The great escape ...to the movies
Nazi PoW left £400k to Scottish village after schoolgirls helped him break out to see film
IT WAS an unlikely act of kindness to the enemy during wartime – rewarded more than 70 years later with a small fortune.
Heinrich Steinmeyer was captured in Normandy in 1944 and held as a prisoner-of-war at a camp in a Perthshire village he has now left almost £400,000 in his will.
The generous gift was Heinrich’s reward for the hospitality the people of Comrie showed to the callow youth conscripted into the Waffen SS as a grenadier in the closing stages of the war.
And now, the son of one of the villagers has revealed how their generosity extended to an extraordinary ‘Great Escape’ plot to successfully liberate Mr Steinmeyer – but just for an evening so he could go to the cinema for the first time in his life.
Details of how the young German was smuggled through the chainlink fence of Cultybraggan Camp were revealed by the son of the late Mamie Carson, one of a group of schoolgirls involved in the escapade who subsequently became a close friend of Mr Steinmeyer.
George Carson said: ‘It sounds like an unbelievable story but it’s absolutely true. My mother and her friends, all schoolchildren at Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, made friends with Heinrich through the fence of the Cultybraggan Camp. I’m not quite sure how they communicated, but during these conversations they discovered that Heinrich had never seen a moving picture.
‘They went up with their push bikes one morning and one of the girls had taken her brother’s school uniform and they smuggled him out of the camp through the chainlink fence and into the cinema, where he saw his very first film.
‘He was absolutely blown away by the whole experience. After the film, they smuggled him back into the camp again.’
Despite being classed as a hardline Nazi, he was shown only affection by Comrie’s 2,000 villagers. Cigarettes, food and money were smuggled to prisoners by locals.
Mr Steinmeyer once said: ‘I was not just the enemy, but a Nazi. Such friendliness was a surprise, but it is in the British nature. They were tough, but always fair. I didn’t expect to find this attitude. ‘It went straight to my heart.’ After the war, he remained in Scotland before eventually returning to Germany in 1970, to care for his elderly mother. After he died in 2014 aged 90, his ashes were scattered at the camp and the surrounding Aberuchill Hills.
Mr Carson’s son added: ‘I met him a couple of times and he was a wonderful man. When I was a young boy, probably just in from playing British and Jerrys with my pals, here’s a German soldier sitting in my living room. When my mother died ten years ago, he maintained a close relationship with my father.
‘They never treated or thought of the prisoners-of-war as anything other than soldiers in the camp – there was no ill feeling.’
The money from Mr Steinmeyer – which he wanted to be spent on projects for the elderly – has now been placed in a Heinrich Steinmeyer Legacy Fund until its best use has been decided.
‘They smuggled him out in a school uniform’