The Indian doctor who escaped from Colditz, Nazi manipulation and the deep suspicion of his fellow POWs

A carved Kashmiri walnut wood box with the emblem of the Royal Army Medical Corps, circa 1940.

In 1940, while leading an ambulance convoy in France, Captain Birendranath Mazumdar of the RAMC was taken prisoner by the Germans. He became the only non-white POW in Colditz Castle, the high security OflagIV-C for officers. The Nazis tried to recruit him, while his fellow British POWs treated him with deep suspicion, excluding him from the escape plans they had. But Capt. Mazumdar stayed fiercely loyal to his military oath of allegiance and his duty to escape. He devised a simple plan: He would ask for a transfer to another camp which held Indian POWs, and during the transfer would escape. On 3 June 1943 he made his move. Along with two Indian sappers he leaped from the moving train and then trekked 560 miles across occupied Europe to Switzerland, to freedom. And to a quiet life that he lived for the next fifty years as a General Practitioner in Wales.