Paperback: "Only those who have been prisoners have any conception of the horrors of being a prisoner, or of the ineffable joy of release; of the terrible rise and fall of the spirit, the fluctuations between the delirium of happiness and madness of despair, attendant upon the fluctuating hopes and fears as the possibility of release advances and retreats." - Percival Christopher Wren, Beggars' Horses
Destination Buchenwald: The Astonishing Survival Story of Australian and New Zealand Airmen in a Nazi Death Camp (7 June 2022) is the harrowing story of the Allied airmen who experienced the true horrors of Nazism firsthand. It is dedicated to the two airmen who never left Buchenwald:
Flying Officer Philip Derek Hemmens, RAF
First Lieutenant Levitt Clinton Beck Jr, USAAF
It was the summer of 1944 as liberating Allied forces surged towards Paris following the D-Day landings. For a large group of downed airmen being held in that city’s infamous Fresnes Prison, they were about to face evacuation into the blackest, bloody heart of Germany and experience the most acute evil of the war.
Amid great secrecy, those 168 airmen – including several from Australia and New Zealand – were transported on a filthy, overcrowded nightmare train journey which ended at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, accompanied by orders for their execution. At Buchenwald they witnessed extreme depravity that would haunt them to the end of their days.
Yet, on returning home, they were confronted by decades of denials from their own governments that they had ever been held in one of Hitler’s most vile concentration camps.
In conducting his original deep research for this book – now completely expanded and updated – Colin Burgess personally interviewed or corresponded with dozens of the surviving airmen from a number of nations, including their valorous leader, New Zealand Squadron Leader Phil Lamason.
Destination Buchenwald: The Astonishing Survival Story of Australian and New Zealand Airmen in a Nazi Death Camp tells a compelling story of extraordinary bravery, comradeship and endurance, when a group of otherwise ordinary servicemen were thrust into an unimaginable Nazi hell.
"This was the first book to provide an insight into our experiences as a group of captured allied airmen, betrayed to the Gestapo, tortured and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. I consider it to be one of the best interpretations of the events as it reflects the voices of the survivors and their challenges to stay alive in such dehumanising circumstances." - Sqn Ldr Stanley Booker, RAF (Rtd), MBE, Légion D'Honneur: Last surviving member of the Buchenwald airmen
Destination Buchenwald: The Astonishing Survival Story of Australian and New Zealand Airmen in a Nazi Death Camp is first published in Australia in 1995 by Kangaroo Press. This revised edition published in 2022 by Simon & Schuster (Australia) is currently available from Dymocks Booksellers in Australia, Barnes and Noble, and in e-book/audio forms on Kindle and Audible on amazon.com.
About the author: Colin Burgess was born in suburban Sydney in 1947. In 2002, after 32 years of in-flight service with Qantas Airways in a variety of roles, Colin took an early retirement in order to concentrate on his writing career.
His first published book was The Diggers of Colditz in 1985, co-authored with Colditz veteran Jack Champ. Since then, he has had numerous non-fiction books published on a wide variety of subjects. In recent years, he has not only turned his attention to writing books on the history of human space exploration, but was appointed series editor for the Outward Odyssey series of books on that subject, published by the University of Nebraska Press in the United States.
To date, he has written or co-authored nearly forty books, and is currently working on a biography of Sister Betty Jeffrey OAM, the Australian nurse who was interned in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Colin still lives near Sydney with his wife Pat. They have two adult sons and three grandchildren.
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