Visit to a prisoner-of-war camp

An afternoon jaunt to a prisoner of war camp and a nuclear bunker may not be top of your bucket list.
But this afternoon we visited Cultybraggan camp, one mile outside Comrie in the heart of Perthshire.
 
Even though we have lived in the area for over thirty years we did not know of the existence of this historic WW2 Prisoner of War camp, the only one open to the public in Scotland.
 
It is an extraordinary place ( see extra photo)   built in 1941 to house 4,000 prisoners including some of the most fearsome Nazis who underwent re-education programs part of which consisted in them being shown photos taken in concentration camps.
 
Even faced with the photographic evidence some denied it and dismissed the photos as “British propaganda”.
 
Amongst the prisoners was Heinrich Steinmeyer, a soldier in the Waffen SS since 1942, who was captured in Normandy in August 1944.
He died in 2014 and left a bequest to the village, which has been put into the Heinrich Steinmeyer Legacy Fund.[4][5]
 
 
After the war the MOD took over the camp and at the height of the Cold War built a nuclear bunker adjoining the site.
Today it houses data storage.
 
So next time you call something “down from the cloud” you may in fact be calling it up from a bunker in the heart of Scotland.
 
In 2004 The Comrie Development trust bought Cultybraggan through a community-right-to-buy option and it now serves both as a historic monument and as workspace for local businesses.

Photo. Inside one of the restored sheds.