Cultybraggan Camp was built in 1939 on the edge of Comrie. Its first prisoner was a British soldier. Within two years it was holding thousands of men captured in North Africa and Europe — members of the Afrika Korps who arrived by train from the Channel ports, SS officers among them.

At its peak, more than 4,500 prisoners of war passed through. Camp 21, as it was officially designated, became one of the UK's detention centres for hardened Nazis. In November 1943 a prisoner named Wolfgang Rosterg — accused of cooperating with the British — was murdered by fellow inmates in what amounted to a fanatical show trial inside the wire.

There was also a re-education programme. Lectures. Hot debates. Some men left changed. At least one never forgot Comrie at all. Heinrich Steinmeyer, a German prisoner interned here during the war, left his entire estate to the people of the village when he died decades later — because, he said, the Scots had treated him as a human being.

The camp remained in use long after the war. In the 1960s it was a National Service posting. One NAAFI driver recalled arriving to find German writing still on his Nissen hut door from the war years. Later it housed a Cold War civil defence bunker, and Combined Cadet Forces used the site into the 1970s.

In 2007 the community of Comrie bought the camp from the Ministry of Defence. Most of the original structures are still standing. The stories are still here too.