Fanatics, murder and the Writer unravels mystery

How diehard prisoners of war turned on each other

It was only one week, a few summer days spent at an outdoors camp in the Perthshire countryside.

But, fifty years on, Bill Jones has never forgotten his time at Cultybraggan or the feeling of a haunting darkness he found there. He doesn’t think he ever will.

He was one of thousands of children to bunk up in the camp’s Nissen huts in the decades after the Second World War, years after the huts had housed Nazi prisoners of war, soldiers notorious for their fanatical loyalty to Hitler.

Now, Bill’s time at the camp in Comrie, Perthshire as a 14-year-old schoolboy in 1968 has inspired his novel, Black Camp 21. The award-winning writer, who revisited the camp to unearth one of its darkest secrets, said: “I remember it vividly. We spent the days running around, getting lost in the mountains and nights gathered round the campfire with the transistor radio, listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin.

“We slept in bunks in one of the huts. It was fun, but the camp was a bit creepy. We all felt it and were a bit uncomfortable. It was as if it was haunted. We asked about the history but nobody told us. When the week was over, none of us was sorry to leave. Now I know why.”

A few years ago, Bill, 64, came across a picture of Cultybraggan and the memories came flooding back.

Still keen to find out about it, he started researching. And what he found out about Camp 21 – its official name during the Second World War – was shocking.

Few people today are aware of the huge number of German prisoners housed in more than 600 ad hoc camps across the country from 1944 onwards.

By the end of the war, it is thought up to 400,000 soldiers had been shipped across the Channel to see out the war in Britain.

Among them were 70,000 category “black” prisoners – the diehards sworn to fight for the Fuhrer until the death. Camp 21 housed 4,000 of the most dangerous veterans of the SS, soldiers refusing to believe Hitler’s awful dream was over.

In December 1944, one of them, German officer, Wolfgang Rosterg, was beaten to death in Hut No 4.

The following year, five of his fellow prisoners were hanged for his murder at Pentonville Prison.

Intrigued by the story and why it happened, Bill spent three years researching Rosterg and Camp 21.

He said: “It was one of the most horrific non-combat stories of the war – and a completely unknown part of it.

“And if I’d known all about it when I was 14, I wouldn’t have slept for a week. Or maybe a year.” For the former journalist turned TV documentary maker, finding the basic information was easy. Digesting it was a little more difficult. He uncovered original letters, records of the trial and found transcripts of secret interviews taped with soldiers – the lost voices of the German troops.

In fact, Bill was so disturbed by the death of Rosterg that he went to find his grave in Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery in the East Midlands.

“It’s where all the German servicemen who died in Britain but weren’t taken home were buried,” he said. “Nobody seems to know much about that either.”

Next to Rosterg’s grave was that of another Camp 21 casualty, Oberleutnant Willy Thorman, who’d been found hanging from a tree just a week before Rosterg’s killing.

“It was a pretty brutal place,” Bill said. “Really the blackest of the black camps.

“For any writer, nothing beats the sensation that one is covering new ground, or covering old ground very differently. Tell almost anyone that more