Over the course of Action Man production, a wide variety of boxed sets were sold; one popular at the time of the Colditz TV series in the early seventies was "Escape from Colditz", which provided both.
There was a game called stoolball played by the prisoners-of-war at Colditz castle during World War II.
It is based on the book written by Pat Reid, a British army officer who was imprisoned in Oflag IV-C, Colditz Castle, in Germany during the Second World War and who was the Escape Officer for British POWs within the castle.
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Miles Reid, WWI veteran and the oldest British prisoner in Colditz.
The programme was shown in 2000 Channel 4 in the UK as part of a 3-part (150 minute total) "Escape from Colditz" documentary.
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Six years later a full-sized replica of the Colditz glider was commissioned by Channel 4 and was built by Southdown Aviation Ltd at Lasham Airfield.
Her work includes Harriet Tubman (A&C Black, 2013), Code Breakers (Barrington Stoke, 2009), Escape from Colditz (Barrington Stoke, 2007) and two collections of illustrated children's stories, I love reading Phonics (Octopus Publishing, 2012) and Reading Heroes (Parragon, 2008).
Escape from Colditz is a game devised by successful escaper Pat Reid, based on the prisoner-of-war camp (Oflag IV-C) at Colditz Castle in Germany during World War II.
He later wrote his memoir Vannacht varen de Hollanders (1950), which was republished translated into English as The Man Who Came In From Colditz (1975) - a pun on the bestselling novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Whilst incarcerated in Colditz in a ploy to get the attention of the German authorities, Ferguson wrote a letter to an Irish friend, the son of Eamon De Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, in which he called for Ireland to join the war on the Allies' side.
Moved with the Colditz Polish contingent to Oflag IVB at Dossel, he was one of the survivors when on 27 September 1944 a British bomb carried by a Mosquito aircraft of No. 139 Squadron RAF, aimed at nearby Kassel, hit the camp in error and killed 90 Polish prisoners.
During the war he was a prisoner of war, and was one of the "prominente" held in Oflag IV-C (Colditz).
Larive did not forget and many prisoners later escaped using this route - that included Larive himself, Francis Steinmetz, Anthony Luteyn, Airey Neave, Pat Reid and Howard Wardle in their escapes from Colditz Castle when Colditz was used in the war as Oflag IV-C.
Werner Daehn (born 1965) is a German actor with an international reputation, who has worked with Vin Diesel and Samuel L. Jackson in xXx, with Jason Priestley in Colditz an ITV1 2005 miniseries, with Bill Pullman in Revelations and with Steven Seagal in Shadow Man.