He was a Nazi stormtrooper in one of the most fanatical divisions in Hitler’s war machine.
So, Heinrich Steinmeyer expected little mercy as he surrendered to British troops towards the end of World War Two, after being relentlessly bombarded for days in his muddy Normandy foxhole by the RAF.
But instead, he says he was treated with humanity by both the troops who captured him and the guards at the Scottish prison camp he was kept at until the end of the war.
A touching story. It reminds me of a story of a German fighter pilot who was closing in to finish off a blazing British bomber that was so shot up it was on the verge of breaking up. With the the gun turrets shot to pieces the bomber was defenceless, a sitting duck. At the last moment the German pilot aborted his attack, pulled alongside the bomber, waved once to the bomber pilot and veered away.
The badly wounded British pilot managed to nurse his plane home. After the war the two pilots met through an incredible coincidence.
