David Lascelles for Out of Colditz

David Lascelles, 8th Earl of Harewood, is a BAFTA-winning film and television producer. He is one of the founders of Heirs of Slavery, a campaign group that seeks to redress the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade.

He joins us for his new book, Out of Colditz; the astonishing true story of the high-profile hostages who survived Colditz - and the man who spared their lives.

The grandson of a King. The son of the Viceroy of India. Churchill's nephew.

Held captive at the notorious Colditz prisoner of war camp, they were the Prominente: scions of the British establishment, and pawns in the hands of Nazi leaders.

As a German defeat loomed, the SS head of the POW camps Gottlob Berger made a pivotal decision: he would disobey direct orders and spare their lives. "Please remember what I have done for you when the war ends," he asked.

This Nazi overseer, who would later be convicted of war crimes, held their future in his hands.

Eighty years later, David Lascelles - the son of George, Earl of Harewood, who would never have been born if his father had been executed - traces the Prominentes' extraordinary journey and wonders who Gottlob Berger was and what motivated his fateful decision: compassion? Remorse? Or self-interest?

"A gripping, unsettling journey into the strange moral fog of the war's last days - and the shadows we inherit long after." ~ Iain MacGregor, author of The Lighthouse of Stalingrad and The Hiroshima Men