Spring is not Autowiring my filter class

Spring is not Autowiring my filter class

I have a servlet filter declared like so:
@Component
public class BlahBlahFilter extends OncePerRequestFilter implements Filter {
with a property declared like so:
@Autowired
@Qualifier("appProperties")
AppProperties properties;
I have the same Autowired declaration in many of my components in the app
and no problems with them - but they are all controllers, services and
other misc stuff with @Component tag
But just this filter class is being ignored, and I cannot figure out how
to get Spring to inject the property into it.
I noticed in my debug log file this was written next to this class name
during component scan:
"Ignored because not a concrete top-level class"
Huh? Yes it is a concrete class, it is not abstract nor is it an
interface. Seems very fishy....
What can I do?
I saw some other topics on this and they were absolutely no help. Neither
of them have an accepted answer and none of the posts helped my situation
either.
Other relevant code snippets which may help:
web.xml:
<filter>
<filter-name>blahBlahFilter</filter-name>
<filter-class>com.blah.BlahBlahFilter</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>blahBlahFilter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>springmvc</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>classpath:spring-mvc.xml</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
spring-mvc.xml:
<context:annotation-config/>
<context:component-scan base-package="com.blah"/>
<mvc:annotation-driven/>