blackisthelight

Irish-American antisemitism in New York

One of the major precursors the primes a group for violence against minorities is a sense of losing social position, and the Irish in New York often had a sense of losing ground to other ethnic groups, particularly Italians and Jews, during the 1920s and 30s. The election of the first Italian-American mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, symbolised a shift in the city’s power structure, and resulted in a sense of loss of influence for Tammany Hall and their Irish affiliates.

Organised antisemitic activity occurred in New York City during the late 30s and early 40s, with the Father Coughlin inspired Christian Front being front and centre of the violence, using anti-communism as their main excuse. The Front’s New York leader, Jack Cassidy, a young law school graduate was, predictably, Irish American as were the large majority of its members. The Christian Front had come out of Brooklyn based anti-communist organizations organising in Irish-Jewish neighbourhoods like Flatbush, and held its first meeting in July 1938 at the Church of St. Paul in Manhattan. Coughlin had printed a call for organizing in his paper Social Justice on 23rd of May calling for groups of no more than 25 to be formed and to recruit more into the movement. Coughlin had in turn been inspired by the earlier proposal by Pope Pius XI for laity to take up the cause of Catholic Action and organise for a more Catholic society. The group quickly settled on anti-Jewish activities as its main course of defending Christianity. The organisation grew quickly and formed numerous cells and branches acting independently of each other but overseen by Coughlin. One of the off-shoots of the Christian Front was called the Christian Labor Front which aimed to oust Jews and communists from labour unions.

An official Nazi ‘Gau’ had been set up in New York around 1931 and the city was the headquarters of the party in the US until it was dissolved in 1933. There were also branches of the Friends of Germany/Friends of the New Germany which became the American German Bund operating in New York throughout the 1930s, claiming up to 8,000 members in the city. The Christian Front took part in a large Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939 led by the German American Bund and a campaign of attacks on Jews across the city began soon afterwards. Irish communities were often anti-interventionist as historical animosity towards Britain, and in particular its military, led many, if not most, to view assisting Britain in a war as tantamount to treason. There was also a widespread dislike and distrust of the Soviet Union and its communist government, and the result was a strong contingent in the north-eastern US which opposed US entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Coughlin and his supporters tried to turn this isolationist view into an antisemitic one by painting Jews as the primary supporters of military intervention against Nazi Germany.

Newspapers played their part in inciting aggression. The Irish World and the long-running Catholic newpaper The Tablet printed stories questioning the extent of antisemitic persecution in Europe and asking why more was not being said about anti-Christian persecution there and in Mexico. The Tablet went further, suggesting Jews were responsible for attacks on Christians and that antisemitism was being exaggerated to cover for communist crimes. Both papers took strong pro-Coughlin stances when he had been taken off air by WMCA and defended his post-Kristallnacht comments that justified the Nazi campaign against Jews. In February 1939, at the height of Coughlin’s attacks on Jews, The Tablet (then operating as The Brooklyn Tablet) praised Coughlin in an editorial by Patrick Scanlon:

Fr. Coughlin has fearlessly and courageously discussed the Jewish problem that others would pass by in cowardly silence…. [No Catholic can honestly criticize] Fr. Coughlin’s very temperate reference to the part that a Jewish Weltanschauung contributed to the untoward world conditions.

Support for Coughlin was not uniform across Catholic America, and some papers like the Catholic Worker and hierarchy like Cardinal Hayes of New York pushed back against him. Sales pitches of Social Justice were used by Christian Front supporters to attack Jews. One seller in Times Square described his technique as insulting anyone who looked half-Jewish and hoping for a response that could be counteracted by a waiting group of supporters. There were large German and Italian communities in the city but it was Irish American gangs who attacked Jews in Queens and Brooklyn, damaging synagogues and boycotting businesses. Aslon J. Smith, writing in The Christian Century, described the gangs in New York as being ‘almost entirely Irish and Catholic’. The Jewish neighbourhoods targeted – Washington Heights, South Bronx and Flatbush were located near Irish neighbourhoods and Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. Near nightly gatherings by these and similar groups to denounce Jewish people and incite violence against Jewish communities were occurring in various parts of the city during the war. The overlap between the Christian Front and the NYPD, another group heavily represented by Irish Americans (the force was 66% Irish American) was notable, and an FBI investigation revealed 1500 NYPD members had tried to join the Christian Front.

A smaller faction, the Christian Mobilizers, led by Joe McWilliams (nicknamed Handsome Joe McNazi) appeared in July 1939 as a breakaway from the Christian Front and wanted to pursue these attacks further. McWilliams came originally from Oklahoma and claimed not to be a Catholic at a later court trial. He had been a strong communist supporter and friendly with many Jews up until the late 30’s. The Mobilizers recruited mainly from Irish Catholics and claimed to have former IRA members in their ranks. McWilliams boasted at the inaugural meeting to 500 local toughs:

I'm gathering around me the meanest, the toughest, the most ornery bunch of German soldiers, Italian veterans and Irish I.R.A. men in the country. I'm going to have the greatest collection of strong-arm men in the city. And if anybody tries to stop us . . . they'll think lightning hit them.

McWilliams played up the anti-interventionist card, stating at one meeting in 1940 that ‘the Jews want to destroy Hitler to the last Irishman’.

It's a revolution against the Jew first, then against Democracy, then against the Republican and Democratic parties. Both are rotten. Both useless. We are going to drive them both out and we are going to run this country with an iron hand, the way Hitler runs Germany.

McWilliams assembled goon squads from a motley collection of petty criminals and staged rallies urging attendees to acquire guns and ammunition and to train in small cells to fight a coming race war. McWilliams was busy, holding up to 20 protests and rallies a week throughout the city, and his gangs assaulted people on a nightly basis. He was equally at home in the gutters as he was on Park Avenue, moving seamlessly across the class divide and set up a political party called the American Destiny Party as a vehicle for publicity. The group worked closely with the Bund and an official merger was discussed but this idea was dropped after the leader of the Bund, Fritz Kuhn was arrested.

After his Kristallnacht-era broadcasts had elicited protests, groups sprung up to aid Coughlin and his messaging. Prominent defenders of Coughlin have been linked with Nazi agents, such as George Von Nosdall in New York, head of the Crusaders for Americanism who praised Fritz Kuhn as the ‘greatest living Christian American in the country’. Von Nosdall made a speech in defence of Coughlin in the Bronx where he addressed a crowd with the Nazi salute and said:

When we get through with the Jews in America they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing… Judaistic gore will soon flow in the streets of New York City!

Edward James Smythe was another New York Christian Front organiser with ties to Nazi Germany through Kurt Mertig and the Bund. The American National Party was active in New York and surrounding states and held meetings of several hundred in support of Coughlin, urging members to kill Jews and Communists, while other groups such as the Citizens Protective League or American Patriots, Inc. appealed to different demographics. Sporting clubs such as the Iron Guard or American Phalanx were established to act as underground paramilitary training groups to teach members in sabotage, street-fighting and guerrilla warfare, with some of the groups claiming IRA experience and membership. Practice runs consisted of vandalizing Jewish businesses and beating up anyone that interfered.

In January 1940, seventeen Christian Front members from Brooklyn were arrested and weapons seized as part of an FBI investigation, eleven of them came from Irish backgrounds. The defendants were charged with seditious conspiracy and the alleged plot involved bombing Jewish centres and left-wing offices and assassinating Jewish congressmen in the hope of sparking a race war. The jurors in the trial were sympathetic and the prosecution had a hard time proving such a large-scale plot would be carried out with a small amount of weapons. No verdict was returned, and The Tablet suggested that the only thing they were guilty of was ‘excessive patriotism’.

Antisemitic violence in the city peaked in 1943 but 1944 saw a further wave of incidents in New York with Irish gangs once again involved. Washington Heights in upper Manhattan saw the worst of the conflict, an area of the city with large numbers of Irish and Jewish residents. Demonstrations against Jewish businesses and refugees took place led by the Christian Front and Christian Mobilizers. Despite the crackdown on the Christian Front in 1940, antisemitic incidents increased after the US entry into the war with vandalism against synagogues, swastika graffiti and taunts of ‘Kill the Jews’ being shouted at worshippers. Often teenagers led the way, beating up Jewish boys and throwing stones at windows, acting on anti-Jewish sentiments they were being exposed to in the Irish community. Two gangs, the Amsterdams and the Shamrocks were prominent in this period. The appeals for police protection often fell on deaf ears, similar to the situation in Boston. It took intervention from Mayor La Guardia to instigate some attempts at de-escalation in the city. The local Catholic church was very reluctant to condemn the incidents. During the worst of the antisemitic violence during the war, Francis McIntyre, auxiliary bishop of New York, minimised the attacks on Jewish property and claimed that ‘the chalk doodlings of children have been used by paid publicity agents to conjure up the phantom of antisemitic hate to injure the Catholic population of New York’. It was not until January 1944 that a cross-community committee started to work together to rein in the gangs. In 1944, Joe McWilliams and 29 others were put on trial for seditious conspiracy under the Smith Act. McWilliams was the principal defendant, but the death of the judge caused a mistrial and the case was not prosecuted again.

In the South Bronx, a similar pattern played out. Christian Mobilizers and German American Bund co-operated in the neighbourhood and led street protests against Jewish targets. This then led to vandalism and the emergence of teenage gangs and assaults on Jews, which went on long after the main groups had been disbanded by the authorities. Posters calling for the elimination of the Jews appeared in the area. Jews fought back against the assaults and tensions simmered throughout the war. This was also a pattern in other neighbourhoods across the city. As the war wound down, so did the inter-ethnic conflict. The defeat of the Nazis and the revelations of the Holocaust may have tempered some of the animosity from Irish quarters, and allowed a renewed focus on Soviet communism as the major international threat. Locally, neighbourhoods may have gotten more accustomed to changing demographics and the economics of the war helped to end the Depression and the accompanying general dense of stagnation and frustration.

