PAID IT ' FÜHR WARD
Ex-Nazi POW leaves savings to Scots
A former Nazi prisoner of war bequeathed his life savings to the Scottish village where he was treated with “kindness and generosity” during his captivity.
Heinrich Steinmeyer left $485,000 to the village of Comrie in central Scotland. The money has been earmarked to help the elderly.
“Throughout his captivity, Heinrich Steinmeyer was very struck by the kindness shown to him by Scottish people, which he had not expected,” said Andrew Reid of the Comrie Development Trust, which will administer the fund, according to the Agence France-Presse.
Steinmeyer was a dyed-inthe-wool Waffen-SS soldier during World War II, enlisting in the murderous armed wing of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel at age 17.
He was just 19 when he was captured in Normandy in August 1944.
“When I was brought to Scotland, I realized the Scots were no different from us,” Steinmeyer said in a 2007 interview with the BBC of his 10 months in the town’s Cultybraggan POW camp.
Surrounded by beautiful hillside and befriended by villagers who chatted with him through the chain-link fence, Steinmeyer realized, “We should never have been fighting each other.”
Going from the battlefield to the rolling hills of central Scotland changed him, he claimed.
“It was a top-security Nazi camp and we were never allowed out. But I loved looking at the scenery all around us, the black hills, I called them,” he once told the Telegraph.
“Cultybraggan was a holiday camp compared to fighting or being a POW in Russia. The whole place was so beautiful. It went straight to my heart, and I thought, ‘ Why have I been fighting this bloody war?’
“I was young and had been brought up in Hitler’s system,” Steinmeyer recalled. “When I was brought to Scotland I realized the Scots were no different from us. We should never have been fighting each other. I love Scotland very much.”
George Carson — whose parents were among the local friends Steinmeyer made through the camp’s fence — spoke of the time they learned Steinmeyer had never seen a movie.
“They went up with their push bikes one morning and one of the girls had taken her brother’s . . . school uniform up with them and they smuggled Heinrich out of the camp,” he said.
“They smuggled Heinrich into the cinema where he saw his very first film. He was absolutely blown away by the whole experience. After the film, they cycled back to Comrie, [and] smuggled Heinrich back into the camp again.”
After the war, Heinrich revisited the town often; his ashes were scattered among the hills he loved gazing at while imprisoned.