In November 1944, a radio operative returned from a special assignment to find that the rest of his battalion had left to train for an operation behind enemy lines – they would be disguised as an “American tank unit” in the Germans’ planned Ardennes counter-offensive. The returning soldier, Frank Stringer, and fellow Irishman James Brady, both served in this Waffen-SS unit. Two months later they found themselves in action against the Red Army, and remained in Germany’s service to the bitter end in Berlin.
The unlikely involvement of Stringer and Brady in the military wing of the SS – they came from Leitrim and Roscommon respectively – began in Guernsey before the second World War broke out. The two teenagers, British soldiers in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, went on a drinking spree that ended violently. Brady later claimed that he could not remember much about the incident “because I was too drunk”. They were convicted of assaulting a policeman and imprisoned, and became POWs when the Germans occupied the Channel Islands in 1940.
During the war the Germans revived the idea of recruiting Irish POWs to serve in their armed forces. Prisoners belonging to “national minorities” were segregated: Ukrainians and Poles were separated, Flemings and Walloons, Bretons and French, and Irish and British. The Irish writer Francis Stuart, who chose to go to Berlin in 1939, interviewed Irishmen to assess their suitability. But he soon tired of this – he was disappointed not to find a more enthusiastic nationalistic response. Irish POWs were isolated in a special camp near Friesack, where they were bombarded with anti-British propaganda which focused on Britain seizing Ireland’s “treaty ports” during the U-boat campaign. By the spring of 1941, the Friesack camp held between 150 and 200 men, who were badly treated.
Stuart later worked for the Germans’ foreign radio service, and eulogised Hitler in talks targeted at his audience at home – he was “a great leader” for what had become an “inspired nation”. The Soviets, however, halted the German rampage across Europe at Stalingrad. During the official mourning period for this military catastrophe, in February 1943, Stuart alluded to Nazi propaganda about the “heroes” of the Sixth Army by telling his listeners that this was an Easter Rising moment. “If I was a German,” he declared, “I should be filled with the deepest pride. I am glad to be living in a country that can produce such men.”
Hitler’s Irish volunteers – John Mulqueen on two Irish POWs who volunteered for the Waffen-SS
Sharpened pens – Alison Healy on the cattier side of writers
“I remember” – Tim Fanning on the power of cinema to unlock the secrets of memory and nostalgia
Prince of the church – Brian Maye on Cardinal Michael Logue
The Irish POWs who succumbed to the propaganda onslaught and volunteered to train as “saboteurs” – 11 in total – never matched the “heroism” standard set by Stuart.
In addition, discipline was not their strong point – most had run-ins with the authorities for various reasons and were held in custody. Some “disgraced themselves”, to quote a British intelligence official, with drunken offers to “fight all and sundry” in a Berlin café among the more minor offences. Overall, they lacked political convictions, and only two, Brady and Stringer, who did not make the grade as agents, joined the armed forces. None of them were dispatched to Britain or Ireland.
One of Stuart’s broadcasting colleagues, Jack O’Reilly, who also perused Irish history to reinforce his points, did eventually parachute into Ireland. In his radio talks he compared religious persecution in the Soviet Union with the Penal Laws era, and highlighted the brutality of the “Black and Tans” during the War of Independence. O’Reilly, however, was not impressed with the Germans’ propaganda operation and found its knowledge of the country to be “purely geographic”. He opted for an intelligence role.
But O’Reilly proved to be weak when it came to geography. In October 1943, the Luftwaffe flew him over the west Clare peninsula, and, extraordinarily, dropped him close to his home town of Kilkee, where he was well known, not least for his Berlin broadcasts. To make matters worse, he got lost. Asking some farmers for help, the word spread, and gardaí, who had heard a heavy aircraft flying overhead, were told about “a strange man carrying a heavy [wireless] case” on his way to Kilkee. O’Reilly reported to the Garda station for questioning, and eventually admitted that he had returned as a spy.
Sligowoman Elizabeth Mulcahy, who met her German husband Helmut Clissmann before the war, became involved in his intelligence work the next year when she visited the propagandists broadcasting to Ireland. They had little useful information, she remembered, and geographical knowledge did not extend to having a map of the country. And they could not learn much from the censored Radio Éireann. She described the news they heard, reception permitting, in saying: “There was a fuel scarcity, black bread and the death of a parish priest in Ballina.”
Mulcahy came home after the war, and secured a visa for her husband three years later. Stuart spent eight months in an internment camp, and he too, after some time, returned to Ireland. On the other hand, Frank Stringer and James Brady were court-martialled and received heavy prison sentences – the argument that they had been “abandoned to the enemy” fell on deaf ears. Ireland’s “accidental Nazis” did not get off lightly.