References

Bayor, Ronald H. (1988) Neighbours in Conflict – The Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941 2nd Ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Carlson, John Roy (1943) Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America New York: E.P. Dutton

Norwood, Stephen H., (2003) Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II American Jewish History , June 2003, Vol. 91, No. 2 (June 2003), pp. 233-267

Spivak, John L. (1940) Shrine of the Silver Dollar New York: Modern Age Books

Stack, John F. (1979) International Conflict in an American City – Boston’s Irish Italians and Jews, 1935-1944 Westport: Greenwood Press

Weitzman, Mark (2013) “Artisans … for Antichrist”: Jews, Radical Catholic Traditionalists, and the Extreme Right pp 265-282 from Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity Edited by Charles Asher Small, Leiden: Brill

Irish-American antisemitism in Boston

Boston is often considered the most Irish city outside of Ireland, and certainly in the Americas. It’s history of large-scale immigration from Ireland has permanently shaped its identity and the city still resonates with Irish people, although often the fondness now has a tinge of embarrassment, as for distant cousins with strange notions of home. By the interwar period, the city’s demographics led to large Jewish and Italian populations living alongside the Irish in the city. A strong sense of Catholicism remained a defining feature of the Irish communities at the time, along with an everlasting grudge against British imperialism, opposition to godless communism and a self-perception as the underdogs that had by then a very questionable basis in reality. Irish political power in the city by the 1930’s extended to control of City Hall, state and federal Senators and Congresspeople, the police department and many other elements of the city and state power structures.

During the depression, an Irish-American priest from Detroit (although born in Ontario) Father Charles Coughlin rose to a position of immense power and influence through his political campaigning driven by an immensely popular radio programme. Coughlin had pioneered both religious televangelism and right wing talk radio from the late 1920’s in a nationally syndicated radio program that drew millions of listeners on a weekly basis alongside huge donations. Originally a supporter of FDR, Coughlin fell out with the president and started a new political party and social movement called the National Union for Social Justice which ran as the Union Party in 1936 elections. An accompanying newspaper called Social Justice proved very popular and was used by Coughlin to spread his ideas. While Coughlin had long used antisemitic rhetoric, following Kristallnacht in 1938 the anti-Jewish rhetoric was ratcheted up to fever pitch and a full-throated endorsement of Nazi policies was spewed out in Coughlin’s radio broadcasts and print. Coughlin credited Dublin priest Father Denis Fahey with solidifying his theological hatred of Jews and strongly promoted Fahey’s work to his immense audience. Coughlin was very popular in Boston among the Irish there and his followers became wrapped up in the hateful targeting of Jewish communities.

For several years Boston became a hotspot for antisemitic attacks by Coughlin’s followers and a closer look at Boston (and New York) in this period reveals how central Irish-American activists were to the organised antisemitism of the period. The Spanish Civil War had motivated Boston Catholics to come out in support of Franco and the Nationalist cause in the name of anti-communism. High profile Boston clergy and politicians such as Cardinal William O’Connell, Congressman John McCormack and Senator David Walsh all made public campaigns in support of Franco. O’Connell, primate of Boston and New England, declared Franco a defender of the Christian civilization in Spain after his planes had bombed and killed a thousand civilians in Barcelona on 18 March 1938. These campaigns motivated Catholic groups in Boston to agitate for the nationalist cause and may have led to networks that responded to the war with Germany a few years later. Long-held antagonism towards Britain as well as local ethnic tensions led Boston-Irish to tend strongly towards isolationism. This position was also taken up by the large Boston Italian community, which left the Jewish community, painfully aware of the persecution in Europe, as the leading pro-democracy and pro-intervention voice in the city. Cardinal O’Connell made multiple anti-intervention statements including one that posited supporters of his position as ‘real’ Americans and could be seen as a pointed dig at Jewish Bostonians:

'It is hard for me to understand why some of the propagandists are allowed to cry down the normal wish of the American people for peace. What is their purpose? They cannot be real Americans, because real Americans think of their own country first. There are certain expatriates, I think you know whom I mean—who are raising their voices in loud accents with the preposterous proposition that America sink her individuality and become a sort of tail-end of a foreign empire.’

Despite facing widespread discrimination and abuse, the city’s Jewish representatives strongly cautioned against condemning the Irish or Italian communities as a whole for the activities of some of their members. The Jewish Advocate, a Boston based newspaper, cautioned against allowing investigations of Nazi and fascist groups to “to degenerate into an indiscriminate alien-baiting campaign.”

Coughlin received more electoral support in Boston than any other city and Mayor Jim Curley called it ‘the most Coughlinite in America’. Under O’Connell’s watch, Social Justice was sold outside every Catholic church in the city. This was in spite of O’Connell’s animosity towards Coughlin who he had repeatedly spoken out against since April 1932. While O’Connell thought Coughlin had gone too far in his rhetoric, they still shared many beliefs, such as anti-communism and isolationism. O’Connell had bought the local Catholic newspaper The Pilot in 1908 and turned it into the official organ of the diocese. The pages were frequently used to minimize Hitler’s actions during the 1930’s and rally support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In the 1936 elections three Democratic congressmen from strongly Irish districts ran on the Union Party ticket, and South Boston was a large base of support for Coughlin.

A New York based Catholic priest named Father Edward Lodge Curran was closely associated with Coughlin and spoke frequently at public events where he criticized Jews for involving the US in the war and praised Marshall Petain as a ‘great and noble soul’. One such event was the Evacuation Day events of 1941 which coincided with St. Patrick’s Day. Evacuation Day was a date to remember the evacuation of British troops from Boston in 1776. This was a large city-sponsored event where Curran made a speech denouncing the US entry into the war, despite the attack on Pearl Harbour. Curran was editor of the largest Catholic newspaper in the US, the Brooklyn Tablet and also wrote a column for the Gaelic-American, a Coughlinite paper in New York. The planned appearance was protested vociferously by many in the city. He was described as Frances Sweeney as a ‘mouthpiece for Coughlin’ and as a ‘fascist demagogue' and disgrace to the Catholic church by Professor Frederick L. Schuman. Despite, or perhaps partly because of the controversy, the events were a huge success with record crowds turning out to hear Curran, and his speech lambasting ‘internal enemies’ received a standing ovation. These events in 1941 led to the creation of the American-Irish Defense Association by Sweeney and other liberal Irish-Americans in Boston. Sweeney was a journalist and antifascist activist who helped to counter the anti-Jewish propaganda pumped out by Coughlin to a receptive audience.

Following Coughlin’s hard turn into antisemitism and pro-Nazism, a group called the Christian Front was formed among his supporters for the purpose of establishing a street presence and with a view to paramilitary activity. In the early years of the war the Boston Christian Front acted as a propaganda outfit for Nazi Germany, screening films and distributing official Nazi literature from its headquarters in Roxbury. The antisemitic campaign in Boston was led by the New England leader of the Christian Front, Francis P. Moran who was named as national director of the Christian Front by Coughlin in 1939. Moran made speeches blaming Jews for starting the war and accused them of conspiring to get Americans killed in the fighting. The start of the campaign was a film showing organised by Moran at the Hibernian Hall in June 1941 where the Nazi propaganda film Sieg in Westen (Victory in the West) was shown to the audience. Meetings at the hall in Roxbury, near Jewish neighbourhoods, attracted up to 500 people and started with Nazi salutes. Rumours were spread stating that Jews were avoiding the draft and engaging in war-profiteering. The fear and hatred was building to a boiling point. Long standing anti-British grievances manifested as pro-German sentiment and were endorsed by the Mayor and other city officials through Evacuation Day and St. Patrick’s Day events which sometimes ended in group attacks on Jewish people. Many of the Christian Front activists were tied up with Nazi agents operating in the US and German-American Bund members.

During the war almost daily attacks were recorded on Jewish residents of Boston’s Dorchester neighbourhood and neighbouring Roxbury and Mattapan. Most of the perpetrators were identified as young Irish-Americans from nearby neighbourhoods like South Boston and Fields Square. Gangs would go into Dorchester to go ‘Jew-hunting’, assault and intimidate Jewish residents and attack Jewish businesses and synagogues. The attacks were called a series of ‘small scale pogroms’ by The Day, a Jewish newspaper based in New York. Accusations were also levelled at the Boston police and city officials (dominated by Irish-Americans) for failing to intervene to prevent the violence by Frances Sweeney. One incident involved two Jewish boys being arrested following an attack by an Irish gang. After the cops showed up during the assault, the police detained, beat and prosecuted the two boys for complaining that the assailants were allowed to leave. An Irish Catholic judge later found the Two Jewish boys guilty of affray. Women and children were frequently targeted in the attacks and residents reported being afraid to leave their houses, even during the day.

The events were mostly ignored by the Boston press. It was not until a PM (A New York based daily newspaper) front page story in October 1943 that the violence was openly admitted and discussed among the politicians of the day, and public denouncements of the violence were voiced by civic leaders. Previously, concerns had been raised but dismissed by the mayor and others more interested in ignoring the problems. A special investigation into police brutality found several members of the Boston PD guilty of assaults on Jews and the Police Commissioner, Joseph Timilty, was fired. Despite this reaction, violent incidents did not peak until later in 1944, with Dorchester High School being one of the centres of the attacks. Irish-American city councillors refused to back any programs aimed at reducing tensions and violence among the youth of the city, seeing such things as smears on the good name of Irish communities.

Incidents tailed off after the war in the wake of the revelations of the Holocaust, but a few years later, once again grew more common as the Red Scare took hold and Jews were caught up in the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Cardinal O’Connell’s successor, Richard Cushing was more accommodating of interfaith dialogue and made efforts to include Jewish groups as part of his civic duties. His tenure represented a shift in the attitudes of the Church hierarchy in the city in relation to its Jewish inhabitants, but Cushing was still a fervent anti-communist who endorsed the John Birch Society and other conspiratorial and anti-Jewish groups under the banner of fighting communism.

