When Cathal O'Shannon returned to Ireland after the second World War, he found a country which had little sympathy for Jews, yet gave refuge to Nazis, he tells Shane Hegarty
In Kildare during the early 1960s, Otto Skorzeny, a one-time SS hero who had rescued Mussolini from a mountain jail, could be found raising prize-winning lambs.
By the time of his death in 2002, Albert Folens had given his name to the schoolbooks of generations of children despite having air-brushed his past in the Waffen SS and Gestapo.
And in 1947, Andrija Artukovic, a man responsible for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia, lived quietly in Rathgar in the full knowledge of the Irish government.
That same year, Cathal O'Shannon arrived home to Ireland having served with the Royal Air Force in Burma. He had joined up at 16, but serving when the war in Europe was over and that in the Far East was ending, "I never raised my hand against the Germans". But in Ireland, he found a country unwilling to welcome those who had fought in the British forces, which had little sympathy for homeless and orphaned Jews, yet which, as O'Shannon discovered, gave refuge to fleeing Nazis and their collaborators.
The veteran journalist's rage has calmed in the intervening years, but it is still surprising to hear him say the government's actions were "not a bad thing". What does he mean?
"One always has to have a certain sympathy for someone being pursued. For instance I found it just appalling to look at the execution of Saddam Hussein. That's not to say he didn't deserve to be killed. However, somehow or other you feel for him. So, to that extent I can understand and almost sympathise. And you feel sorry for someone who is being harried, and is in danger of their life, and even their liberty. Having said all of that, and I pose the question at the very end, we didn't admit at the time and even since that we allowed Nazis come and find refuge here."
In a two-part documentary beginning this week, O'Shannon tracks the journeys of a dozen Nazis who landed - either temporarily or permanently - in Ireland.
He was approached to make the film because, he says, he had known some of these men.
Becoming a journalist with The Irish Times in 1947, he went on to meet Skorzeny (a "loveable rogue") and Helmut Clissmann, who had been recalled from Ireland at the outbreak of war only for the Germans to twice attempt to smuggle him back in so as to recruit IRA members as Nazi collaborators. "He was a charming man," recalls O'Shannon.
"He became a model Irish citizen. I mean, he was one of the founders of Amnesty International in Ireland. That's the sort of man he was, although he was a German and was in an army that was controlled by the Nazis."
O'Shannon reckons that between 100-200 Nazis and collaborators passed through, or stayed in, Ireland after the war. Some had escaped prison, some were evading death sentences, and they arrived from a variety of countries.
"We talk about the Nazis, but we had a look at the history of about a dozen people and only two of them were German. There are Croatians, Flemish, Bretons, Dutch. All of them dead, with one exception: a Flemish fella who joined the Waffen SS, called Staf van Velthoven. He's now living in Co Galway. He was quite open about it. 'Yes, I was a Nazi.' "
However, van Velthoven remained inscrutable. "Four hours I spoke to him, saying, 'why did you join?' I still haven't got an answer as to why he joined the Nazi party. After four hours!"
Sixty years on, even a mass killer such as Artukovic is largely unknown here. O'Shannon admits that he hadn't heard of him until a year ago.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for viewers will come from discovering that Albert Folens had been involved with the Gestapo and Waffen SS. While Folens had admitted to serving in the war, he had underplayed his role.
"I didn't know that Folens was anything but Irish until maybe 10 years ago, when he was still alive. The rumours were going around at that stage," says O'Shannon. "It came as a total surprise to me that this man was originally Flemish."
The documentary examines the State's role in allowing these men to enter, and leave, without interference. It claims that then Taoiseach Éamon de Valera preferred if one Nazi refugee used a pseudonym, because it was easier to deny his presence here. "Looking at it now, it's very simple," believes O'Shannon. "Many of the people coming here were nationalists. The Flemish were nationalists. The Bretons were nationalists. They'd joined the Nazi party out of sheer opportunism."
Added to that, of course, they had fought against the English. "There was a huge, huge minority, maybe even a majority, of people in Ireland who were pro-German in the second World War."
Religion was important, too. "Most of them were fleeing from communists. We were hugely anti-communist. The Nazis had ceased to be the enemy and communists became the enemy, as did the whole idea of communism . . . And these anti-communists were also mainly Catholic. So they were helped in by members of the Irish church. By priests from Poland, Belgium, France."
The contrast with the attitude to other refugees remains stark. "It compares unfavourably with our attitude to the Jews before, during and after the war," O'Shannon says. "We had an attitude toward the Jews that was unsympathetic. Jews weren't popular. Aren't popular. There was always an underlying anti-Semitic attitude in official Ireland."
It was vital, he says, to detail this in the documentary. "It shows an ambivalence between a general acceptance of Nazi collaborators and Jews not being allowed in. It's bloody awful to think about it. It was bloody awful."
Yet, the actions of both the government, and of individuals, must be seen in its historical context, he believes. "I was making this point to a fellow in Brittany and he looked at me and said, 'Mr O'Shannon I know something of your history. You're an Irishman and you joined the Royal Air Force; what's the difference between that and a Breton joining the Nazi party?' And I said, damn it, you're right, I haven't got an answer to that, except to say that I believe in democracy. I think that if anybody joined the Nazi party or allied themselves to the Nazi party, they must remember and accept that they allied themselves to the Holocaust, one of the greatest crimes of mankind."
That O'Shannon's own military record was for years seen as something to be ashamed of illustrates the historical baggage which has for so long blocked any discussion of this episode.
"When you came out of the Air Force, you kept your head down. And I'm a bombastic bastard anyway and I didn't give a shit who knew or not. But I was actually in physical fights over this as a young man. Oh yes. It wasn't always easy. 'Traitorous bastard joining the British forces.' This was said to me by a general in our own army, in the Horseshoe Bar of the Shelbourne one night. I had to be stopped from f***ing belting him!"
Are we at a point when we can examine this history, free of such baggage?
"I hope that we're past it, but what I say in this is 'let's admit that we did this.' I'm making excuses for the people that did this because I'd sooner make excuses for them than let them make excuses for themselves, because what they were doing in many ways was inexcusable. They had their reasons. But it was wrong."
Hidden History: Ireland's Nazis is on RTÉ1 on Tue at 10.15pm