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Surnames: Catlow
Classification: Biography
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CATLOW - Captain Tommy Catlow, from Tunstall, Lancashire – Prisoner of Colditz
Why heroes of Colditz returned to the Nazi jail
Ben Aris in Colditz
Sunday April 17, 2005
The Observer
For their Nazi captors they were troublemakers, but the three British veterans who
returned to the Colditz high-security prison yesterday were honoured guests as the 60th
anniversary of its liberation was celebrated.
Like nearly all the other prisoners at the castle, Major Peter Parker, Lieutenant Kenneth
Lee and Captain Tommy Catlow were interned at the Colditz Sonderlager, having tried to
escape from other camps.
'Escape. That's how you got here,' said Parker, who served in the 60th Rifles,
now known as the Green Jackets. 'We were all in the same boat and were all here
because we had escaped from somewhere else.'
Parker was part of a mass break-out by 63 British soldiers who tunnelled under the fence
at Eichstadt camp, near Berlin. 'The Germans dispatched more than 6,000 soldiers to
catch us,' he said.
Escaping prisoners were a serious drain on the German army at a time when it was short of
men at the front. Built in 1014, Colditz became home to the Nazi's most troublesome
prisoners. However, unlike the concentration camps, Colditz's inmates were
well-treated and relatively comfortable.
Tommy Catlow, from Tunstall, Lancashire, was a Royal Navy submariner and was captured in
1942 after a plane taking him to a new posting was shot down. He was sent to Milag, the
marine internment camp near Bremen, but tunnelled out. After 10 days on the run, he was
recaptured and put in Colditz. 'It was my duty to escape and I never stopped trying
but never quite managed it,' he said. 'The closest I came was when a colleague
jumped in the back of a German truck but I didn't make it.'
Kenneth Lee, who served in the signals corps, attached the 51st Highlanders, was sent to
Colditz, where he spent four years, after jumping train three times while being
transferred between camps. While waiting for his name to come up on the escape list -
prisoners had to co-ordinate their escape attempts with the international escape committee
made up of senior offices from all the nationalities present - Lee became one of
Colditz's chief forgers, making passports and passes out of scraps of paper.
American troops liberated the camp on 16 April 1945 and were met by the 300 prisoners - by
that time almost all British soldiers.
http://www.politics.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,1461776,00.html