After the war, another Boston Irish Catholic priest, a leading Jesuit named Leonard Feeney preached antisemitic speeches to fervent supporters in Boston Common on Sundays and attracted former Christian Front supporters to his cultish group called Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. His followers were forbidden from communicating with their parents, earning personal income or having sex. Feeney targeted Harvard students and offered recruits free room, board and tuition. A description of one of his sermons gives a flavour of his rhetoric:

‘At the center of an ever widening ring of people, without an overcoat, on a small, rough, wooden platform, stood a short plump man in the black suit of a clergyman, his arms waving in the air, his white hair tossing about above his glasses, his shrill voice carrying over the noise of traffic on nearby Charles Street.

“Brotherhood is the bunk,” cried the little clergyman, “the most absolute nonsense. You Catholics out there—do you know the Jews are trying to take over this city? And the Protestants are helping them. Why, everyone knows that. Everybody knows that to be true. The Jews run the business end, and the Protestants, the religious. And this is supposed to be a Catholic city.”

A woman's voice said something above the general murmur of the crowd. The little man in black turned to her and gasped. “How dare you say such things. You're disgraceful, I'm very much ashamed to hear you say such things.”

The woman trembled, almost cried, but repeated her remark. “Is this what our boys fight and die for, Father? Is this why Protestants and Jews fight to save all of us?”

The white-haired speaker stopped his talk. He called the woman names: “a Jew mistress ... a horrid, degenerate, sexual pervert,” and other choice epithets, ending his attack with, “you filthy man, you.” The woman almost fainted. She stayed, but said no more.’

Scuffles were commonplace between his supporters and Harvard students, including a young Bobby Kennedy, who took issue with Feeney’s preaching. Feeney was a former Boston College professor and taught theology at the Jesuit College in Weston, Massachusetts. Prior to his arrival at St. Benedict’s in Boston city centre, he had edited America, the nationwide Catholic magazine and published several volumes of poetry. He was later the editor of a magazine called The Point which frequently published antisemitic writings such as Jewish Invasion of Our Country – Our Culture Under Siege which ran in the January 1957 edition. Feeney was a fervent supporter of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, the ’no salvation outside the church’ doctrine which led him to vigorously assail all other religions, but Jews in particular. This gave rise to the term ‘Feeneyism’ which is considered heretical by the Catholic Church and also known as the ‘Boston Heresy’. Feeney was silenced by Cardinal Cushing, which he ignored and then excommunicated in 1953 for heresy. He died in 1978.

Boston remains a nexus for far-right Irish American activity today. More recent groups such as the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Club (or NSC-131 – the 131 standing for ACA or anti-communist action) have tried to develop a presence in the city and the broader New England region, latching on to St. Patrick’s Day events and courting Irish far-right groups in a bid to boost legitimacy on both sides of the Atlantic. Central to much of the rhetoric from such groups is a sense of the Irish as underdogs, undeserving of the criticisms of wider White America, and attempting to exploit the grievances of a centuries long struggle against colonialism as fuel to light fires of hatred towards minorities. This line has been broadly pushed by other American far right groups, regardless of their specific ethnic make-up or affiliation, alongside the Irish slaves myth and used to justify anti-Black hatred and discrimination. It has been heartening to see, in the spirit of Frances Sweeney, that public demonstrations by far-right in Boston have usually been strongly opposed by the city’s present day residents and long may that continue.

Sources:

Crosby, Donald F., (1971) Boston's Catholics and the Spanish Civil War: 1936-1939 The New England Quarterly , Mar., 1971, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Mar., 1971), pp. 82-100

Feldberg, Michael (2012) American Heretic: The Rise and Fall of Father Leonard Feeney, S.J. American Catholic Studies , Summer 2012, Vol. 123, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 109-115

Goldstein, Jenny (2001) Transcending Boundaries: Boston’s Catholics and Jews, 1929-1965 Brandeis University Thesis

Lebowicz, Matt (2017) When Boston was America’s ‘capital’ of anti-Semitism Times of Israel 4 September 2017

Norwood, Stephen H., (2003) Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II American Jewish History , June 2003, Vol. 91, No. 2 (June 2003), pp. 233-267

Savadore, Laurence D. (1951) Father Feeney, Rebel from Church, Preaches Hate, Own Brand of Dogma to All Comers The Harvard Crimson

Spivak, John L. (1940) Shrine of the Silver Dollar New York: Modern Age Books

Stack, John F. (1979) International Conflict in an American City – Boston’s Irish Italians and Jews, 1935-1944 Westport: Greenwood Press

Warren, Donald (1996) Radio Priest – Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio New York: The Free Press

James Kopp, doctor killer

Ireland has long been used as a refuge for far-right activists avoiding the consequences of their actions. Breton SS members, genocidal Croatian priests, rootless neo-Nazi intellectuals and many more have found themselves washed up on the island at one time or another. One such fugitive was an American assassin on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list who hid out in Dublin at the turn of the millennium.

Since the late 70s, and peaking in the 90s, the abortion wars have raged across the US and sometimes bled over the borders. Bomb attacks, shootings, assassinations, assaults and intimidation have all played a part in the movement against abortion rights led by Christian fundamentalists. These clandestine activities worked hand in hand with legal methods such as long term strategies of media campaigns and political pressure, which in 2022 led to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and a new era of state mandated restrictions on bodily autonomy. According to the National Abortion Federation, anti-abortion activists committed at least 42 bombings and 196 arsons of clinics, and 11 murders of abortion providers in the US between 1977 and 2021. In October 1998 as part of the violence, a Jewish ob/gyn doctor named Barnett Slepian was shot and killed at his home in Amherst, New York by anti-abortion militant James Kopp in an attack that was almost identical to several unsolved attempted murders of doctors across Canada and the US. Five of the victims, including Slepian, had been shot with a sniper rifle through a window of their home. Kopp had adopted the nom de guerre of Atomic Dog and was a hardened militant, intent on playing his role in what he saw as the defence of innocent life. He was soon suspected of the Slepian murder and after being placed on the FBI’s top ten most wanted list in December 1998, Kopp fled to Ireland, via Mexico, and managed to evade capture for over two years.

Kopp was not an outlier, he was a central figure in the protest movement and had been arrested dozens of times in relation to his activities at clinics. Kopp was born in California in 1954 and achieved a master’s degree in Embryology from California State University. He became involved in anti-abortion activity after his girlfriend had an abortion. Kopp was affiliated with a Catholic anti-abortion group called The Lambs of Christ, and an underground paramilitary group called the Army of God. He had multiple arrests for actions taken against clinics, and claimed to have invented a type of blockade that was difficult for police to deal with. As a member of the anti-abortion network, he travelled constantly across the US and went on missions to Europe and South East Asia. Kopp was involved in traditional Catholicism, (or trad-cath) theology, a dissident branch of Catholicism that rejects many of the modernising reforms carried out by Pope Paul VI following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s. The reforms adopted by the council included the adoption of the vernacular language for church services and a rejection of the concept of collective guilt of Jewish people for the death of Jesus. Kopp’s links to the trad-cath Society of Saint Pius X sect were investigated by Canadian police in relation to the shootings of doctors in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Hamilton.

While on the run in Dublin, Kopp regularly attended the SSPX church, Saint John’s on Mounttown Road in Dún Laoghaire. The church is one of seven chapels in Ireland currently run by the Society. SSPX has a long history of involvement with antisemitic and far-right activity, and has spawned a smaller extremist off-shoot called SSPX-Resistance which also has a presence in Ireland and many further connections to holocaust denial and far-right activity. The FBI claimed that Klopp was assisted by pro-life groups while on the run in Ireland, but no direct evidence to this effect has been produced, and the claim was denied at the time by anti-abortion groups. In 1983 Ireland had adopted the draconian Eight Amendment to the Constitution which strictly prohibited abortion access but this had not prevented anti-abortion groups such as Youth Defence from campaigning against any perceived liberalisation of the abortion laws. Youth Defence had adopted some of the tactics of the US abortion wars, including aggressive picketing and intimidation of abortion healthcare advocates. The group has links with trad-cath circles and made important international connections with other like-minded organisations. Reports of Youth Defence’s activities can be found in literature published around the time of Kopp’s time in Ireland from the SSPX-aligned International Third Position group alongside advertisements for genocidal anti-Jewish literature and scene reports for Blood and Honour. The ITP was based in London and led by Italian fascist Roberto Fiore, a wealthy and well-connected politician who has maintained his connections with Ireland since. Two of Youth Defence’s prominent members, Justin Barrett and James Reynolds went on to form the far-right National Party in 2016, and another, Michael Quinn, founded a short-lived neo-Nazi group called the Democratic Right Movement in 2010. During an interview in the run-up to the 2018 referendum to appeal the Eight Amendment, Barrett advocated exactly what Kopp had done, executing doctors who provided abortion services. Kopp also had contacts in England among anti-abortion activists there. During his time as an activist in Europe, Kopp served spells in jail in Manchester and Rome alongside his close friend Maurice Lewis, a British-Canadian activist, and would have had extensive connections across the continent, which may have proved valuable during his time on the lam, but his main source of support was from friends in the US, and this was to prove to be his downfall.

Kopp was adept at identity fraud. He adopted the identities of deceased babies of a similar age to himself and managed to acquire several Irish driving licenses and passports which allowed him to work and travel. He acquired an Irish passport in the name of John O’Brien but his usual pseudonym was Timothy Guttler and he spent some of his time in Ireland living in the Morningstar Hostel near Smithfield, and the Iveagh Hostel near Christchurch. He found casual work, including a spell at a hospital on Hume Street, and was a regular at Bewley’s on Grafton Street. Meanwhile, FBI agents in the US were bugging Kopp’s friends in New York – convicted clinic-bomber Dennis Malvasi and his wife Loreta Marra, and hoping to get a lead on Kopp’s location. A series of phone calls and emails led them to believe he was hiding out in Ireland. As the net closed in, a journalist at the Irish Mirror received a tip-off from a Garda source and the paper ran a front-page story, alongside Kopp’s photo, about the hunt for him focusing on Ireland. Kopp got the message and fled to France, taking the ferry from Rosslare to Cherbourg and on to the town of Dinan in Brittany. After a few days he was arrested by French detectives on 29th of March, 2001 and later extradited to New York to face his murder trial.

