Britain's Toughest Compound
By 1944, Cultybraggan held some of the most committed Nazis the British had taken — senior SS officers and diehard party members who refused to accept that the war was lost. The camp was officially designated a "black" camp: a place for men considered dangerous, men who enforced Nazi discipline on each other as ruthlessly as any prison regime.
The Plot
That summer, a group of prisoners formed a plan. If 7,000 men broke out simultaneously, the British would be overwhelmed. Tunnels were started. A map of the surrounding Perthshire countryside was drawn from memory. Roles were assigned. The plan was audacious — perhaps delusional — and it was never carried out.
The Murder
What the escape plot made visible was something darker: the culture of terror the SS maintained inside the wire. Prisoners suspected of cooperating with British authorities — informers, Verräter — faced consequences.
In early December 1944, a fellow prisoner named Wolfgang Rosterg was brought before an informal tribunal. Rosterg had worked as a medical orderly and was known to hold anti-Nazi views. The verdict was swift. He was beaten and hanged from a water pipe in the camp washroom.
The Executions
British investigators identified five men responsible: Erich Pallme König, Kurt Zuehlsdorff, Josef Mertens, Joachim Goltz, and Herbert Brüling. All five were convicted of murder by British military court.
On 6 October 1945, they were hanged at Pentonville Prison in London. It was the only occasion in wartime Britain that German prisoners of war were executed for the murder of a fellow prisoner.
Two Camps in One
The same compound that produced this act of violence also produced something else. In a different hut, a prisoner drew sixty-six cartoons. In the village seven miles away, schoolgirls were sneaking a homesick prisoner to the cinema. And a young man named Heinrich Steinmeyer was quietly deciding that the people of Comrie had treated him as a human being.
Camp 21 held all of this at once.