They burrowed like moles, made a glider out of bedsheets, hid in laundry sacks, and abseiled down the steep walls of a fortress that was supposed to keep the most troublesome British captives under lock and key.

The wartime prisoners of the wind-swept Colditz castle remain potent symbols of British and Allied ingenuity. Hundreds of escape attempts were plotted from the 700-room castle that squats on a crag south of Leipzig; just 18 found their way home.

Now the escape academy is becoming a music academy as the castle undergoes a major revamp at the behest of the government of Saxony. The aim is to turn the complex into a functioning German castle again rather than just a fragment of the British popular imagination.

In the next three years, however, a more modest museum is to be built – with only one floor devoted to the prisoners of war – while the rest of the castle will be put to other uses. The plans are stirring a debate about how far the castle can be modernised without losing its sense of authenticity. Survivors, after all, are dying and their old network, the Colditz Association, which was a powerful lobby for their interests, has been wound up. A German official concerned with the upkeep of the many rundown castles around the country said: “I can see that while the castle is undeniably the property of Saxony and part of a German history that stretches back to the 11th century, it is also part of the emotional history of the British. We should be be treading delicately.”

The castle with its two courtyards looks superficially much as it did between 1940 and 1945. The East Germans, though, used the castle as a hospital and nursing home after the war, splitting many of the original rooms. In the outer courtyard, the old German barracks has been converted into a youth hostel. The punishment cells were knocked down after reunification to make way for a restaurant. And the building that once housed the camp workshop – where prisoners stole tools and spare keys – will soon be the Saxon Music Academy.

David Ray, author ofColditz: A Pictorial History, said: “British and Commonwealth visitors come primarily for the PoW stories and locations and that will diminish when word gets round that Colditz is just another German Schloss [castle].”

So far the changes are broadly acceptable to surviving inmates and their relatives. “My father was in Colditz for four years,” says Antony Anderson. His father, Major Will Anderson, was an expert improviser, creating a typewriter and other equipment needed to forge passes.

“His line would have been: if people manage to convert it for use by the community then that is a wonderful thing.” Michael “Micky” Burn – a former prisoner who covered the liberation of his own camp for The Times – said he thought that the German authorities should be left to get on with the renovation. “I’m entirely in favour of recreating the prisoner camp,” said the 95-year-old veteran, “but first and foremost it is a great German monument.”

There are, however, two fundamental problems. The first is that turning Colditz into a largely German memorial site may stir up the local neo-Nazi youths. After 100 far-right youths stampeded through the town in February, 20 local mayors mounted an antiNazi rally to show that Colditz rejected them. Even so, locals believe that the far Right could try to scare away some of the 20,000 tourists who arrive each year.

There is also a plan to turn over one of the former prisoner barracks into a secondary school. That would entail the loss of the PoWs’ theatre as an historical site. Airey Neave, who later became a Conservative MP, started an escape from behind the stage. The Germans allowed the PoWs to engage in amateur dramatics, giving escapers a chance to run up disguises on a homemade sewing machine. One French officer almost escaped dressed as a woman. Renate Lippmann, one of the curators at Colditz, says: “It would be a real shame to lose the theatre.”

But while Britain remains sentimental, Mr Burn has few illusions. “I hate the place myself,” he says.

Past glories

— Built around 1083 by Augustus the Strong, King of Saxony and Poland, the castle sits on a promontory jutting out hundreds of feet above the River Mulde. It was a mental asylum for much of the 19th century

— Under the Nazis, Colditz housed Oflag IVC, “a special camp set up by the Germans for prisoners of war who had proved themselves to be a nuisance at other camps”, according to the Colditz inmate and historian P. R. Reid. The Nazis believed the camp was escape-proof because of its high outer wall and moat

— Among those who escaped were Lieutenant Airey Neave, later an MP, who marched out dressed as a German officer

Source: colditzcastle.net

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