Members of Army of God, a violent extremist group active in the abortion wars, protested outside the courthouse during his trial calling for his acquittal, and have supported him since his trial. Members or supporters of the group (which uses a leaderless resistance model to avoid centralised repression and deniable association) have been convicted of bombings of clinics and murder of doctors. The group has produced a manual for activists wanting to pursue illegal means in the anti-abortion campaign. Part of the manual reads ‘…we are forced to take up arms against you. Our life for yours, a simple equation. Dreadful. Sad. Reality nonetheless. You shall be tortured at our hands. Vengeance belongs to God only. However, execution is rarely gentle. The book also contains a dedication to Kopp – ‘Special thanks to Atomic Dog, you nuclear canine’. Klopp confessed to the shooting of Dr. Slepian and was convicted of second degree murder. He was sentenced to a term of twenty five years to life.

Sources:

Cusack, Jim, Humphreys, Joe and O’Morain, Padraig (2001) Anti-abortion groups say they did not meet Kopp Irish Times 31st March 2001

Clarkson, Frederick (1998) Anti-Abortion Bombings Related SPLC Intelligence Report Summer 1998 SPLC

Jefferis, Jennifer (2011) Armed For Life – The Army of God and Anti-Abortion Terror in the United States (PSI Guides to Terrorists, Insurgents, and Armed Groups) Santa Barbara: Praeger

Risen, James (2022) Anti-Abortion Zealots Were Precursor to Donald Trump’s Right-Wing Shock Troops The Intercept 11th July 2022

Wells, Sniper (2008) Sniper – The True Story of Anti-Abortion Killer James Kopp Canmore: Altitude

Vulliamy, Ed, McDonald, Henry, Jeffries, Stuart (2001) Abortion Death Hunt Muzzles 'Atomic Dog' The Guardian 1st April, 2001

https://spotlightontheright.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/no-2-justin-barrett-michael-quinn/

https://www.dailyedge.ie/jim-jefferies-abortion-sketch-3977137-Apr2018/

https://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/kopp-links.shtml

Charles Bewley, Ireland’s Ambassador to Nazi Germany

Some people fail spectacularly at their jobs and the story of Charles Bewley, the Irish Minister to Hitler’s Germany is one such tale. The word diplomat has come to be a synonym for tactful and level-headed, with international representatives expected to navigate difficult political situations with a calm and measured attitude, but Bewley refused to adhere to convention.

(Note: Due to the nature of the Irish Free State during this period, the title of Ambassador was not used, instead titles of envoy, minister or chargé d’affairs were variously used.)

Charles Bewley was born into a wealthy unionist Quaker family in Dublin in 1888 but converted to Catholicism and became an Irish nationalist involved in the struggle for independence. He trained as lawyer at Oxford and King’s Inn College in Dublin, and acquired a high level of competency in German, French and Italian. As a Sinn Féin member in 1921, Bewley was appointed to a position in Berlin as consul for trade matters for the as-yet unrecognised Free State or Republic. The nascent state was making connections to further its economic independence from Britain, and Germany was seen as a likely partner. He was soon involved in a row when he was ejected from a Jewish-owned Berlin nightclub for making antisemitic remarks about Robert Briscoe who was also in Berlin at the time. Briscoe was a Jewish member of the Republican movement and later a long-time Fianna Fáil TD and Lord Mayor of Dublin. Briscoe was a gun-runner for the IRA and his mission to Germany resulted in a tug-boat called Frieda landing in Waterford with a large supply of arms for the IRA along with several other shipments. Briscoe reported on the night club incident with Bewley in a letter to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, George Gavan Duffy:

It seems Mr. Bewley arrived there in the evening in a rather advanced state of intoxication, and on my name being mentioned burst forth into a string of most abusive and filthy language. His chief point of argument as an excuse for this attitude was my religion. His expressions about me in connection with my faith were evidently of so strong and so vile a nature as to warrant his forcible ejection. He returned, however, almost immediately and then abused the proprietors until he was again chucked out and forbidden to ever enter their premises again.

Gavan Duffy was well aware of Bewley’s antisemitic views, certainly from Briscoe and also from John Smith Chartres, one of the principal Treaty negotiators and then serving as the envoy to Berlin who reported:

I have known Bewley for several years and have a high regard for him. I know he is mad on the Jewish question and the incident you reported … was inexcusable.

When Bewley applied for the post of Chargé d’Affaires in Berlin, Gavan Duffy recommended that he be posted to a more Catholic area. This was not particularly because of his antisemitic leanings as such, but because they were so pronounced as to be clearly interfering with his professional judgment, an opinion supported by Chartres. Bewley was supported at the time by Joseph Walshe who would later assume Gavan Duffy’s role. Bewley returned to Dublin in 1923, as the Berlin mission was closed down until 1929, and worked as a prosecutor for the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedhal government. He has been described as aggressively pro-Treaty and supportive of the execution of Erskine Childers by Free State forces. In 1929 Bewley was appointed by Walshe as Irish Minister Plenipotentiary to the Vatican where he served for four years and was awarded a knighthood for his service by the Pope in 1933. A move back to Berlin followed as he was appointed Irish Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to Germany in July 1933 after impressing DeValera during a visit to the Vatican. Once in Berlin, he made waves among the English speaking and diplomatic communities with his crude anti-British jibes. In contrast to his predecessor, D.A. Binchy, who had foreseen the horrific reality of Nazi power, Bewley’s reports from Berlin show that he was enamoured with and enthusiastic about Hitler’s reign and National Socialism, particularly as an authoritarian bulwark against communism. His letters justify the actions of the Nazis in eliminating political rivals and attacking Jews as necessary actions to secure the nation from the perils of communism.

It is true that a promise was given at the same time that the activities of the Jews in commerce would be restricted by law, and it would appear certain that such restriction will be drastic when it comes. Such measures would certainly be in harmony with the general public opinion, which partly as the effect of propaganda and partly as the result of the singularly provocative conduct of the Jews themselves in former years is extremely anti-Semitic.

Unlike many of the diplomats stationed in Germany, he attended several of the notorious mass rallies in Nurnberg that were staged as expressions of Nazi power. He described one as an ‘unqualified triumph’ and praised Hitler as the ‘finest orator that I have ever heard’. Bewley, like many right-wingers at the time, was also concerned with the influence of Freemasonry which he saw as pro-British, pro-Communist, anti-Catholic and pro-Jewish. The association of Freemasonry with subversive Jewish interests led to the forcible dissolution of the German masonic lodges in 1935 by the Nazi regime. Bewley was susceptible to conspiracy theories, and felt sufficiently moved by the question of ritual murders of Christians by Jews to send an official four page report to Walshe, concluding that it was only logical for the German government to act against such a potentially fatal influence. Most of Bewley’s reports are not stated as representing his own personal views, but instead he forcefully represents Nazi viewpoints (and implies they were consensus viewpoints in Germany) without any contradiction, statements which could easily have been taken verbatim from Der Stürmer. A letter on the Czechoslovakian situation classifies Czechoslovakia as a threat to Germany. Another letter dated 15th March 1939 appears supportive of Monsignor Tiso’s National Party in Slovakia for its ultra-Catholic nature.

In his declaration Monsignor Tiso has emphasised the Catholic character of his government, and announced the introduction of new legislation dealing with the Jewish problem on German lines.

Tiso’s enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis would lead directly to the deaths of over 69,000 Jews, over two thirds of the pre-war Jewish population of Slovakia.

Bewley was also influenced by the writing of Fr. Denis Fahey, a well-known Dublin-based theologian and prolific antisemite. A December 1938 report to Walshe on antisemitism in Germany shows a man fully immersed in antisemitic conspiracy theories who recommends Walshe read Fahey’s The Rulers of Russia, a book that produced lists of Jews supposedly responsible for the spread of communism. The report fully justifies repressive actions against Jewish communities by German, Italian, Czechoslovakian, Polish and Hungarian governments on the grounds of Jewish disloyalty to their ‘host nations’, and supposed allegiance to Zionism and communism. The report also claimed American Jewish bankers financed communist movements in Europe, that Jews were in control of banking, academia, arts and the media, and attacked individual Jewish businessmen as swindlers and fraudsters in need of intervention by state forces. It went on to warn against Jewish immigration, a point particularly relevant to Bewley’s position as Irish Minister in charge of approving visas for Jews hoping to leave Nazi Germany for Ireland. He would run up against Briscoe again in this regard, as Briscoe was advocating for sanctuary for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. An example of the depth of his antisemitic thought can be seen in the letter.

A further reason given in Germany and all the other countries of Central Europe for introducing discriminating legislation against the Jews is their demoralizing influence on the communities among which they live. It is a notorious fact that the international white slave traffic is controlled by Jews. No one who has even a superficial knowledge of Germany can be ignorant that the appalling moral degradation before 1933 was, if not caused, at least exploited by Jews. The German stage was the most indecent in Europe; it was a Jewish monopoly. German papers appeared of a purely pornographic nature: the proprietor and editor were invariably Jews. Jewish members of the Reichstag were responsible for the introduction of a number of measures abolishing legal penalties for abortion and a number of other practices which are visited by the most severe punishments in every Christian country. Jewish emigrants in the countries which they have been permitted to enter have created and are creating grave moral scandals and are a source of corruption of the populations among which they dwell….There are of course very many other reasons adduced for the elimination of the Jewish element from the public life of Germany: I cannot for obvious reasons enter into them all. I desire however to point out that the facts here stated are well known to everyone who has lived in Central Europe, or who has taken the trouble to make enquiries from non-Jewish sources into the situation as it really is.

Bewley was aware of the intense legal restrictions placed on Jewish Germans by this time by the Nazis and fully justified the exclusion of Jews from most areas of German society. He was also concerned with what he imagined was Jewish repression of Catholics in Eastern Europe. Bewley justified the Nazi measures by comparing them to previous anti-Jewish Papal decrees.

