THE myths of history have a habit of falling apart when you talk to those who were there.

Colditz is rightly renowned as the most famous German prison camp of the Second World War, the scene of bold, imaginative but mainly unsuccessful escapes.

Yet, according to two former inmates who met for the first time at the Imperial War Museum in London yesterday, conditions within the 11th-century castle near Leipzig were, to tell the truth, not at all bad.

They were fed, they were healthy, they were safe and their German captors behaved, on the whole, very correctly, to an elite group of officer prisoners who were persistent escapers from other camps or who were regarded as dangerous subversives.

Former inmates of the celebrated schloss will gather in Colditz this weekend to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its liberation by American forces on April 16, 1945.

There were an estimated 300 escape attempts from Colditz, but almost all those who broke out of the castle were recaptured. Only 31 made it home: 12 French, 11 Britons, 7 Dutch and a Pole. None is alive.

Neither Walter Morison nor Michael Burn, both of whom spent two years in Colditz without ever meeting each other, tried to escape. When they were incarcerated in 1943, both decided that the safer option was to sit the war out. Flight Lieutenant Morison, 85, who lives in Chichester, West Sussex, was captain of a Wellington bomber on his way to Essen when his aircraft crashed after a collision with another in the squadron. He baled out, was taken prisoner and sent to Stalag Luft III.

He escaped, but was recaptured on a northern German airfield several days later as he was starting up a Luftwaffe fighter for a flight to neutral Sweden and freedom. “My captors were very upset, and sent me to Colditz. Colditz was a camp for officers, and the Germans were very class-conscious. Contrary to the popular myth that it was a hell-hole, they treated us very well.”

Captain Burn, from North Wales, is 92 and a former foreign correspondent of The Times. He was a commando on the St Nazaire raid in western France where he was captured and transferred to Colditz.

“I don’t know why they sent me there; it was either because I had met Hitler during my work for The Times, or because I was regarded as a subversive; I was a known Marxist.” His abiding memory is of the liberation. “I saw a German officer, a decent fellow, gazing into the castle courtyard in tears.

“All the Nazi propaganda had taught him that if Germany lost the war it would be overrun by barbarians who did not conform to the Aryan idea of racial purity.” Many of the US liberators were black.

£3,000 for Harris cap

A CAP worn by Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command from 1942, fetched £3,055 at a Bonhams auction in Oxford yesterday.

A menu from a dinner celebrating the decoration of the Dam Busters sold for £4,465. Both items went past their estimated prices and were sold privately to collectors.

The cap was accompanied by a letter from Sir Arthur, apparently to an admirer, which reads: “I cannot imagine why anybody should require a personal souvenir from me.” The menu features the signatures of 31 crew members.

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