IRISH HEROES AND THE NAZIS

IRISH HEROES AND THE NAZ

                                                                   by Ron Walsh

                                                                              Although the facts had been kept hidden for many decades, there were numerous Irish heroes who took part in the 2nd World War. But they would not have looked upon themselves as heroes. And it was a World War, not an ‘’Emergency’’.

                                                                              Dubliner Brendan Finucane was one of those heroes. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1938 at age seventeen, was shot down in his Spitfire plane over the French coast in 1942, and subsequently died. Prior to that he became the youngest ever Wing-Commander in the history of the RAF, and was regarded as that outfit’s number one Fighter Pilot. Another Dubliner John Hemingway also enlisted in the RAF in 1938, was shot down twice in action, but survived, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1941. When he passed away in 2022, at age 103, he was the very last surviving airman of the Battle of Britain, of whom Churchill said ‘’Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many, to so few’’. Great men. Great Irishmen. Great Dubs.

Michael Morris (later Lord Killanin) and Percy Hobart developed specially adapted armour that was used on D-Day, and also designed one of the first amphibious tanks. Morris’ wife, Mary Sheila Cathcart Dunlop, from Oughterard in county Galway, was later awarded an MBE for her help in breaking the German Enigma Code.

Rickard Charlie Donovan from Ballymore, Ferns in county Wexford, became senior Deputy Director of Combined Forces for the Royal Navy and played a prominent part in the planning for the D-Day landings. He was later decorated by Britain and America for his work.

Richard Hayes, then Director of the National Library, was a skilled mathematician who was also fluent in German. Working with Colonel Dan Bryan, the head of Irish Military Intelligence, Hayes solved the Goertz Cipher which had defied sixteen British M15 staff at Bletchley Park.

More names have surfaced recently in the book ‘’The Irish In The Resistance’’ written by Clodagh Finn and John Morgan, although Samuel Beckett’s connection with the French Resistance has been well known for a time. Margaret Kelly moved from her native Dublin to Paris in 1932 at age twenty, where she soon founded the famous Bluebell dance troupe at the glamorous ‘’Folies Bergere’’ nightclub. She later married Jewish pianist and orchestral conductor Marcel Leibovici, but they continued living in Paris after the French surrender. She somehow managed to protect her husband and many other Jews during the war, despite being arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo on a number of occasions.

Singer Delia Murphy was married to Dr. T.J.Kiernan, who served as Irish ambassador to the Vatican during the war years. She helped many Jews and Allied soldiers and airmen on the run while living in Rome, taking numerous risks, with the support of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and a number of nuns and priests.

There were many such heroes, with many of them located in France. Janie McCarthy from Killarney in county Kerry was one such person, taking big risks in order to help Allied soldiers. Maureen O’Sullivan, Fr. Kenneth Monaghan, Brian Rafferty, Anna Hodges, Bridget Bolger and Sister Katherine McCarthy were others who put their lives at risk for a just cause. The defeat of the Nazi’s.

Working in Bletchley Park, Galway woman Emily Anderson became recognised as the top female codebreaker of her time, and was awarded the OBE after the war.

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The aforementioned Richard Hayes was employed as head of a unit attempting to break coded messages being transmitted by Nazi agents living in Ireland back to Germany. Hayes was successful, being the very first person to break Germany’s microdot encryption code. However, later-on he over-emphasised the cooperation between this country and the Allies, claiming that ‘’During the war Irish neutrality was constantly misrepresented in the Allied press’’.

While he was right up to a point, the facts are that until the summer of 1943, like most other countries Ireland assumed that the Nazi’s would win the war. Soon afterwards we picked what now appeared to be the winning side, allowing Allied aircraft the use of the Donegal Corridor, holding captured German airmen imprisoned for the duration, while allowing captured British and American airmen into Northern Ireland, from where they would soon rejoin their various units. While its often claimed that captured Germans were never released until after wars end, that was not always true. Some captured American and British personal recalled encountering Germans later in the war whom they had previously come across as prisoners-of-war in Ireland.