It is perhaps well to refer to the fact that very few, if any, of the measures introduced in Germany in relation to the Jewish problem cannot be paralleled in the measures introduced by the Popes in relation to the Jews of Rome. Under various Papal decrees Jews were forbidden to have Christian servants. Christians who had recourse to Jewish doctors were excommunicated. Jews lived in special parts of the city and carried a distinctive mark (a wheel or circle) on their clothing, marriages between Jews and Christians were not admitted.

Bewley claimed to be unaware of any German cruelty towards the Jewish community, despite outlining in great detail actions that most people would consider outrageously cruel. Instead, he claimed that the news reports of attacks against the Jewish community were invented or exaggerated by Jewish controlled newspapers in England. English Jews are particularly singled out for attack, deriding English media outlets as ‘Anglo-Jewish agencies’, and labelled as being both anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. A letter to Walshe dated 25th January 1939 is a strongly worded missive suggesting that fifty German Christian refugees that had been admitted to Ireland were secretly Jewish and that it would be impossible to deport these ‘undesirable types’.

There is therefore, so far as I have been informed, no safeguard that the 'non-Aryan Christians' admitted into Ireland are not Jews who have applied for Christian baptism merely for the material benefits which they hoped to derive from such a step… Even if territory were found for the settlement of Jews from Europe, and permission were given to the Jews admitted into Ireland to obtain citizenship of it, there is no guarantee whatever that the Jews in question would wish to leave Ireland for, say, Guyana or Madagascar, and in this event it would not be possible to deport them. There would therefore be no possibility of getting rid of these persons for the rest of their lives, while their children would presumably be Irish citizens… It has been the experience of numerous other countries that the Jews admitted for the purpose of agriculture abandon their agricultural work at the first opportunity and go to live in the cities. In Ireland it would in any event be impossible for them to obtain holdings of land. It is therefore safe to say that the fifty persons admitted for training in agricultural work will abandon the country for the cities, where they will live at the expense of the Irish community… The well-to-do families who have guaranteed to maintain 'temporarily' twenty adults and twenty children have obviously no idea of the impossibility of getting rid of these people after the expiration of the temporary period. It cannot be expected that they will continue to maintain them for the rest of their lives. Therefore the persons in question will either be supported directly by the Irish taxpayer, or will obtain employment and thereby increase the number of Irish unemployed… The twenty children will presumably enter one of the already overcrowded professions, thereby increasing the difficulty of making a living for the Irish students who have received the same education at the expense of their families.

It is worth noting again that as head of the Irish Legation, Charles Bewley had an important role to play in the issuing of work visas or refugee status to German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution prior to the war. Less than a hundred were granted leave to enter Ireland despite the massive persecution and large volume of applicants. Bewley was recalled from his post shortly before the war and replaced by William Warnock. He refused to return to Dublin, instead remaining in Berlin working as a journalist for German newspapers including Die Aktion published by the Ministry of Propaganda. He wrote under his own name, clearly identifying himself as the former Irish Minister. Bewley’s articles concentrated on anti-British topics but also included antisemitic material. He was also employed by a Swedish news agency run by Joseph Goebbels and divided his time between Italy and Germany, using an altered diplomatic passport and pretending to be an official Irish representative.

Bewley acted directly for the Nazis and provided confidential information to German intelligence. An October 1940 report detailing various Irish members of the Department of External Affairs included comments that Joseph Walshe was an ‘active supporter of the Jewish cause.’ He produced several reports but was rejected by the SD for a role as an agent. Towards the end of the war, Bewley was arrested in Merano, part of the Salò Republic set up by Mussolini in northern Italy. He was interrogated by Allied troops, briefly sharing a cell with John Amery. Upon hearing of Bewley’s arrest, Irish officials decided that ignoring him was their preferred course of action. Walshe wrote in a memorandum:

Bewley was an ass – but only an ass. He wasn't a criminal – least of all a dangerous criminal. It was notorious that he was a complete coward and would not risk his skin for any cause or nation… The best punishment for Bewley would be to show him how unimportant he was, to release him with a kick in the pants, and let him make his way back to Ireland.

He was issued with a new Irish passport which had his trade listed as ‘A person of no importance’. No charges were brought against him for his wartime activities, and he was released from custody in December 1945. Bewley did not return to Ireland but settled in Rome after the war and published occasional works. He produced an uncritical biography of Hermann Goering in 1956 and wrote his memoirs which remained unpublished until after his death. Charles Bewley died in Rome in 1969 aged 81.

Footnotes:

Chartres’ Anglo-Italian wife, Anna Vivanti, a renowned novelist, was a friend of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian war-hero, poet and ultra-nationalist whose occupation of Fiume created much of the aesthetics for the inter-war fascist movement. Anna was part-Jewish and died in Italy during the Second World War. Despite supporting Mussolini, she had been interned for suspicion of being a British agent and had her books banned.

Robert Briscoe was an ardent Zionist who used his experience to help the Zionist cause in the 1930’s and 40’s. He fundraised in the US and brought Ze’ev Jabotinsky to Ireland to learn guerrilla tactics that were later used by the Irgun in Palestine.

Amery was a British fascist who had helped set up the Legion of St. George, a group of British soldiers recruited to the Nazi cause and was executed in London in December 1945.

Sources:

Dictionary of Irish Biography (available at www.dib.ie)

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy archives (available at www.difp.ie)

Duggan, John P. (1989). Neutral Ireland and the Third Reich. Dublin: Lilliput Press.

Hull, Mark and Moynes, Vera (2017) Masquerade – Treason, the Holocaust, and an Irish Imposter Norman: University of Oklahoma Press

Jewish Virtual Library (Available at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

Kelly, Darren (2016) The Irish Free State’s First Diplomats: Jealousy, Anti-Semitism and Revenge History Ireland Issue 1 Volume 24 January/February 2016

Roth, Andreas (2000) Mr. Bewley in Berlin – Aspects of the Career of an Irish Diplomat, 1933-1939 Dublin: Four Courts Press

With this project I am taking a very expansive view of ‘Ireland’ to include not only people from the island and events that happened here, but also the Irish abroad, the Irish diaspora and connected events. This article concerns a post war fascist intellectual with a tangential connection to Ireland. With the end of the Second World War, there was no hiding place for the consequences of antisemitic behaviour. Millions of Jews had been systematically murdered in the death camps of the Holocaust, extensively documented by Nazi paperwork and thousands of survivors and eyewitnesses. The world collectively vowed ‘Never Again’ and overt antisemitism was banished from any respectable political field, at least for a while. Unfortunately, Nazi ideology lived on after the war in the remnants of the extreme right and managed to find new adherents. Ireland, relatively unscathed by the war, and famously neutral (26 counties at least) became a haven for all sorts of people looking for somewhere to hide from the after-effects of the war.

One of the principal keepers of the flame of post-war Nazism was an American named Francis Parker Yockey. Yockey was born in Chicago in 1917 to a middle-class family with Irish and German heritage. Yockey was highly intelligent and a gifted piano player who trained as a lawyer at various colleges, graduating from Notre Dame in 1941. He became involved with fascist groups while living in Chicago in the late 1930’s including the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund. He had an article published in Social Justice the newspaper of antisemitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. Chicago was a hot-spot for these groups and Yockey was drawn willingly into the milieu. Yockey became obsessed with the writing of William Spengler who theorised about the rise and fall of civilisations, comparing Western European cultures with Eastern ‘Magian’ or Jewish cultures.

Yockey enlisted in the Army after graduation and went AWOL, possibly on a mission to help Nazi spies. He was honourably discharged for mental health reasons but put on a list of suspected Nazi sympathisers. This did not appear to affect his hiring a couple of years later as a civilian prosecutor in the tribunals investigating German war crimes. Yockey was stationed in Wiesbaden but was disinterested in prosecuting Nazis, frequently helped the defendants and failed to show up to work most days. He attempted to establish contacts with former Nazis and was fired for abandonment of position. Yockey had grown to hate the United States, seeing it as destroyed and utterly corrupted by degenerate Jewish influences. In particular though, he wanted the resurrection of a pan-European fascist movement to establish a white empire to counteract modernism and ‘inferior’ cultures. The remnants of Jewish society would need to be exterminated for this to happen.

Yockey abandoned his wife and children and moved to Ireland for a period in 1947-48 where he wrote his 600 page magnum opus Imperium at a seaside inn in Brittas Bay, Co. Wicklow using the pen-name Ulick Varange. The pen name symbolised a pan-European meeting with Ireland and Rusia at either end of the imaginary empire. Yockey’s reasons for moving to Wicklow remain somewhat of a mystery. Little has been unearthed for his choosing of Ireland as his location for a writing retreat. The small coastal town wouldn’t appear to offer much in the way of research material for such a large undertaking, so perhaps it was simply the fact that Ireland was English speaking, had managed to avoided the major consequences of the war and offered somewhere quiet to concentrate. Yockey dedicated his book to ‘The hero of the Second World War’ – Adolf Hitler. He doesn’t appear to have had local connections or have left a legacy in the town apart from Imperium which he finished writing on January 30, 1948. In the book he developed his thoughts for a spiritual basis for racism, taking the works of Spengler as his main inspiration. One of the last sentences contains a geographical reference to Ireland as part of this sought after white European empire:

The soil of Europe, rendered sacred by the streams of blood which have made it spiritually fertile for a millennium, will once again stream with blood until the barbarians and distorters have been driven out and the Western banner waves on its home soil from Gibraltar to North Cape, and from the rocky promontories of Galway to the Urals.

The book contains many references to ‘culture-distorters’, a code word for Jews. The book was warmly received by many influential post-war far-right thinkers such as French Holocaust denier Maurice Bardèche, and Italian esoteric philosopher Julius Evola. It also contains some of the earliest Holocaust denial material with passages mocking the gas chambers. That Yockey wrote this after being exposed first hand to the evidence of the Holocaust shows the extent of his duplicity. Deborah Lipstadt, writing in Denying the Holocaust, said of Yockey and the book:

Twenty years prior to the formation of the IHR (Institute for Historical Review), Yockey laid out the essential elements of Holocaust denial.

