Charles Bewley, Ireland's Minister to Berlin from 1933 to 1939, was a Nazi sympathiser and a rampant anti-Semite. The Department of External Affairs was aware of his views before he was posted to Berlin and Bewley's was undoubtedly a strange and ill-considered appointment. However, the combination of his beliefs and his posting make Bewley a compelling and intriguing subject for biographers. This short biography of a deeply flawed diplomat makes engaging reading.
Roth begins by providing readers with a short history of Irish-German diplomatic relations and Bewley's early career. The book then concentrates on Bewley's posting to Berlin and his wartime activities as a propagandist in Nazi Germany after leaving the Irish diplomatic service.
Bewley was born into a Quaker family in Dublin in 1888. He was educated at New College, Oxford, where he converted to Catholicism. Beginning a legal career, he drifted into Sinn Fein circles. Bewley was sent to Germany in 1921 as Irish trade representative. Following a bar room brawl in Berlin with Robert Briscoe, during which Bewley harangued Briscoe about his Jewish faith, Bewley's anti-Semitism came to the attention of the Dublin government. Bewley got off lightly with a verbal reprimand from his superiors.
In 1923, he returned to Ireland and, following an unsuccessful attempt to enter politics, to his legal practice. He was recalled to the diplomatic service in 1929 as Minister to the Vatican.
Despite a loathing for de Valera, which he made no secret of in his official diplomatic contacts, Bewley remained at the Vatican after the change of government in Ireland in 1932. The following year, seven months after the Nazis took office, he was posted to Berlin.
Roth shows that in seeking to comprehend Bewley's conduct in Berlin it is necessary to understand his pro-German sentiment in tandem with his strong anti-Communist and anti-British feelings. Bewley was a very complex character, no genius, but cunning and resourceful in a most dangerous manner. Using Bewley's confidential reports to Dublin from Berlin, Roth deconstructs his sanitised memoirs (Memoirs of a Wild Goose, Lilliput Press, 1990) in which his anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi outlook are toned down. This reporting shows a susceptible, perhaps gullible, diplomat being drawn further and further into a belief in the Nazi state and its trappings. Roth's close and judicious reading of his source material shows how unreliable Bewley's memoirs are. He also shows how, despite a reasonable understanding of the Hitler state and Nazi foreign policy, Bewley's confidential reports came to be increasingly clouded by the Nazi party line. It is also clear from Roth's analysis how Bewley's actions thwarted the attempts of Jewish refugees from Germany to gain visas to Ireland.
Dublin grew increasingly dissatisfied with his performance in the late 1930s. His reporting on Kristallnacht was particularly anti-Semitic and damning. Bewley, who had by now "gone native" in Nazi Germany, was recalled to Dublin in August 1939 as war loomed. He chose not to return, effectively firing himself from the diplomatic service. His wartime exploits have long fascinated historians, but until Roth, little was known about them. No research had been done into his propaganda writings for wartime German newspapers and journals, his publications (particularly his biography of Hermann Goering) or his clandestine activities for the German intelligence services during the war. Roth's research reveals Bewley as a small-time propagandist, writing on his favourite anti-British, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic themes. The importance of Bewley's work for the German intelligence services and his standing within the German security apparatus are explored and are dismissed by Roth as at best amateur. He argues that Bewley was not a reliable source and was not held in high esteem by the Third Reich, whose security agencies saw him as "too lazy and very timid".
The paradox of this is that Bewley's reports, with their anti-de Valera bias, arguing that the Taoiseach was co-operating with the British during the war and supporting the Allies, were, as historians have shown in the past decade, closer to the mark than Bewley and his German masters might have realised. Had the Germans taken them seriously, Ireland's wartime stance of neutral but with a certain consideration for the Allies, might have turned out very differently.
Michael Kennedy is Executive Editor of the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series, volume II of which was published recently.