HistoryAdolf Mahr came to Ireland in 1927 as keeper of Irish antiquities in the National Museum. Although not a trained archaeologist, he made a considerable impression both as a scholar and as a promoter of archaeological research, encouraging a major initiative by Harvard University.
In 1934, he became director of the National Museum. It is said that his appointment was resented because of an overbearing and didactic manner, but such claims owe much to retrospective political typecasting. Mahr was a good candidate, and his directorship was characterised by his energetic approach to exploring and conserving Ireland's archaeological heritage. By 1939, he was an archaeologist of international standing. But Mahr, born in Austria to Sudeten German parents, was also a dedicated Nazi, who joined the party on April 1st, 1933, and a year later formed an Irish branch. He became its official leader.
So, far from being the figurehead of a quaint émigré organisation, Mullins shows Mahr to have been an active and ambitious leader in a sophisticated and disciplined network of Nazi parties controlled from Germany. As the political nature of the organisation became clear, and as Europe moved towards war, Mahr became an object of suspicion. In 1938, representations to the German legation resulted in him nominally ceding leadership of the Nazi party in Ireland, but a year later it was evident that he was still in effective charge, as Joseph Walshe of External Affairs warned de Valera. Providentially, he was on a combined business/holiday/Nazi Party trip to Switzerland and Germany with his family when war broke out, and the Irish government adroitly marked him down as on unpaid leave for the duration.
There is no hard evidence that Mahr spied while in Ireland, although topographical and other material that he accumulated during his archaeological surveys might have been of some use in the event of a German decision to invade Ireland. But as leader of the Nazi political organisation in Ireland he collected information on fellow Austrians and Germans in Ireland, and he denounced those whom he could not control. Stranded in Germany, he threw himself into war work in the Foreign Office. In 1941, he submitted proposals for improving propaganda broadcasts to Ireland, and shortly afterwards was appointed head of the Irland-Redaktion. There he oversaw the work of a strange assortment of Irish broadcasters, most significantly the writer Francis Stuart. In June 1944, ever anxious to better himself, Mahr made a bid to establish and run a new anti-Jewish radio station.
CATHAL O'SHANNON PROVIDES a generous foreword to this book. Like him, I differ from Gerry Mullins in his conclusions, which are at odds with the evidence that he and other writers have provided. Mullins asks: "What could Mahr have done differently? He joined the Nazi party in 1933, but so did millions of others." But most of them were in Germany. Mahr was safe in Ireland, and as a civil servant had a cast-iron excuse to steer clear of membership. Why should we feel sorry for such a man, released "dishevelled" and thin but otherwise unharmed from detention in 1946, recipient thereafter of a pension in hard currency for his truncated Irish service in a Germany where most people had nothing, displaying no signs of embarrassment or repentance, and loudly complaining that he should have his Irish job back?
It is important to separate assessment of Mahr's motivations and activities from the struggles his family endured as the Reich crumbled in 1945. The courage, enterprise and resolution displayed, particularly by his oldest daughter, should not be allowed to confer any benediction on Mahr's miserable political record before and during the war.
The curiosity of his pre-war friendship with individual Jews compounds rather than discounts the moral and intellectual evil of his enthusiastic participation in the most toxic forms of anti-Semitic propaganda. The decency and generosity of his children, who acknowledge the horrors of Nazism and their father's enthusiasm for Hitler while still honouring both their parents, should not blind us to this man's egregious history.
This interesting book is the latest in a distinctive genre of charitable writing about people with Irish backgrounds who engaged with Nazism before and during the war - William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), Frank Ryan and Sean Russell, who conspired with German intelligence against Irish interests, Francis Stuart, lionised as a Saoi in the 1990s "for singular and sustained distinctions in the arts" (presumably including dissimulation) by the same cultural organisation whose members were recently invited to pillory and defame Israel, and now the place-seeking, peevish Adolf Mahr - where the drama, complexity and pathos of their individual stories and relationships is thrown in the scales against the hard evidence of their free choice to help Hitler. Enjoy the book but not the author's verdict on its reprehensible subject.
Eunan O'Halpin is Bank of Ireland chair of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College Dublin. His next book, Churchill's Irish Secrets: British Intelligence and Ireland in the Second World War, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2008
Ireland's Nazi No 1: The Life of Adolf Mahr By Gerry Mullins Liberties Press, 253pp. €16.99