After leaving Ireland Yockey worked to establish cooperation among disparate national movements and embed white European nationalism as a common cause across the continent. Yockey became somewhat of an international man of mystery and founded a group called the European Liberation Front which mirrored Oswald Mosley’s Europe – A Nation project. Yockey worked briefly at the European Contact Section for Mosley’s Union Movement, earning valuable contacts in the post-war underground. His 1949 pamphlet The Proclamation of London set out his ideas on how to build this movement, but Yockey’s intransigence was an impediment to his organising endeavours. The pair, like many egotistical activists before and since, soon fell out, with Mosley punching Yockey at an event in Hyde Park. Mosley had refused to publish or even review Imperium finding it incomprehensible. The book was published by some wealthy German contacts and has remained in print ever since.

Yockey travelled constantly through Europe, North America and the Middle East using multiple forged identities and was one of a large number of fascists (including Otto Ernst Remer and Johann von Leers) who became involved in the Egyptian government of Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. Nasser ran a cut-price Operation Paperclip and attracted a large assortment of former Nazis to work in his security and technology apparatuses. Yockey became a byword for international intrigue, attempting to associate himself with the remnants of the Nazi regime such as the Socialist Reich Party, and leading fascist figures around Europe, North America and the Middle East. He kept up with his followers by mailing out issues of a monthly newsletter called Frontfighter to subscribers. His clandestine visits to the US led to collaborations with H. Keith Thompson and Senator Joe McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare.

The anti-Americanism of Yockey’s work was based in an idea of Jewish and multiracial corruption and was strong enough that he positioned himself as a supporter of the Soviet Union. A trial he witnessed in Prague led to the execution of eleven Jews, leading Yockey to believe that Stalinism had made a decisive break with Jewish influence. Yockey’s prime political motivation seems to have been to create alliances strong enough to counter US hegemony which he saw as the principal threat to Europe. This attitude was also adopted by a few other fascist writers in the 1950s such as James Madole of the National Renaissance Party in the US.

His anti-Americanism eventually caught up with him and he was arrested by the FBI in 1960 in San Francisco. Yockey was travelling with multiple forged passports and literature he was working on, including porn that he had been writing for cash. While under arrest his only visitor was Willis Carto, a tireless white supremacist activist who became a staunch advocate of Yockey’s ideas, and reprinted Imperium in 1962 for an American audience. Carto was one of the most prominent members of the US far-right during the 60s, 70s and 80s and led the Liberty Lobby organization among other endeavours and played a huge role in the resurgence of Holocaust denial in the Anglosphere. Revilo P. Oliver, one of the founding members of the John Birch Society, a leading Holocaust denier and mentor of William Luther Pierce was also a big fan of Yockey’s work, amplifying its contents to newer generations of neo-Nazis in the US. Under investigation by the FBI who realised he was a big catch, Francis Parker Yockey killed himself with a cyanide capsule in jail before standing trial, aged 43.

Yockey’s philosophy and writings have inspired many third position movements and assorted holocaust deniers. Despite his relatively low historical profile his influence can be seen resonating to this day in fascist circles. His brief but important time in Ireland is referenced occasionally by some of the latter-day Irish far-right, particularly among the more bookish types who enjoy signalling their knowledge of obscure fascist history. His pen-name, Ulick, has been adopted by a writer at fascist rag The Burkean who engages in all sorts of bigoted propaganda and promotion of semi-obscure post-war European fascists, and Keith Woods, a nerdy Irish protégé of Richard Spencer with a relatively large audience, has made knowing references to Yockey. It is hard to quantify Yockey’s legacy, but a glowing biography from Arktos in 2018 signals that he may be more significant than usually given credit and Yockey has an audience among the more mystical end of the neo-Nazi milieu. Many rank Imperium along with Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries as the most important books in American Nazism. In many respects his writings also prefigured Aleksandr Dugin and Eurasianism although the direct influence is questionable. The Nazi movement was thoroughly discredited in the aftermath of the war and reduced to a handful of true believers, particularly in the English speaking world. Yockey was one of a few that kept the torch of hatred burning and passed it on to others who would kindle the flames brighter still.

Sources:

Atkins, Stephen E., (2009) Holocaust Denial as an International Movement Westport: Praeger

Coogan, Kevin (1999). Dreamer of the Day – Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia

Goodrich-Clark, Nicholas (2003) Black Sun – Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity New York: New York University Press

Lee, Martin A. (1997) The Beast Reawakens Boston: Little Brown

Lipstadt, Deborah (1993) Denying the Holocaust London: Penguin

Mammone, A. (2019). Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mostrom, Anthony (2017) The Fascist and the Preacher: Gerald L. K. Smith and Francis Parker Yockey in Cold War–Era Los Angeles Los Angeles Review of Books, 13th May 2017

Mostrom, Anthony (2020) America’s “Mein Kampf”: Francis Parker Yockey and “Imperium” Los Angeles Review of Books, 8th August 2020

The role of Irish immigrants in British fascism has been downplayed over the years, often by people eager to remember the Irish who were involved in the antifascist movements during the 1930’s and unwilling to confront the complicated nature of a colonised people engaging in ultra-nationalist movements on behalf of the coloniser. Hope Not Hate’s Matthew Collins remarked in an interview with the Irish Times that “It’s a well-known fact that during the 1980s, almost everyone in the National Front came from an Irish family.” I think that this phenomenon is worthy of further study.

The interwar period was a time of immense political upheaval and Ireland and its diaspora were as divided as any other Europeans. Like most fascist movements, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was a cross-class movement with its leadership typically coming from the more educated and well-connected classes. One compatriot of William Joyce (or Lord Haw-Haw as he became known during the war) was Norah Dacre Fox, aka Norah Elam. Norah was born in Dublin in 1878 to John Doherty, a successful businessman from Donegal and his wife Charlotte, from a Protestant middle-class Dublin family. John was involved in nationalist politics with Parnell and the Home Rule Party in Dublin before moving the family to London when Norah was ten where he became a local politician with the Liberal Party. Norah married Charles Dacre Fox in 1909 and took his surname but the marriage did not last long.

Dacre Fox became involved with the suffragette movement in her early 30s in the pre-Great War years and quickly rose through the ranks of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst, to become General Secretary. She became one of their most capable public speakers at often rowdy meetings (many of which she organised) which were held under threat of attack by the police or other opponents. Dacre Fox was also a prolific writer and contributed many articles to the Suffragette Newspaper as one of the few authors writing under their own name. These were skills she would later adapt to fascist organising as a BUF member. Dacre Fox was jailed three times for her suffragist activities and supported militant action. During one of her trials she disrupted proceedings with a speech that included the lines:

I want to know why women like us should be standing in this police-court today, when scoundrels are allowed to go through the country destroying the minds and bodies of little children. Why do you not prosecute these men? Why should you prosecute us women, whose only crime is that we stand for the downtrodden, sexually, economically, and politically? The whole thing is a travesty and a farce; it has become a public scandal.

Her time in jail, where she engaged in a hunger strike, had an impact on her and reinforced her willingness to fight against what she saw as a corrupt system.

Here in the 20th century men can still conceive that this is civilization and they are prepared to go on with the present system, which no words can describe. Whoever gets into that prison, perhaps people not all bad, are likely to be turned out dangerous criminals. So far as I am concerned, I remember the words of Ernest Jones the Chartist. He said, ‘I went into prison a Chartist. I came out a revolutionary.’ I went into prison a Militant Suffragette. I came out fifty militants rolled into one.

The suffrage movement wound up at the start of the Great War as most of the leadership, including Dacre Fox, urged an end to suffragette activities and threw their support behind the patriotic militarism of the establishment that led to millions of dead on the battlefields of Europe. The WSPU took a rightward turn during the war, criticizing trade unions and attacking German immigrants. Dacre Fox embraced this anti-German sentiment and was part of a movement to intern and deport all German or German descended residents from Britain. Dacre Fox and Emmeline Pankhurst also worked closely with Nancy Astor in 1914, the first female MP to take her seat in Westminster, who later became known for her antisemitism and support for national socialism.

Dacre Fox’s apparent concern for the downtrodden also extended to animal rights, something which remained a life-long concern. After the first world war, she limited her activism to the anti-vivisection movement. She was a prominent member of the London and Provincial Anti-Vivisection Society (LPAVS). Though this group she became involved in a milieu of vegetarianism, alternative medicine and anti-vaccination ideas which included theosophical and Christian Science groups. This movement arose partly as a backlash against modernity and scientific rationalism, and it included many well-off women in parallels not dissimilar to the Covid-19 era. Much of the response from the medical establishment at the time was sexist and dismissive of legitimate criticisms, leading to further entrenchment of people who felt they had been mistreated. As the BUF expanded in the 1930’s, many of the LPAVS were drawn into their activities, and the group was kept under surveillance by the police for suspicion of being a BUF front.

