The Designation
Not all prisoner of war camps were alike. Camp 21 Cultybraggan was officially classified as a "black" camp — a deliberate designation reserved for the men considered most dangerous, most committed, and least likely to cooperate with British authorities.
The camp held around 4,000 prisoners at its peak. Early arrivals included Italians and Germans captured in North Africa. As the war turned and the Allies advanced through Europe, the character of the population changed. Senior SS officers arrived. Diehard Nazi party members. Men who continued, behind the wire, to enforce the same discipline on each other that they had enforced in the field.
Arriving at Comrie
In November 1943, a column of Afrika Korps prisoners arrived at Comrie station. James Hardie, a local resident, watched from Drummond Street and later recorded what he saw in Comrie Characters and Cameos (2000):
"As they grew nearer it was observed that they marched three abreast in one very long, unbroken column... They were very erect, and of splendidly proud bearing, even although wearing only trousers and singlet, just as they had been when captured in Libyan heat... they were Rommel's elite paratroops and were real tough guys, who glared at us with disdain as they passed only 4' out from the kerb."
The trains that brought them — Southern Railway carriages in malachite green from the Channel ports, or Great Western in chocolate-and-cream — were an unusual sight on a line that normally saw only LMS maroon.
Inside the Wire
The "black" designation meant that the hardest compound held men who policed each other as vigilantly as any guard. Prisoners suspected of cooperating with British authorities — informers, in the eyes of their fellow inmates — faced consequences from within.
It was this internal culture that led, in December 1944, to the murder of Wolfgang Rosterg and the executions that followed. That story is told in the Mass Escape Plot exhibit.
The Same Camp
The black compound was one part of Cultybraggan. In another hut, a prisoner was drawing cartoons. In the village, schoolgirls were quietly helping a homesick man. A young soldier named Heinrich Steinmeyer was forming impressions of Scotland that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
The camp held all of this at once.