Ireland's OWN: History

 

29 April  2001 Heil Hibernia —by David O'Donoghue,* Sunday Business Post In 1930s Dublin, Nazi Party members bagged top state jobs, socialised with senior politicians, and held their Christmas parties at the city's top hotel. The truth behind neutral Ireland and the men who served two masters. They operated like a normal political party, collected subscriptions, kept membership files and reported regularly to party headquarters. Their Christmas parties were held at the Gresham Hotel, and other social events took place at the Red Bank restaurant on D'Olier Street and at Kilmacurragh Park Hotel in Co Wicklow. The difference with this party in 1930s Ireland, however, was that its headquarters was not in Mount Street, but in Berlin, in Germany. The party's members — numbering from 50 to 100, depending on whether visitors are included — owed their loyalty to Adolf Hitler. This was the Irish branch of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeitspartei (NSDAP), the Nazi party. The story of Nazi activity in Ireland begins with a Prussian bandsman called Fritz Brase. In 1923, he was appointed director of the new Irish Army's school of music, with the rank of colonel. Brase took his job to mean rearranging many traditional Irish jigs and reels to sound like thundering Prussian martial pieces. But it wasn't until the early 1930s, when he wrote to the army's chief of staff, Major-General Michael Brennan, seeking permission to set up a branch of the Nazi party in Dublin, that his other interests came to the army's attention. Brennan was understandably somewhat miffed that an Irish Army Colonel intended to swear loyalty to the Third Reich. He told the German to choose the party or the army, but Brase wanted the best of both worlds. Records held in Berlin show that he joined the Nazis in April 1932, just a month before his 57th birthday. Brase appears to have tried to keep his party membership a secret from the Irish army but pressure from the military's top brass is the most likely reason he relinquished his post as local Nazi leader in 1934. His successor was another Irish state employee, Dr Adolf Mahr. Mahr was an Austrian archaeologist who had arrived in Dublin in 1927 to join the staff of the National Museum in Kildare Street. In 1934, he was appointed director of the museum by [Éamon] de Valera. Mahr scoured the country buying artefacts for the museum but, like other party members, he had a hidden agenda. After taking over as party leader in Ireland, he set about building up the NSDAP's membership and was quite successful. At least 23 Germans were recruited to the party during his 1934-39 term. This was roughly a quarter of all adult German males in the 26 counties. Mahr's efforts on behalf of the Nazi party were not restricted to German citizens. According to Irish military intelligence files, he "made many efforts to convert Irish graduates and other persons with whom he had associations to Nazi doctrines and beliefs". Mahr was no Mr Nice Guy. According to the leading authority on Irish-German relations in the 1933-45 period, Lt Col John Duggan, his recruiting methods amounted to "bully boy tactics". Germans living here appear to have been given a choice: join the party or leave Ireland. Visiting Germans had to report first to Mahr, or face a reprimand. Using his virtually unlimited power within the small German colony, Mahr was able to get diplomat Georg von Dehn-Schmidt and German ambassador Erich Schroetter packed home to Berlin in 1934 and 1937 respectively for not toeing the party  line.  Perhaps understandably from then on, the German Legation was staffed by loyal party members. They included Schroetter's successor, Dr Eduard Hempel, Hans Boden, and an SS officer, Henning Thomsen, who was transferred to Dublin from Oslo early in 1939. Mahr's bullying tactics may also explain why a Malahide-based Lutheran minister, Wilhelm Tanne, felt obliged to join the party in October 1934, even though Protestant churches in Germany, for the most part, opposed Hitler. From 1934 to 1939, Mahr was Germany's de facto top diplomatic representative in prewar Ireland. He represented the Irish branch of the Nazi Party at the May 1937 coronation of George VI in London, where he was joined by Joachim von Ribbentrop, then Hitler's ambassador to the Court of St James. It was no coincidence that Mahr secured a post as head of the Irish desk at the wartime German Foreign Office when Ribbentrop was foreign minister. He also directed radio propaganda broadcasts to Ireland. The German