Norah and her partner, Dudley Elam, became involved in the British Union of Fascists in the early 30’s and Norah began using her oratorial skills for campaigning on behalf of Oswald Mosley’s party, frequently appearing alongside William Joyce in the Sussex area before his expulsion from the party in 1937. Dacre Fox (referred to as Elam from now on) claims to not have liked Joyce, and they had very different views on Ireland with Elam supporting Irish independence and opposing Unionism in marked contrast to Joyce who had assisted the Black and Tans as a teenager and hated Irish nationalism. Elam’s activities mostly consisted of speeches and writing alongside other organisational work. Street-fighting at public meetings was common as the BUF tried to build enough power to impose its antisemitic fascist policies onto British society but met stiff resistance from targeted groups. In 1936 Elam was announced as a future BUF candidate for Northampton. The BUF paper Action described their candidate as a “popular and well-known Fascist propagandist.” The BUF was happy to use Elam as proof that it was not a sexist or misogynistic outfit with Mosley announcing that “it killed for all time the suggestion that National Socialism proposed putting British women back into the home.” Eleven of the eighty BUF candidates announced for the election were women, a high percentage for the time. Elam became a prolific writer for the Blackshirt newspaper and used her suffragette background to rail against the deficiencies of the democracy she now wished to dismantle, seeing fascism as a completion of the emancipatory project of the suffragettes. This sentiment was echoed by William Joyce in his National Socialism Now pamphlet. Writing in 1936, her disillusionment with party politics and her antisemitic conspiracism were evident in an article penned for the BUF journal Action:

Seeing that party women once again wear the primrose in the memory of the Jew Disraeli, the rosette in honour of Sir Herbert Samuel, the red emblem in commemoration of Karl Marx; they have turned again as handmaidens to the hewing of wood and drawing of water for the party wirepullers, and they add to all this futility the cross upon the ballot paper once in every five years.

In spite of her anti-German campaigning during the first World War, Elam was part of the BUF inner circle which grew increasingly pro-German as the Second World War approached, and she was involved in meetings between various far-right groups such as the Right Club and Link as the war grew close. Under surveillance by MI5, the Elams were part of the first BUF contingent interned on 23rd of May 1940 under the 18B regulations.

After the war, Elam, grew distant from the remains of the BUF but remained friendly with Mary Allen, another suffragette who might be considered trans by today’s standards, and Arnold Leese, an extreme antisemite to the right of Mosley who had led the Imperial Fascist League in the 1930s (and was mentoring Colin Jordan, later of the National Socialist Movement during this period.) All three shared an interest in animal welfare. Leese was a noted camel doctor and combined his interest in animal welfare with antisemitism by attacking traditional Jewish meat preparation, a tactic more recently replicated by Islamophobic groups. Allen had organised the formation of women’s police forces in the 1920’s and had met Eoin O’Duffy in 1926 at an international police conference where he had left a strong impression on her. Elam adopted an attitude of Holocaust denial after the war which she attempted to pass on to her family, with whom she was frequently bad-tempered and abusive. Norah Elam died in London in 1961 aged 83.

Elam’s story is worth recounting as an example of the interests that many of the interwar fascists had that might seem unfamiliar to a casual modern observer. Feminism, environmentalism and animal rights have come to be almost solely associated with left and liberal politics, but this was certainly not the case in the interwar period, and there is no reason to believe they might not play a role in any present or future fascist organising. Part of this myopia comes from viewing fascism as solely coming from the right and concerned with returning to a mythical past. It is that, but can simultaneously be proposing a brave new future, as circumstances allow, and take on surprising, modern forms. As the consequences of climate collapse become more apparent, it is likely that new forms of fascism will emerge to take advantage of the situation and may adopt unexpected configurations. The purported defence of innocent animals from alien cultures as done by Elam can be used to legitimise violence against a minority group, and attacking Halal practices as barbaric has become one of the staples of Islamophobic organising in the 21st century. Single-issue activists such as animal rights groups or environmental campaigners who ‘put differences aside’ to work with fascists almost certainly doom their projects to failure once hate groups gain a foothold. By recognising the anti-vaccination attitudes of the interwar period as mirroring those of the modern far-right, perhaps a wider understanding of the malleability of fascism to adapt or colonise issues not typically seen as their central concerns might be gained and avoided.

Sources: Brazell, Emma (2019) Theresa May under fire after unveiling statue of ‘Nazi-sympathising’ MP, Metro, 9 November 2019

Connelly, Katherine (2013) Sylvia Pankhurst London: Pluto Press

Durham, Martin (1992) Gender and the British Union of Fascists. Journal of Contemporary History, July 1992

Durham, Martin (1998) Women and Fascism London: Routledge

Elam, Norah (1936) Women and the Vote. Action, No. 6, 26 March 1936

Gottlieb, Julie V. Feminine Fascism – Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement 1923-1945 London: I.B. Tauris

Heaney, Mick (2022) ‘In the 1980s, almost everyone in the National Front came from an Irish family’ Irish Times Oct 17 2022

Joyce, William (1937) National Socialism Now London

Macklin, Graham (2020) Failed Führers London: Routledge

McPherson, Angela and McPherson, Susan (2010). Mosley’s Old Suffragette – A Biography of Norah Dacre Fox Lulu.com

Pankhurst, Emmeline (1914) Suffragette – My Own Story. London: Hesperus Classics (2015 Reprint)

Thurlow, Richard (1998) Fascism in Britain – A History 1918-1998 London: I.B Tauris

For several years I have been researching antisemitism in Ireland and want to use this space to share some of that. The impetus arrived from trying to understand the modern far-right movement in Ireland and realising that antisemitism was a glue that stuck so much of it together, even if many of the participants were not fully aware. As such, much of the writing can be understood as a study of Irish fascism in general. The blog is unashamedly antifascist.

Much of the writing will cover 20th century history and the subject matter can be very difficult as it includes extreme hatred and genocide. I am not Jewish, but neither are the people and movements I am studying. Part of the reason this is an understudied area of Irish history may be due to the small numbers of Jews that live in Ireland. I do not believe it is incumbent on the people who are subjected to bigotry and hatred to study and explain it to those who are not. Hopefully this work can raise awareness and understanding of the role antisemitism has played in shaping far right movements in Ireland. The constituent movements can be broadly split into three streams – Catholic, state nationalism, and anti-state nationalism. I am an amateur historian with limited resources and most of the work relies upon the research of others who have done the heavy lifting, credit will be given where due.

No Pasarán.

Róisín Ní Mheara whose given name was Phyllis James was a woman of many identities. She played a minor role in Berlin during the Second World War with the Nazi propaganda radio network, but more importantly should be known for her writing and work after the war as a Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier. Her own chosen identity as an Irish language scholar and cultural activist raises questions about the adoption of ‘oppressed’ identities as a foil for the worst bigotry possible, as well as the ability of Irish nationalists of various stripes to brush fascist tendencies under the carpet as part of an anti-British outlook.

Ní Mheara was born in England in 1918 and put up for adoption shortly afterwards. Her adoptive parents were aging members of the wealthy upper-class, her father being General Sir Ian Hamilton, a decorated member of numerous British imperial campaigns in Sudan, Burma and most notably South Africa during the Boer War. Hamilton rose through the top of the army command, and led Allied troops at the battle of Gallipoli during the First World War. After a hugely ‘successful’ career Gallipoli was a disaster and he retired in 1920. Despite his war hero status (Churchill, a family friend, had even penned a book about him in 1900), by the 1930’s Hamilton had become a vocal supporter of appeasement, along with other high-profile members of British high society. Hamilton believed in Hitler’s plans for European peace and as head of the British Legion travelled to Bechtesgaden to meet Hitler and pose for photographs in August 1938. Hamilton flew home to London in the Führer’s personal plane. Ní Mheara’s adopted mother was Jean Muir, daughter of the obscenely wealthy tea-baron John Muir.

Ní Mheara’s relationship with her parents seems distant, as was common among the upper-class at the time. Her father was 65 at the time of her birth and her mother 57. The marriage had been childless until the adoption of Róisín and another baby after the First World War. Ní Mheara began spending time in Germany as a schoolgirl in 1933, firstly at a finishing school in Munich, and later made several trips to Germany and Austria before the war, working and studying as an actor. Her passion for acting spilled into her real life and the boundaries became blurred. She enjoyed living in the Third Reich, and was excited by the rise of Hitler to power. Despite having no definite connection to Ireland, over the course of several decades Ní Mheara became obsessed with the island and its culture and reinvented herself as Irish. In her autobiography she claimed her biological father was an Irish soldier in the British Army. While living in Berlin, she repeatedly referred to herself as ‘neutral Irish’ perhaps to avoid charges of treason. This adoption of an Irish identity may have served several purposes, as noted, an Irish person working for the Nazis was in less danger than a British person, with whom Germany was at war with. In addition, as a rebellious gesture towards upper class British parents, identifying with the first part of the empire to break away would have been a significant ‘fuck you’ to her parents steeped in the imperial riches of the British Empire’s corporations and armies. (This may not be relevant for her mother who appears to have sympathies for Irish Home Rule and attended Roger Casement's trial in 1916) Thirdly, identifying as a minority has sometimes been adopted as a cover for fascist politics, adopting a faux anti-imperialism as was not uncommon among Irish, Breton, Flemish and other national minorities in Europe during the twentieth century who aligned themselves with fascism in opposition to their own local oppressors.

Prior to the war Ní Mheara ‘s contact with Ireland consisted of a week-long visit in 1937. The trip had a strong influence on her and she adopted Irish style anti-British talking points from then on. In Berlin in 1940 Ní Mheara, like others, found herself without an income and played up her usefulness to the authorities in return for financial survival. By now using the name Nora O’Mara, she was recruited by Kurt Haller, an Abwehr II officer who assisted Edmund Veesenmayer and dealt with many of the Irish contacts for the Nazis. (Later on in the 1950’s Haller made several trips to Ireland and included visits to Jim O’Donovan and Francis Stuart to thank them for their service to Nazi Germany.) Ní Mheara managed to pass herself off to him as a source for Irish affairs and began her paid career with the Nazi regime.

Ní Mheara was issued a ‘stateless’ passport and introduced to Professor Fromme, Hermann Goertz, and Francis Stuart. Fromme was an archaeologist with a strong interest in Ireland and liaised with various Irish contacts on behalf of the Nazis throughout the war. Fromme had introduced Goertz to Stuart and the two were getting acquainted prior to his spying mission to Ireland where he would liaise with Stuart’s wife Isolde Gonne, her mother Maud Gonne and various other Irish nationalists. Ní Mheara was pregnant at the time, apparently from a relationship with a Ukrainian man who had left the city, and was given a job as Goertz’s secretary. After Goertz’s departure, Stuart and Ní Mheara became lovers for about a year and Stuart arranged for Ní Mheara to work with him at Irland-Redaktion, the Irish part of the large network of foreign language Nazi radio stations run out of the Rundfunkhaus. In July 1940 Ní Mheara, Stuart, Professor Fromme, IRA man Frank Ryan, and Nazi operative Helmut Clissmann who had an Irish wife, made an appearance at an Irish POW camp where they were part of an effort to recruit Irish soldiers captured fighting with the British Army to the German side.