To be fair to the de Valera led government, while there were strained relations between Ireland and Britain because of the formers neutrality stance, for pragmatic reasons (possibly because of the fact that many thousand Irish people were living and working in Britain) an official blind-eye was turned to what became known as the ‘’Donegal Corridor’’. From the summer of 1941 RAF planes were allowed a direct route west out to the Atlantic ocean, across south Donegal, north Leitrim and north Sligo. Although they supposed to fly at a certain agreed height, that was never enforced, and was never complied with by the British in any case.

With the RAF flying from an air-base on the shores of Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, the ‘’Donegal Corridor’’ shaved some one-hundred miles off flights to the Atlantic, thus preventing German U-boats from operating in a particular area without fear of air attack. This ‘’nod and a wink’’ neutral Ireland policy also allowed an armed air/sea rescue trawler (the ‘’Robert Hastie’’), manned by eleven British personnel, to operate out of Killybegs unhindered. Those agreements were almost entirely shrouded in secrecy. Local units of the Irish Army were unaware of decisions made at a higher level.

As the war moved into 1943, cooperation between Irish and Allied intelligence stepped up, including detailed weather reports for the Atlantic Ocean, with the latter helping to decide the launch date for the Normandy landings. As far as Nazi spies operating inside Ireland were concerned, they were not monitored, located and captured from the very start for the sake of the Allies. It was done because it was feared that at some stage Germany would invade this country in its attempt to defeat Britain. No more. No less.

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The ‘’United Nations’’ is hardly as united as its title suggests. Putin’s/Russia’s war on the Ukraine is an obvious case in point, an old-fashioned war prompted by ego. China hardly make up part of one big happy family, while Iran, North Korea and other Muslim states are, if anything, far worse. Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel made this comment on the war in the Middle East decades ago; ‘’We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us’’. Some fifty years later things remain the same.

While Germany started two world wars because it wished to expand its territory, that impulse no longer exists. But many will claim that the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinard in June of 1914 was the reason why the Great War commenced less than two months later, but that is simply not so. Of course the Austro-Hungarian Empire was very upset by the killing of the Archduke, which had been carried out by a Serbian extremist group wishing to increase Serbian power in the Balkans by breaking up that same empire.

However the Archdukes death would have been gotten over if Germany had not used it to cajole Austria into seeking retribution, which they did by attacking Serbia. With various military treaties already in place between the European powers, the die was cast, with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire lined up on one side, and France, Russia and Great Britain opposing. Germany invaded France by taking a short-cut through Belgium, and, as Britain had pledged to support neutral Belgium the Great War commenced. But it was Germany’s desire to expand that was the real catalyst. Fifteen years later, after the Nazi’s were voted into power in 1933, the die was cast once again as Germany’s wish for expansion had not gone away, as was well demonstrated over the following ten years, throwing the world into absolute chaos once again.

After the 2nd World War most Germans, instead of succumbing to guilt about the horrors they had inflicted upon the world, indulged in an orgy of self pity. One writer even posed the question; ‘’What makes us so unpopular around the world?’’, while many Germans embraced a narrative of their own victimhood, displacing any compassion for others, especially for six million dead Jews. They simply wallowed in their own sufferings; poverty, family loss, hunger, the transformation of their cities into rubble. Even today those feelings linger-on with many.

The famous German writer Thomas Mann, living in the US, wrote that he would not be coming ‘’home’’, and enraged everyone by asserting that every book published in the his country since 1933 should be pulped. The majority of Germans took little notice of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, simply dismissing them as ‘’victors justice’’. With five million men dead, more than six million in western Allied prison camps, and another two million in Russian prisons, German women faced a desperate shortage of male companionship and sex. Most of the broken, emaciated soldiers who eventually came home were far less appealing than the healthy specimens of the occupying forces. Couples found it almost impossible to salvage fractured relationships, while numerous repatriated prisoners-of-war were prone to impotence. Many wives had been raped or had found temporary lovers in their husbands absence, and saw their former partners as losers.

Over the decades the myth that all postwar Germans were suffused with guilt and shame has been allowed to dominate, while one writer had this to say of the older generation; ‘’The majority were not and are not democrats, and I see that as the fundamental evil. Hitler knew how to persuade the Germans that they were a privileged species. Most of our parents went along with that madness’’.

