Hitler's Irish Voices: The Story of German Radio's Wartime Irish Service by David O'Donoghue, with a Foreword by Professor J.J. Lee Beyond the Pale Publications, 236pp, £7.95 in UK
On December 19th 1937, the members of the German community in Dublin booked the Aberdeen Hall of the Gresham Hotel for their Christmas party. On the night, the balconies were decorated with Swastika flags and a large portrait of Adolf Hitler dominated the room. The highlight of the evening came when the German Minister to Ireland, Dr Eduard Hempel, led the assembled company, with right arms outstretched, in rousing choruses of the Horst Wessel Lied and the German national anthem, Deutschland uber Alles. Ignorance was bliss then, of course, but even after sixtyodd years, one's spine prickles at the thought of such a spectacle. Many of the adults present were members of the Nazi Party, and in less than two years some of the most prominent of them were holding high positions in the German military machine. One such was Adolph Mahr, Director of the Irish National Museum. He left this country on the outbreak of war, on leave of absence from his job, and was soon setting up Irland-Redaktion, the radio station that was to broadcast propaganda over the airwaves for practically the entire duration of hostilities.
The man who actively headed the station was Hans Hartmann, a Celtic scholar who lived and travelled in Ireland for various periods in the Thirties. (To add a personal touch, my brother-in-law studied under Hartmann in Hamburg in the Seventies, and had a Christmas card from him only last December). David O'Donoghue's book throws light on these men, and on the eccentric bunch of individuals they gathered about them in an endeavour to win over the Irish nation to their cause. Whether they had any real success is a moot point, but those tinny voices whispering out of the ether during the dark days of the war are still remembered vividly by those, possibly few, who heard them.
Most of the propaganda was aimed at keeping Ireland neutral, with promises of a unified island when the Third Reich won the war. Hartmann, it seems, did his best to keep anti-Semitism out of the broadcasts, all of his talks being given in the Irish language, in which he was fluent. In spite of accusations to the contrary, William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) had no control over or input into the content of Irland-Redaktion's material.
The most prominent Irish-born contributor to the station was Francis Stuart who, in 1940, had taken up a position lecturing in the English Department of Berlin University. Stuart, still a figure of controversy even in his nineties, then appeared to wish for a break-up of the old world order, and saw warlords such as Hitler and Stalin as the instruments to bring about such a catharsis. He has always struck me as being rather naive in his various philosophies, although I say this not as an exoneration of his actions but merely as a basis for understanding them.
Stuart gave his talks regularly during the war years and appears only to have ceased when requested to broadcast anti-bolshevist propaganda. He was always an admirer of the Russians, but expediency also formed an integral part of his make-up, and it was no coincidence that his cessation of radio work occurred when the Germans were obviously losing and the Allies were storming the gates of Berlin. As well as Stuart, a number of other rather idiosyncratic characters had gathered in the German city at the time. One such was John Francis O'Reilly, an adventurer from Co Clare, who was caught potato picking in the Channel Islands when the Germans invaded. Apparently a chancer of the front rank, O'Reilly managed to persuade no less than seventy-two other Irish labourers to journey to Germany with him in order to work in the munitions factories. The German authorities soon found that they had got more than they bargained for in this endeavour, for, as Dr O'Donoghue puts it: "The train journey from the north coast of France to Germany degenerated into bedlam with O'Reilly's `fusiliers' spending their savings on a massive drinking spree which caused havoc. The party invaded all compartments of the train and on several occasions pulled the communication cords causing an amount of confusion."
O'Reilly was later to join up with Hartmann's small team of broadcasters, but he soon grew tired of such sedentary labour. Looking for adventure, he volunteered to be sent to Ireland as a spy, was parachuted down near his home town of Kilkee and was quickly captured. In time he escaped and was betrayed by his father, a former Sergeant in the RIC, who had helped to arrest Roger Casement in 1916. The £500 reward the father got, along with the wad of money given to the son by the trusting Germans, helped to set John Francis up as a publican and hotel owner in Dublin when the war was over.
Some other characters who figure in this fascinating book are the IRA men Sean Russell and Frank Ryan - Russell died of a ruptured ulcer in a German submarine while being brought back to Ireland and, perhaps apocryphally, was said to have been got rid of by being shot out of a torpedo tube; Ryan died of unspecified illnesses in a hospital in Dresden. The rather sinister William Joyce, employing his own agenda, is peripheral to the story, as are the Irish woman, Susan Hilton, depressed and alcoholic; William Warnock, the Irish Charge d'Affairs in Berlin, possibly pro-German, certainly anti-British; and, of course, Goebbels, boss of the Ministry of Propaganda, and von Ribbentrop of the Foreign Office, each antagonistic to the other.
Dr O'Donoghue's book illuminates a little-known aspect of the second World War, certainly as it impinged on Ireland. His research has obviously been exhaustive, and he has personally interviewed most of the surviving participants. He has unearthed a number of highly interesting facts, one of the most telling of which is that the Irish Government only twice protested about the barrage of propaganda being beamed into the country. On both occasions, Francis Stuart was involved - once when he protested about the execution of IRA men in Belfast and, secondly, when he advised voters not to back Fine Gael. Otherwise, no attempts were made to block these broadcasts, although they were minutely monitored by G2, the Intelligence unit of the Irish Army. This all gives credence to the wag in Dublin Opinion of the time who, upon being told that Ireland was neutral, asked: "Neutral against whom?"
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic