Wettins took it in the end regardless, Margrave William the One-Eyed of Meissen acquiring the lordship in two steps, in 1396 and in 1404; the sale of 1404, by Thimo VIII for 15,000 silver marks, closed nearly 250 years of rule by the family, and the town was drawn into the Margraviate of Meissen. The new owners' first building campaign rebuilt the castle chapel and the storeys above it in 1420. A Hussite attack around 1430 set town and castle alight and left the castle partly destroyed. Elector Ernest had it rebuilt in 1464 and died there in 1486, on his way back from the imperial diet at Frankfurt am Main, of the effects of a hunting accident.

In 1504 the baker Clemens Bock accidentally started a fire that destroyed the town hall, the church, the castle and a large part of Colditz. Reconstruction began in 1506, with new buildings raised around the rear courtyard, and the decisive work came around 1520, when the castle was remodelled, enlarged and refitted in the early Renaissance manner. Colditz had its first flowering as a hunting seat under Elector Frederick the Wise, whose reign ran from 1486 to 1525; he took his own generous apartments on the second upper floor of the Fürstenhaus, looking over the deer park and the inner court, and had Lucas Cranach the Elder fit them out. Work on the upper floors began in 1524.

A stretch of the wood beside the castle was fenced off as a deer park around 1520, and a document of 26 August 1523 records the enclosed thirgarten, a kilometre long and one of the earliest parks of its kind on what is now German soil. Some 400 fallow and red deer lived in it, shot on set hunts by the elector and his guests, and Cranach the Elder used the castle as background staffage in his painting The Golden Age in 1523. Two stables, each for forty horses, were fitted out on the service court from 1523, beside a tower that served as prison and watchman's lodging and a ditch where the hunting dogs were kennelled. Elector Christian I bought land and enlarged the park twice. Hans Irmisch began a pleasure house there in 1591, fitted out by David Uslaub in 1600 and ringed by twenty worked ponds and a kitchen building. A last enlargement eastward, by about a third, followed in 1624 under Johann Georg I, after which a local pastor counted the park among the seven wonders of the land.

Elector Augustus ordered further and more comfortable alterations in 1566, intending to live in the castle himself, though the work only began in 1582; by 1591 the complex had been recast as a Renaissance castle, taking in the parts still standing in the Gothic style, with the architects Hans Irmisch and Peter Kummer supervising. The portal of the church house was cut in 1584 from Rochlitz porphyry tuff and richly decorated in the mannerist style by Andreas Walther II, and the stone bridge carrying the approach from the town was built the same year. The Holy Trinity chapel, which links the cellar house to the electors' house, was redesigned inside and out in the same period. Lucas Cranach the Younger, who was at Colditz in 1583 to paint a large boar the elector had killed, six times over, made its altarpiece with Wolfgang Schreckenfuchs. That altarpiece was damaged in the Thirty Years' War, and its heart-shaped central panel of the Crucifixion is now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. A second flowering came under Christian I and his wife Sophie of Brandenburg, who terraced the ward below the castle buildings into pleasure gardens; Sophie held Colditz as her widow's seat from 1602 to about 1620, continued the building, laid out the terraced vineyard with its stairways and grottoes on the slope facing the castle, and in 1603 had the officials' house with the Quadertor built as a court pharmacy. The castle afterwards became the administrative office for the Office of Colditz and a hunting lodge, and in 1694 its owner, Augustus the Strong, began an expansion that produced a second courtyard and seven hundred rooms in all.

Augustus the Strong was the last Saxon ruler to come to Colditz with his hunting party. The whole inventory was sold in 1787, and in 1800 the greater part of the deer park was converted into state forest under the forestry practice of the Saxon crown, which it remains; the pleasure house had been pulled down a few years earlier because it was unsafe. In 1803 the castle became the workhouse of the Leipzig district, holding up to 200 inmates who counted as of good character rather than criminals: vagrants and beggars from the margins of society, who were to be trained to industry, time-discipline and the fear of God by eleven officials and a preacher. Frederick Augustus III used it to feed the poor, the ill and people who had been arrested, and it served that purpose until 1829.