Legation at 58 Northumberland Road, Dublin, supplied him with regular reports on the comings and goings of German nationals — including Jews whose Irish addresses and movements were recorded in ominous detail. The Legation's radio transmitter was used to send secret political, economic and military information to Berlin — until de Valera eventually ordered its seizure in December 1943. In his other role as director of the National Museum, Mahr was friendly with de Valera, who had obtained cabinet approval for the Austrian's nomination to the top museum post. One of his colleagues, a Scottish archaeologist, Dr Howard Kilbride-Jones, recalled that in June 1938 when Mahr needed additional funding to complete an archaeological dig in Drimnagh, the two called to the Taoiseach's office and left with de Valera's personal cheque for £400 (about £20,000 in today's terms). Party members like Mahr and Brase found themselves in an awkward position as state employees in the 1930s, because they could not serve two masters without a conflict of interest. But they weren't the only NSDAP members who tried to serve the Irish state and Nazi Germany. One, Friedrich Herkner, was appointed professor of sculpture at the National College of Art in Dublin in 1938. He joined the Nazi party in 1939, and spent the war years in Germany. After the war, he did restoration work on public monuments there. Herkner was allowed back to teach again in the College of Art from 1947 until his retirement in 1969. Otto Reinhard was appointed director of forestry in the Department of Lands, having beaten 65 other candidates to get the job. He left his home in Silchester Road, Glenageary, for Germany at the outbreak of the war, having joined the Nazi party in 1939, and never returned to Ireland. Another, Friedrich Weckler, bagged a top state job as chief accountant of the ESB in 1930, having worked previously on the Shannon electric scheme for the giant German engineering company Siemens. Four years later, he joined the Nazi party. He remained in Ireland, and died at his home in Dalkey in 1943, aged 51. Heinz Mecking signed up to the Nazi party in 1931. He was also on the state payroll, employed as an expert adviser to the Turf Development Board (the forerunner of Bord na Mona) from 1936 to 1939.  He took over as NSDAP chief in Dublin when Mahr left for Berlin in July 1939. When war broke out, Mecking joined the German army and later oversaw turf production for the winter campaigns in Russia of 1941 and 1942. He died of starvation while a prisoner of the Red Army in December 1945. Helmut Clissmann, who joined in 1934, studied at TCD (though he never graduated) before running the German Academic Exchange Service in Dublin. Mahr was assisted in his Nazi party duties by a Dublin-based Siemens director, Oswald Mueller-Dubrow. He operated as Mahr's deputy in the Nazi party's ausland (foreign) organisation which kept an eye on Germans living abroad, enforced discipline among party members, and produced regular reports for Berlin. Other party members living in Ireland included Heinrich Greiner, who had come here in 1935 to help start up the Solus lightbulb factory in Bray; Hans Hartmann, based at UCD from 1937 to 1939, where he studied Irish language and folklore (during the war, Hartmann broadcast Nazi propaganda in Irish from Berlin); Hilde Poepping, an exchange student at University College, Galway; Karl Kuenstler, an engineer with Siemens; and Robert Stumpf, a radiologist at Baggot Street Hospital. In 1939, Stumpf invited some Irish doctors and their wives on a tour of the Third Reich, which included a visit to Berchtesgaden, Hitler's mountain retreat in Bavaria. According to Irish military intelligence, Mahr and Reinhard were both employed during the war in "one of the German intelligence sections which dealt with matters concerning a landing in Ireland". The German army had drawn up detailed documents for an invasion of Ireland to coincide with the invasion of England in 1940, and in August that year IRA men Sea¨n Russell and Frank Ryan were to be landed on the Dingle peninsula by U-boat (the plan was aborted when Russell died, from a perforated ulcer, aboard the vessel). In July 1939, Mahr had received a letter from an SS maps office in Prague thanking him for his "efforts". But, in the 1930s, were de Valera and his ministers aware that Nazi party members were on the state payroll? The answer would appear to be that a few civil servants were, but the Taoiseach became aware of what was happening only in 1939. Todd Andrews, who was