Grisly wartime riddle of creepy Cultybraggan

Bill Jones explains how, armed with few facts, he tackled the story of an innocent man’s horrible death

IN the summer of 1968 – like thousands of schoolchildren before and after me – I found myself staying in a rusty Nissen hut in Perthshire. The occasion was an “arduous training” camp organised for my school cadet group of which I was a reluctant, CND-supporting member.

Two things stuck in my memory when our bus took us home from that week in the shadow of the Highlands.

The first was the music. Every night we’d congregate after dark around a transistor radio, thrilling to the greatest soundtrack of any year. Ever. The Beatles. Joe Cocker. Fleetwood Mac. The Doors. Otis Redding. And so many more.

The second was how we’d all hated the place – which was known to one and all as Cultybraggan Camp – and yet none of us knew why. Just something creepy which 30 or so 14-year-old boys had all felt, and were more than happy to leave behind amid the sheep and the bracken.

Fast forward 40-odd years and I was looking for an idea for a third book. Writing full-time is a career I’d come to quite late, and with two successful biographies under my belt (both about deeply unhappy high-achieving men), it had to be something new, something radically different.

In a previous incarnation, as a documentary filmmaker, I remembered a programme I’d made in 1989 about a German POW who’d married into a north Cumbrian farming family after the war; a man who had stayed in England and now spoke in a curious accent, half-Hamburg, half-Penrith.

It was a voice which had stayed with me, as had a fascination for the clash of cultures and ideas which lay behind the extraordinary flood of captured Germans into Britain during the months that followed D-Day. Tens of thousands of beaten soldiers had arrived here within weeks of the Normandy invasions. Many thousands more would follow before Hitler’s death in 1945.

Who were they? Where had they all gone? How long were they here? Who guarded them? In what conditions did they live?

They were questions which led me back to a place I’d almost forgotten. Back to Cultybraggan Camp, back to the Nissen huts and way back in time for an explanation for those feelings of unease which had dogged my teenage stay there so long ago.

As it happened, there was no secret about what had happened there. It’s just that nobody had told us, and – the more I understood about the story – the more I understood why.

Because what actually transpired is one of the most horrific non-combat stories of the war. And if I’d known all about it when I was 14, I wouldn’t have slept for a week. Or maybe a year. Back in the war it wasn’t known as Cultybraggan, it was Camp 21; the final dumping ground for the recidivists of Hitler’s army; the SS fanatics and diehards incapable of accepting that their war was over or that the tide of Nazism had been turned. And in December 1944 – under the curved corrugated iron of Hut No4 – five of them had battered one of their own compatriots to death before stringing his corpse up in a latrine.

In less than a year, the five had been identified, tried and hanged in Pentonville Prison. The oldest of them was 21, the youngest around 18.

Every research route I took led me back to this story and within a few weeks – for only the second time in my life – I was back up there to investigate. Snow laced the horizon, and smoke rose steadily from Comrie’s chimneypots. Absolutely nothing had changed. Now listed buildings, the camp stood mostly empty under bitter February skies and it was colder in the huts than it was outside them.

Standing there, watching snow settle on the backs of sheep, I knew I had to somehow tackle this story. But how? All my life I’ve dealt in facts, either in print or on television, and yet so few facts cling to either the perpetrators or their victim. How could I write a non-fiction book with so little to go on?

Postponing my decision, I headed for one of the most moving – and unknown – spots in England; the hideaway cemetery in the Midlands for German service personnel who died on British soil during the Second World War. Here rest pilots shot down in the Battle of Britain, submariners plucked from flaming oil slicks in the English Channel and prisoners who succumbed to illness or much much worse during their incarceration away from home.

There, among the lines of identical stones, I found the grave of Wolfgang Rosterg. Here was the man who had been murdered at Camp 21; on December 23, 1944, just one week after his 35th birthday. Next to him in the same dismal plot, another Camp 21 casualty, Oberleutnant Willy Thorman, who had been found hanging from a tree just a week before Rosterg’s Christmas killing.

Not Camp 21, I decided then, but Black Camp 21. And not a dry, non-fiction piece of academic research, but a novel; a format that would allow me to create three-dimensional characters from mere names and fully develop the twisted narrative that climaxed with an innocent man’s horrible death.

AT no stage of the process which followed was anything easy. For almost three years I shared my life with people who mystified me and events which truly shocked me. I was also aware that I was hugely pushing the bounds of literary licence; developing characters from the barest of bones whose long ago deaths had robbed them of the right to reply.

Gradually, however, the story came together. Crucially, into the mix of real people I introduced my own protagonist, Max Hartmann, an empathetic young German soldier torn between his oath to the Fuhrer and his deep love for a bride he scarcely knows and the child he’s never met.

It is Hartmann’s dilemma – his