In 1829 a Dresden commission, restructuring Saxony's penal and asylum institutions, decided to separate the incurably insane then housed in the former house of correction, orphanage and poorhouse at Waldheim from the convicts, and to fit out Colditz for them. The workhouse inmates went to the house of correction and labour at Zwickau, and the castle became the state institution for the incurably insane, with up to 400 patients. Its first director was Christian August Fürchtegott Hayner, who had worked out the new plan, including a garden for the inmates' recreation. Ludwig Schumann, a son of the composer Robert Schumann, was a patient from 1871 until his death in 1899, and August Bürck, a writer who had worked with Schumann, died there in 1880; Ernst Baumgarten, one of the inventors of the airship, was among those held there as well. A new hospital building went up in 1864 on the ground of the stables and working quarters of the front court. Between 1914 and 1918 the castle housed both psychiatric and tuberculosis patients, 912 of whom died of malnutrition.

The institution closed in 1924, and thirty-five patients thought to need particular security were taken to the closed psychiatric hospital at Waldheim. Under the Saxon welfare law of 1925, Colditz was fitted out from April 1926 as a state correction institution, the only one in Saxony: seventy-two men from the correction institution at Sachsenburg and twenty women from the district institution at Dresden-Leuben, all of them convicted more than once for repeated begging or vagrancy. The aim, as in the workhouse a century before, was to bring the work-shy and the idle to a regulated life through strict discipline and compulsory labour. The number of inmates had risen to 320 by 1930, and they were moved to the reformatory at Bräunsdorf near Freiberg when the National Socialists took the castle over in 1933. The best known of them was Elsa Asenijeff.

From 21 March 1933 to 18 August 1934 the castle held the Colditz concentration camp, a protective-custody camp for communists, homosexuals, Jews and others the regime counted undesirable; 2,143 opponents of the regime were imprisoned there, among them Bruno Apitz and Hermann Liebmann. They were kept in the cellar house and the church house, slept on straw with two blankets, had to relieve themselves in buckets, and shared one towel between two men. From 1936 to 1937 the castle served as a camp of the Reich Labour Service and housed part of the town museum and various NSDAP formations. On 1 January 1938 a state sanatorium and nursing institution of about 360 beds opened on the site, in practice a nursing institution, taking mainly permanent and severe nursing cases from other Saxon institutions. More than half the patients were put on a very cheap special diet, without fat or meat and short of calories, and the death rate stood markedly above the Saxon average for such institutions even before the war; 84 patients died before it closed on 5 October 1939, most of them of marasmus and tuberculosis.

A prisoner-of-war camp designated Oflag IV C, a special camp for officers, was established from 31 October 1939 and run by the Wehrmacht. It took officers who had become security or escape risks or were regarded as particularly dangerous, and with the castle standing on its rocky spur above the Zwickauer Mulde the Germans believed it an ideal site for a high-security prison. The Kommandantur stood in the larger outer court, which had only two exits and housed a large German garrison; the prisoners lived in the adjacent court in the former princely apartments, in a building 27 metres tall, and the flat terraces outside were watched constantly by armed sentries and closed off with barbed wire. Prisoners came from Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada among other countries, until the Wehrmacht High Command decided in May 1943 to hold only British and American officers there. The first British prisoners, the Laufen Six, arrived on 7 November 1940 after their first escape attempt from the camp at Laufen. Eighty French officers of Jewish origin were quartered in the attic of the cellar house, a separate accommodation that a number of the other interned French officers are said to have insisted on; despite antisemitism and deportation, the Jewish inmates were covered by the Geneva Conventions signed before the war. Élie de Rothschild, a Jewish officer held there, was married by proxy at Colditz on 7 October 1941.

