Bridgnorth's wartime mystery of the flowers on the enemy graves

Who put the flowers on the graves of the enemy?

It was a question they were asking in Bridgnorth back in 1941. Could it be a Nazi sympathiser? Or was it just some compassionate soul who could not bear to see the graves neglected?

In the town’s cemetery there were simple white crosses marking the last resting place of two German airmen whose bomber had come down during the Blitz the previous November. They bore the inscriptions “Feldwebel A Engelkin, German Air Force, 16.11.40” and “Unteroffizier S Mutzl, German Air Force, 16.11.40.”

Their Heinkel III bomber had been on a mission to bomb Birmingham and Coventry, but their plane had iced up and gone out of control. Joseph Mutzl, who was 23, was the first to bail out, but his parachute failed to open properly and he was found dead in a garden at Callaughton, near Much Wenlock.

The aircraft broke up, with wreckage coming down at Derrington, between Monkhopton and Ditton Priors, and at Netchwood, about a mile away. Heinrich Engelken - there is a discrepancy with the initials and spellings on the graves - who was 26, was killed, but two further crew members bailed out and were captured.

Afterwards the tail of the Heinkel was put on display in Bridgnorth as part of a week to raise money to buy a Spitfire.

Bridgnorth, and the RAF, buried the Luftwaffe dead with full military honours, despite being a town which had tasted the bitter cost of the Blitz - in August 1940 the town was bombed, causing deaths and injuries and, indeed, there remains a bomb site in Bridgnorth to this day, which is kept as a memorial garden.

The funeral was held at Bridgnorth Cemetery on Wednesday, November 20, 1940. The coffins, each with eight bearers, were borne up the tree-lined drive to the Church of England chapel. Leading the cortege was the RAF chaplain, the Rev W W Orpwood.

A last salute from 12 rifles was fired over the graves before finally a bugler blew the Last Post and Reveille.

In May 1941 an Express & Star reporter went along to try to get to the bottom of the mystery of the flowers appearing on the graves, but drew a blank. It was noted that the German airmen were buried alongside an RAF recruit.

“All we know is that the flowers appear on the graves occasionally, but no-one appears to know who put them there,” a cemetery worker said.

One woman told our reporter that the mysterious donor of the flowers was probably someone who felt that the German airmen were “somebody’s sons,” while another said she often placed flowers on graves of people she did not know, because the thought of a dead person being forgotten and the grave neglected touched her sympathies.

“And to me there is nothing wrong with that, and perhaps that is what the person who places the flowers on the German graves feels.”

Whether the mystery was solved, we don’t know, not that it really mattered, and in any event the graves are no longer at Bridgnorth Cemetery. Their bodies are said to have been exhumed on January 30, 1963, and they were reburied at the German military cemetery at Cannock Chase.