All countries indulge in myth’s to a greater or lesser extent, history is riddled with them, none more so than in Germany. There is even an argument that because so many American industrialists invested in Germany soon after the Great War ended, that it was actually the Yanks who were responsible for Hitler’s rise! Repeat it often enough and you will actually come to believe it. And while Henry Ford was a well-known anti-Semite, Hitler was already well-infused with his own beliefs before the first Ford plant commenced operations in Germany.

An oft repeated German lie is the one that claims there was a serious attempt in the 19th century to replace the English language in the United States with German! Totally out of left field, but nonetheless believed by many. That particular myth came from an attempt in 1795 to seek that all federal laws, which were (naturally) printed in English, be also printed in German. Such a proposal was put to Congress, but was roundly defeated.

And how about the attempt on Hitler’s life in the summer of 1943? Because of the atrocities being carried out by the Nazi’s, which at that point of the war were being discovered by the general public (but by no means the full extent of them), many top military men suddenly developed a conscience and decided to put an end to their leader. Certainly such an attempt was made, but it failed. However it was not fuelled by a sudden remorse for the plight of the Jews, but rather by a sudden realisation that Germany might actually be defeated. Some families claim that a relation of theirs took part in that attempted coup, and lived-on to recall the event in subsequent years. More baloney. When Hitler recovered sufficiently from the shock, he ordered over five thousand people who had in any way been involved in the plot to be executed. In actual fact the true figure was probably somewhere around three thousand, but those people who had shaken hands with one of the plotters, or even smiled at them, were also included in the clean-out. But not even one person who had been involved in the attempt on Hitler’s life lived to tell the tale.

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Thousands of German Jews fled the country following Hitlers rise to power in 1933. However, thousands of non-Jewish Germans also left, which clearly shows that not everyone was duped into following the Nazis. Big business stood behind them, which was hardly surprising. And to finish, its only right that a small number of those companies should be mentioned in ‘’Germanys Roll of Dishonour’’.

Accumulatoren-Fabrik Afa (later BAE); Its workforce included many Jewish and non-Jewish slave-workers. A ‘’fluctuation’’ of 80 prisoners per month was planned as part of the ‘’extermination through labour’’.

AEG; Used large numbers of forced labourers, as well as concentration camp prisoners, who worked under inhuman conditions.

AUDI (Auto Union); To be fair to the company, according to a 2014 report commissioned by themselves, Auto Union bore ‘’moral responsibility’’ for the 4,500 deaths that occurred at Leitmeritz concentration camp.

BASF; Collaborated with IG Farben to produce Zyklon-B, the lethal gas used for mass murder during the Holocaust.

Bayer. BMW. Zeiss. Continental.

The German-American Petroleum Company; The company was a subsidiary of Standard Oil, and was fully run by the Nazi regime during the war. In 1944 the workforce consisted of 17,064 Germans, 5,511 forced labourers, and 4,372 prisoners-of-war.

Deutsche Bank. Dr. Oetker. Hugo Boss.

Flick Family; Friedrich Flick’s companies (he was later a convicted war criminal) employed some 48,000 forced labourers in his coal mines, steel plants, and munitions works. Almost 80% of the workers died.

Ford; The German subsidiaries used slave labour, although its not known if Henry Ford knew about that, even though he was a self-publicised anti-Semite. General Motors subsidiaries also used slave labour.

JAB Holding Company; Many of its female workers were sexually assaulted by a number of employee’s, including the two men who ran the business, Albert Reimann and his son.

Kodak. Krupp. Mercedes-Benz, who later paid $12 million in reparations to victims families.

Dutch-British Shell; Under forced administration.

Siemens. Telefunken. Zeiss. Braun. Deutsche Luft Hansa. And many many others.

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A final salute to the many Irish heroes who put their lives on the line to help numerous people escape the Nazis, over eighty years ago. Some of them received recognition abroad for their courage, but not from their country of birth. The only salute the Nazis deserve, is ‘’Heil Hitler’’. Irish heroes, and Nazi zero’s.

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Ron Walsh. Copyright 2024.