Those held at Colditz included Douglas Bader, an RAF flying ace who had lost both lower legs; David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service, and Georges Bergé, its co-founder; Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, head of the Polish underground army; Charles Upham, the only fighting soldier awarded the Victoria Cross twice; Airey Neave of the Royal Artillery, later a Conservative MP; and Desmond Llewelyn, later the actor who played Q in seventeen James Bond films. For all its security the camp accumulated one of the greatest records of successful escape attempts, perhaps because of the men sent there: most had attempted escape before from other prisons and were moved to Colditz because the Germans thought the castle escape-proof. Pat Reid, one of the Laufen Six and the British escape officer, got away in 1942. Through the winter of 1944–45 prisoners built a glider, the Colditz Cock, in a remote part of the attic; it was never used, the camp being liberated not long after it was finished, and afterwards it was brought down to the attic below and assembled for the prisoners to see. In the last days of the camp many of the prominent or high-ranking prisoners were transferred to Laufen on Himmler's orders. American troops entered the town of Colditz in April 1945 and took the castle on 16 April after a two-day fight, freeing the inmates; the American war correspondent Lee Carson, assigned to the task force that liberated it, entered Colditz on 15 April 1945 and took the only photograph of the finished glider.

The Red Army replaced the American occupation in June 1945, and under the agreement reached at Yalta the town became part of East Germany. In October and November 1945 the castle served as a collection point for expropriated and expelled estate owners and their families, gathered there so that they could be dispossessed. From 1946 it housed a hospital with an internal medicine department and ear, nose and throat and eye wards, which was moved out in 1996; the state also used the castle as a prison for local criminals, and later as a home for the aged and a nursing home as well as a hospital and psychiatric clinic. For many years after the war repairmen kept turning up forgotten hiding places and tunnels, among them a radio room built by the French prisoners, which was then lost again and rediscovered some twenty years later.

Former prisoners, the so-called Bad Boys, were already visiting while the castle stood in East Germany, and ordinary British tourists came too: files in the Leipzig archive of the state security records show 50 to 100 Britons a month travelling there through the state travel agency in the summer of 1976. The Colditz Society was founded in London in 1991, when about 120 former prisoners from England, France and Poland were members and met twice a year; no veteran has been alive since 2020. Pat Reid wrote The Colditz Story and The Latter Days at Colditz on the living conditions and the escape attempts of 1940 to 1945, and in the early 1970s served as technical consultant on the BBC series Colditz, broadcast in 1972. Carried through so much fiction and documentary, the escapes popularised an unrealistic picture of prisoner-of-war escapes as commonplace, sometimes called the Colditz Myth. The glider itself was treated for a time as a tall tale, there being no solid proof it had existed and Colditz lying in the Soviet occupation zone; Bill Goldfinch had taken home the drawings he made designing it, and when the single photograph finally surfaced the story was taken seriously. A full-sized replica built from those drawings was test-flown at RAF Odiham in 2000 in front of several of the former prisoners who had worked on the original, and a second, unmanned replica launched in 2012 from the roof intended for the first crossed the river and landed in a meadow 180 metres below.

Extensive restoration by the Free State of Saxony followed the hospital's departure in 1996, including a substantial refurbishment in 2006 and 2007 in which the walls were repainted to recover the castle's appearance before the Second World War. Excavation around the present altar in the autumn of 2012 exposed the Romanesque foundations, hall, chancel and apse, of the late twelfth-century Marian chapel that preceded the castle church, and the chapel itself was restored between 2013 and 2015 at a cost of nearly two million euros, with glass panels set into the flagstone floor to show an escape tunnel dug by French prisoners. Since 2003 the castle has belonged to the State Palaces, Castles and Gardens of Saxony and it is protected as a heritage monument in Saxony. A youth hostel opened in April 2007 and the Saxon state music academy in 2010, and since April 2024 the castle has held a museum whose permanent exhibition covers the electors, the Oflag IVc camp, the escape attempts and the two hundred years of institutional use, with guided tours through some of the escape tunnels. A memorial to the 84 patients who died in the nursing institution, designed by the Leipzig artist Thomas Moecker, has stood in the cellar of the banqueting hall building since 2017, and the Colditz Castle historical society, founded in 1996, keeps its offices in the administration building on the front court.