Madam, – It is tempting to portray Dr Eduard Hempel as a “reluctant” Nazi, but the photograph of him giving a Hitler salute at the Dublin Horse Show in August 1938 (in the company of president Douglas Hyde and taoiseach Éamon de Valera) paints another picture. Members of the German show-jumping team were entertained by another Nazi party member, Otto Reinhard, head of forestry at the Department of Lands (one of six Nazis on the state payroll).
Hempel’s NSDAP membership dates from July 1st, 1938, while Reinhard joined on September 1sst, 1939, shortly before leaving Ireland to assist the German war effort by overseeing timber production in the Carpathian mountains.
Hempel received the spy Hermann Goertz at his legation on Northumberland Road, in addition to using the legation’s transmitter to send sensitive information to Berlin. One historian, JP Duggan, claims that the Dieppe raid, on August 19th, 1942, was compromised as a result of data sent by Hempel’s transmitter (eventually seized in December 1943, after pressure from US envoy, David Gray, and stored in a safe at de Valera’s own bank branch, the Munster Leinster in Dame Street).
In Hempel’s favour, however, he was in a difficult position: trying to maintain normal diplomatic relations with a neutral country while German military intelligence agents (13 of whom were sent here from 1939 to 1943) held secret negotiations with IRA leaders in Dublin, Hamburg and Berlin. – Yours, etc,