managing director of the Turf Development Board in the 1930s, recalled in his 1982 memoirs that: "As German triumph followed German triumph in Europe [Heinz Mecking] became increasingly uninvolved in his assignment [for the TDB]. He set himself up as a Nazi intelligence agent photographing railway stations, river bridges, sign posts and reservoirs ... When war broke out he had to return to Germany, with reluctance. He thought that he would be more useful to his country acting as an intelligence agent in Ireland." Andrews had hit the nail on the head with this observation. The Germans were not, in fact, ordered back to Berlin after the outbreak of war on September 3, 1939. They held no less than three tense meetings at the Legation in an effort to reach a consensus on what to do. Finally, the reports of Germans being interned as enemy aliens in Britain tipped the balance. They feared they would spend the war as internees if British troops invaded Ireland, so they sought de Valera's help to get back to the Fatherland. In one of Dev's cannier wartime moves, he persuaded the British to grant 50 Germans safe passage through what was technically enemy territory. They gathered at the mailboat at Dun Laoghaire on September 11, 1939 amid Nazi salutes and shouts of "Auf Wiedersehen". Herkner told an Irish Times reporter they were "returning to Germany to join the colours" and Mecking gave the Nazi salute on the quayside before sailing with the others to Holyhead. Their departure was ultimately Germany's gain: the repatriation of so many Germans with a detailed knowledge of Ireland meant that German counter-intelligence had to drop no less than 12 agents into Ireland, by boat, submarine and parachute, from 1939 to 1943. Mahr had left Dublin two months earlier, officially for his annual holidays in Austria in July and to attend the sixth international congress of archaeology in Berlin in August. Unofficially, however, he had planned to attend the Nazi party's annual rally at Nuremburg in September, which was later cancelled due to the outbreak of war. Since early 1939, however, he had been feeling the pressure from top Irish officials over his Nazi party role, and had been shadowed both by the Garda Special Branch and the army's intelligence arm, G2. In February 1939, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Joseph Walshe, reported to de Valera on his meeting with the newly arrived German diplomat Henning Thomsen: "I suggested to him, as I have frequently done to his Minister [Hempel] and his Minister's predecessor [Schroetter] that the existence of a Nazi organisation in Dublin ... having as its chief member and organiser an employee of our State [Mahr] was not calculated to improve relations between our two Governments." The formal memo reveals that Walshe had been aware of what he called "the Nazi cell in Dublin" since 1936, yet nothing had been done about it, apart from monitoring party members' movements and mail. In fact, the Dublin government's hands were tied when it came to dealing with Nazi party members in Ireland because, according to the rules, civil servants such as Mahr were barred only from membership of Irish political parties, not foreign ones. In addition, people such as Jupp Hoven (who studied at Trinity College and during the war, together with Helmut Clissmann and Frank Ryan, tried to set up an Irish brigade in the German army) and Professor Ludwig Muhlhausen (who had taken hundreds of photographs of Sligo and Donegal in 1937, some of which later ended up in a German army invasion handbook) could not be touched because they had not broken any law. In 1937, civil servant Leon O Broin reported Muhlhausen's spying activities to a senior army officer, only to be told that it was not illegal to take holiday snapshots. Very few members of the German colony returned to live in Ireland after the war. Clissmann was smuggled back from Rome, posing as a returning pilgrim, and Herkner got his old teaching job back, but Mahr was never to see Dublin again. On his release from an internment camp in Germany in April 1946, Mahr sought reinstatement as director of the National Museum. Under pressure from opposition TD James Dillon, de Valera heeded the advice of his military intelligence chief, Colonel Dan Bryan, that allowing the return of such a "blatant Nazi" would be "unwise". *David O'Donoghue is an historian and author. His latest book is Hitler's Irish Voices: the Story of German Radio's Wartime Irish Service. Page updated 31 Aug 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.