Death shadows us at every step". Meyer was wounded during the fight with the 3rd Canadian Division, but escaped from the Falaise pocket with the division's rearguard. The remnants of the division joined the retreat across the Seine and into Belgium. On 27August, Meyer was awarded the Swords to the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and promoted to SS-Brigadeführer. He led his retreating unit as far as the Meuse, where he and his headquarters were ambushed by an American armoured column on 6September. The division's staff fled into a nearby village, where Meyer and his driver hid in a barn. A farmer discovered them, and informed the Belgian resistance. Meyer surrendered to local partisans, who handed him over to the Americans on 7September. Prisoner of war After his surrender, Meyer was initially hospitalized due to injuries he received from his American guards during an altercation. He was transferred to a POW camp near Compiègne in August and attempted to hide his SS affiliation, but his identity as a high-ranking SS officer was discovered in November. Meyer was then interned at Trent Park in England, where his conversations with other high-ranking prisoners of war were covertly tape-recorded by British military intelligence. He was frank about his Nazi-orientated political beliefs in these exchanges; Meyer had dedicated himself to its ideology, saying that a person "could only give his heart once in life". One interrogator described him as "the personification of National Socialism". Throughout the recordings, Meyer and other SS men confirmed the German armed forces officers' view of them as ideological fanatics with an almost religious belief in Nazism, the Third Reich, and the messianic personality cult of Adolf Hitler. In a taped January 1945 conversation, Meyer praised Hitler for having inspired a "tremendous awakening in the German people" and for reviving their self-confidence. In a taped conversation the following month, he chided a demoralized Wehrmacht general: "I wish a lot of the officers here could command my division, so that they might learn some inkling of self-sacrifice and fanaticism". According to the recordings, Meyer had not just paid lip service to Nazi ideology to further his military career; he saw himself as an ideological racial warrior with a duty to indoctrinate his men with the National Socialist creed. Despite rigorous interrogations by British authorities, Meyer refused to admit any war crimes; his involvement in the Ardenne Abbey massacre was eventually revealed