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 Augustus the Strong of Poland in the 1690s, with seven hundred rooms by the time he was finished expanding it. From 1829 to 1924 it served as a sanatorium for the wealthy and noble, with darker chapters during the First World War when 912 patients died of malnutrition. The Nazis turned it into a political prison in 1933 — for communists, homosexuals, Jews, and others they considered undesirable. When the Wehrmacht needed a high-security camp for Allied officers in 1939, the castle's perch above the river made it look ideal. The Germans believed it could not be escaped from. They were exactly wrong about exactly the wrong men.

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 camps and been recaptured. From May 1943 the Wehrmacht restricted Colditz to British and American officers, though earlier prisoners had included French, Belgian, Polish, Dutch and Canadian officers. The roster reads like a who's who of remarkable lives. Douglas Bader, RAF flying ace and double leg amputee. David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service. Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, who had led the Polish Underground Army during the Warsaw Uprising. Charles Upham, the New Zealand infantryman and only fighting soldier ever to receive the Victoria Cross twice. Desmond Llewelyn, who later became known as Q in seventeen James Bond films. Airey Neave, who later became a Conservative MP and was assassinated by the INLA in 1979. Concentrating these men in one castle and expecting them to sit quietly was, in retrospect, a peculiar plan.

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 television series Colditz. The French POWs dug a tunnel from the chapel that went undiscovered for so long that it was rediscovered, twenty years after the war, by repairmen. There was a hidden radio room. Officers got out in German uniforms cobbled together from blankets and stage paint. Lorne Welch was recaptured trying to start a German aircraft to fly to Sweden. The success rate was high enough that the camp's reputation, amplified by postwar films and books, gave rise to what historians now call the Colditz Myth — the idea that POW escapes during the war were common. They were not. What was unusual about Colditz was that it concentrated, in one place, the men most likely to keep trying.

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, the story was taken seriously. In 1999 Channel 4 commissioned a full-size replica, built by Southdown Aviation at Lasham Airfield, and several of the original prisoners watched it test-fly at RAF Odiham in 2000. The glider worked. In 2012, another Channel 4 replica, this one radio-controlled, was launched from the same chapel roof the original was meant to use. It crossed the river and landed in a meadow 180 metres below. The escape plan, dismissed for decades as fantasy, would have flown. The castle today is a museum and a youth hostel. The chapel floor has glass panels showing the French tunnel. The Colditz Cock has not been built into the displays in original form, but its replicas, and the photograph of the original, hang on the walls — proof that the men the Germans had labelled incorrigible had, until the very last weeks of the war, been working out how to fly home.