Mock executions, cardboard sets and the wrong uniforms...
veterans condemn the latest Colditz drama
By Chris Hastings
British war veterans who were imprisoned at Colditz have attacked a new £6 million ITV drama about the Nazi prison as a "travesty of the truth".
The ex-prisoners of war say that the two-part drama, From Colditz with Love, which will be broadcast this month, is historically inaccurate and littered with errors.
Ken Lockwood, 93, from Bristol, who was held in Colditz for four years after being captured by the Germans in Belgium while serving as a Territorial Army captain, said the programmes misrepresented life in the prison camp and had failed to get even basic details correct.
"It is risible, a disgraceful insult and a travesty of the truth. They should never have used the word Colditz in the title because it bears no relation to what it was actually like to be a prisoner there," he said. "The prisoners in the show are too well dressed and too well fed. They simply do not look like prisoners of war. Even the barracks look too comfortable.
"The sets look like they are made of cardboard and one of the characters has even got the wrong uniform on at one stage," Mr Lockwood said.
"Their depiction of the roll call is also wrong. In the programme the men are all shown standing well apart from each other in a very long line. But it just didn't happen like that. We always used to stand as close to each other as possible to cover up the fact that the line-up was often incomplete because people were involved in escape activity in other parts of the camp."
Mr Lockwood, who is one of 35 surviving British and Commonwealth prisoners at Colditz, was also scathing about the programme's portrayal of his German captors. He described as "complete nonsense" a scene in which a German officer presides over a mock execution.
In episode one of the drama, which stars Damian Lewis, Tom Hardy, James Fox and Timothy West, three mud-soaked escapers are forced to kneel on the ground and beg for their lives as a German firing squad takes aim.
One of the British prisoners, who is visibly sobbing, tells the officer: "For Christ's sake, don't do this." The German guards then fire above the heads of the men.
"That sort of mock execution did not go on at Colditz and to pretend it did is just not acceptable," said Mr Lockwood.
"We were PoWs and it was our job to escape or at least cause as much trouble as possible. Their job was to try to stop us. Both sides appreciated the other's point of view and as time went on some of the Germans grew to respect us."
In another scene a German officer is seen wielding a pistol and screaming abuse at two naked prisoners in the shower. Another former inmate, Bill Goldfinch, 88, who now lives in Salisbury, Wiltshire, said that such treatment did not take place.
"Nothing like that ever happened at Colditz," he said. "The German soldiers behaved like a proper army should. It may have happened elsewhere but it certainly did not happen where I was."
Earl Haig of Bemersyde, 87, the president of the Ex-Prisoners of War Association and himself a veteran of Colditz, said that there was no evidence that mock executions were ever staged.
Earl Haig, who was a second lieutenant with the Royal Scots Greys when he was captured at El Alamein in 1942, said: "I have never heard of anything like this happening and I think I would have done.
"It sounds like it has been totally cooked up for dramatic effect. Dramas are fine if they explore things that really happened but there is an awful lot of what I call the exploitation of Colditz.
"There were a lot of spectacular escapes but life there was a lot more low key than some of these programmes pretend."
The criticism will be an embarrassment to ITV, which has invested more than £6 million in the drama.
The programmes were filmed in the Czech Republic and will be broadcast to mark the 60th anniversary of the prison's liberation on April 16, 1945.
They will tell the fictional story of three prisoners who make a daring attempt to escape from another prisoner-of-war camp. Two of the men are caught by the Germans and taken to Colditz. The third, played by Damian Lewis, gets away and returns to London where he falls in love with the girlfriend of one of his fellow escapers.
Andy Harries, the programme's executive producer, defended the dramas and said that they were intended to appeal to a contemporary audience and not just to people who had direct experience of the camp.
"Our programme is completely fictional and is not purporting to be the real story of Colditz," said Mr Harries.
"We have not made the show for the veterans; we have made it for a Sunday-night ITV audience that doesn't really know anything about the place.
"We want the drama to appeal to young women as much as it does to young men. That is what we have included elements of a love story. It is not purporting to be, in any shape or form, the story of Colditz. I don't think 50 years on that an audience wants to see that."
The first of the two episodes of the drama will be broadcast on Easter Sunday at 9pm on ITV1. The time and date of the second episode have still to be confirmed.
©Telegraph Group Limited 2005