Tässä ote yhdestä kriittisestä arvostelusta:"
Macintyre is very dismissive of Pat Reid, successful escaper and author of two best-selling and highly enjoyable books on Colditz (as well as a full story of Colditz and at least three other books), and is very hostile towards Reinhold Eggers, who spent much of the war as either Lageroffizier or security officer at the camp. In fact, he displays a marked hostility to all the Germans in Oflag IVC and is pretty dismissive of any prisoners who are not British, dealing only summarily and incidentally with their repeated, ingenious escape schemes, without following them through to their conclusion; often he cannot even to bothered to mention the names of the protagonists.
The blurb boasts that this will become the ‘definitive’ account of Colditz, but almost from the beginning it strikes a discordant note. He starts with a prologue describing the famous ‘Franz Joseph’ escape that led to Mike Sinclair being shot in the chest – the sort of ‘kerigma’ you’d expect to start off a thriller – and his first chapter, entitled ‘The Originals’, describes the arrival of the six British officers (including Reid) who had escaped from Laufen; but the first arrivals were in fact Polish, as Macintyre later has to admit. It is clear, then, that he is far less internationalist in his outlook than Reid, Airey Neave, or any other memoirist or historian of Colditz. Even then, he only mentions by name three of the ‘Laufen Six’, despite the fact that they contributed greatly to life in the camp (Kenneth Lockwood is mentioned only once, on page 36; ‘Peter’ Allan does not rate a mention until page 38 – and Macintyre does not provide his proper name). Other well-known characters are also given short thrift – eg, Brian Paddon gets one paragraph on page 132, and there is no mention whatsoever of Peter Tunstall, who was a constant thorn in the side of his captors, despite Macintyre claiming to have had access to his POW report. So the lacuna pile up. Although covering the same ground as his predecessors would be repetitious and therefore possibly boring to those already familiar with the Colditz saga, isn’t this supposed to be a history of Colditz? Matters are not helped by numerous factual inaccuracies: for instance, he has Eggers welcoming the ‘Laufen Six’ to Colditz – although Eggars was still in Festung Koenigstein at the time. Had Macintyre read all the books listed in his extensive bibliography, he would not have made such a silly mistake.
Since it was not his intention to write a definitive history, or even a convincing ‘debunking’ history, what was his intention? Well, he gives the game away to some extent in a long and tedious digression about the (highly secretive) work of MI9 in which – you’ve guessed – he manages to shoe-horn in the name ‘Ian Fleming’, one of his (and The Times’) pet obsessions. Then, of all the hundreds of prisoners in Colditz, the two with whom we are expected to most identify are a rich, privileged, well-educated Indian doctor who was a victim of racial prejudice from his fellow prisoners, and Julius Green, a Jewish dentist from Scotland who sent coded messages to England. Given Macintyre’s spy monomania, the latter is understandable to some extent, but why then does he not mention the contribution, in this regard, of Douglas Bader, Peter Tunstall and numerous others? Why only Green? I think there might be a personal agenda here. As for the Indian, readers who are familiar with recent politics might well remember Theresa May’s speech after the EU referendum in which she said: “This country welcomes people from India, particularly the rich.”
This, then, is not a ‘definitive’ history of Colditz. It is a history for the new, post-Brexit Establishment, and, I think, a work of political expediency."