Prior to working at the radio station Ní Mheara worked with Stuart’s translator, Ruth Weiland, to publish her first known work, a piece on Padraig Pearse as part of a collection of essays on Irish freedom fighters called Irische Feiheitskämpfer which had an introduction by Stuart. Fromme and another academic with strong Irish connections, Ludwig Mühlhausen, also contributed to the collection. As part of her Irish charade, Ní Mheara began taking Irish language lessons from an Irish man in Berlin who had been working as a teacher. She had a gift for the language and picked it up quickly, a skill she would go on to expand upon, becoming an expert not only in modern Irish but also its medieval variant.
Ní Mheara appeared occasionally on-air for Redaktion. Her account of the operation in her autobiography labels the Rundfunkhaus radio centre a nest of Jews and spies. She reserves praise for William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw and the American voice of Axis Sally, Mildred Giddens, both of whom were true believers of the Nazi cause and notorious antisemitic propagandists.

At the end of the war, Ní Mheara, pregnant with her second child, appeared in Paris and was arrested by British intelligence. Initially confined to a refugee camp, her high-level family connections helped in ensuring no charges were brought against her. It is unclear how she supported herself, she had been disinherited by Ian Hamilton, but she appears to have begun dividing her time between Ireland and Germany around this time. her autobiography describes visits to Ireland in the late 40’s and 50’s and she also appears to have acted in Frankfurt and Munich. Ní Mheara published a poem in Dublin Magazine in 1955 and worked at RTE on some radio plays around this time.

As Ní Mheara’s visits to Ireland became more frequent, she established more links with Irish language activities in the west of Ireland, and adopted another alias, using the surname Vinard and posing as a Swiss widow. She lived in Galway between 1969 and 1974 and established a cultural academy, An Durlas, in Galway city that included a nursery, theatre and classrooms. An Durlas was sold to the Gaelic League in 1973. A second project that Ní Mheara initiated on Inishmaan was called the Museum of the Islands which opened in August 1973. Ní Mheara stayed on Inishmaan for about a year before handing the museum over to the islanders and returning to Germany. These projects were significant and would have earned her a lot of respect among the Irish language activists of the time.

Putting her language skills to use, Ní Mheara worked on a translation of Buile Shuibhne or Mad Sweeney from Middle Irish into German (Published as Der König der Bäume, 1985) and established a friendship during the curse of the work with Gaelic scholar Tomás Ó Fiaich. Ó Fiaich was Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland from 1977 until his death in 1990. She later worked with Ó Fiaich on his Gaelscrínte san Eoraip or Irish Shrines in Europe which detailed Irish Christian missions to Europe. After Ó Fiaich’s death she published a follow-up titled In Search of Irish Saints (1994) and organised the Cardinal’s papers for his memorial museum in Armagh. Ní Mheara also organised a large number of Celtic cultural events in Germany and Austria throughout the 1980s as well as participating in Irish arts projects.

Between 1977 and 1980 Ní Mheara wrote a regular column ‘Letter From Europe’ for the Irish language weekly Inniu. The paper had been founded in 1943 by a cultural action group called Glúin na Buaidhe (Generation of Victory) which had split from Gearoid Ó Cuinnegáin and Craobh na hAiséirighe due to his extremist political views. Shortly after the split Ó Cuinnegáin launched an overtly fascist political party Ailtirí na hAisérighe (Architects of the Resurrection) which went on to gain some electoral success in local elections. Ní Mheara befriended Glúin founder Prionsias Mac an Bheatha. Inniu’s editor was Tarlach O hUaid, who had been born Augustus Hood into a Unionist and Methodist family in London. O hUaid rejected his upbringing and became an Irish nationalist activist, IRA member, Altiri na hAiseirighe member and editor of the IRA paper War News in the 1930’s which had made a habit of publishing pro-Nazi content. It was in her column in Inniu that Ní Mheara began writing Nazi apologism and Holocaust denial. Based in Germany, the columns often covered German affairs and included praise of former Nazis such as Rudolph Hess or Herbert Kappler, head of the Sicherheitsdienst. A column from 13 January 1978 is a classic piece of Holocaust denial. In it Ní Mheara claims that only 7,000 Jews died at Bergen-Belsen and that most died of disease caused by Allied bombing and after Allied troops had taken control of the camp. The true figure is closer to 70,000 Jews and Soviet prisoners murdered by Nazi prison guards where torture and random killings were the norm. The victims included Anne Frank and her sister. Ní Mheara’s column also derided modern art and culture, along with communism and socialism, and adopts an overly romantic praise for Celtic nations.

Ní Mheara remained an unrepentant Nazi propagandist for the rest of her life, justifying and downplaying the Holocaust. In 1991 Ní Mheara published her autobiography in Irish, titled Cé hÍ Seo Amuigh? (Who Is She Outside?) which received grant aid from the Irish state (a standard procedure for many Irish language books) and was published by a prominent Irish language publisher Coiscéim. (An English translation with minor variations titled ‘Recollections’ appeared in 2015. Quotes are taken from this version for ease of reference unless otherwise stated.) The book is openly and unashamedly fascist and pro-Nazi in content, and is a mix of autobiography, political screed, fantasy and revisionism. The author invented her Irish heritage from the very beginning and wrote about a toddler’s nationalist fervour and hostility her towards British family and their upper-class social circles. The result is hokey and reminiscent of a bad Hollywood film of the era. Hitler’s rise to power is greeted as a day of ‘triumph and delivery’ that will allow Germany to dispose of a cumbersome democracy and regain its place as a world leader by cleaning the cities of Jews and other undesirables who had polluted the nation. Some quotes illustrate the tone of the book.

The National Socialist Government, as it described itself, had a huge task ahead. A path had first to be cleared. The towns and cities were congested with swarms of destitute citizens, country folk unable to live on their land, East German refugees, Polish Jews. The demoralising effect of these centres was such, that the highest crime rate in post-war Europe was claimed by German cities; prostitution, drug-trafficking and other underworld activities flourishing. Despite the thankless job of sweeping these centres clean, such was the will of recovery, that the new government during this period even gained in popularity.

Ní Mheara compares German stormtroopers invading neighbouring countries spreading Nazi ideology to early Irish Christian missionaries in the Middle Ages, both working to civilize the barbarians. The individual Nazis she meets are portrayed as kindly and good-natured souls who wish to improve the world. The book cites fringe conspiracy theories as historical fact and repeats Nazi propaganda almost word for word, such as massacres of Germans to justify the invasion of Poland. The writing portrays Nazi Germany as an honourable blameless participant in world events and contains commentary on the Jewish culpability for the First World War, parrots Nazi justifications for military expansion and occupation, blames Churchill and Britain for starting the Second World War and engages in blatant Holocaust denialism. Having lived in Vienna during the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, Ní Mheara justified the anti-Jewish violence there:

The Jews in Vienna now became uneasy. To say this influential minority was anything more than respected would be a gross exaggeration. The Jews had contributed much to the arts, had gained control of the media and kept a firm grip on the cultural scene of the city, but as also owners of those dreaded pawnshops, the luxurious houses and limousines many of them displayed, caused deep resentment…Having monopolised so intensely public life in the city of Vienna, this minority had caused much animosity among its inhabitants, and this resentment they now had to suffer. In the heat of the moment, they certainly did so, and there were some ugly scenes for those Jews who went into hiding instead of boarding a train. Ousted out of their positions with a none-too-gentle hand, personal vengeance played often an ominous role. There was rabble in the streets — as if from nowhere suddenly a mob appeared, a mob that once bore red flags with hammer and scythe and now shouting National Socialistic slogans. They roamed the city, breaking shop windows and Jew-hunting. A division of Security Guards (SS) had to be ordered down from Berlin to restrain this violence and protect the Jews from the fury of the mob, so that their exodus could be conducted in a civil manner. Suffering long unemployment, the anger of the simple people was mainly directed against those Jews from Eastern regions who had swarmed into the impoverished city after World War I. Poor Jews as they were, arriving by foot with bundles on their backs, they were quick to enrich themselves as pawnbrokers and moneylenders. So, 'wandering Jews' these were again to become, pushed on into further territories.

These words were not written at the time of the events, they were written in the 1980’s, long after the facts of the Holocaust were widely known. An estimated 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered. In justifying the exclusion of Jews from the arts, when Ní Mheara herself was required to prove her non-Jewish heritage, she wrote:

These measures were enforced as a counteraction to restrict the overpowering Jewish influence in post-war Germany, considered detrimental. In the cultural scene especially, this influence was thought to be the cause of the great moral decline in the cities…

She praised Nazi efforts to help ‘resettle’ Jewish communities:

Germany’s sincere intent was to provide the Jews with a homeland. and plans stayed on the agenda well into the war, only to be abandoned by force. Other efforts were dropped only when the mining of the seas made transport on a mass scale impossible. Such evacuation programmes became all the more pressing, as more and more Jews fell into the hands of the German army on the Eastern front. This army could do nothing more than herd these, their sworn enemies, into ghettos and to postpone the solving of the Jewish question until after the war…There is every evidence to prove that it was their earnest endeavour to provide the Jews with a homeland overseas.

Ní Mheara defended the Nuremberg Laws and suggested they hadn’t gone far enough:

The restrictive measures enforced by Germany on Jews in 1935 certainly hardly raised an eyebrow and can be seen by scanning the press accounts of the period. This indifference caused Hitler to underestimate the danger those measures exposed the nation to in the long run. Already his nomination had in 1933 incited the fury of the Jewish World Organization, whose members, lacking a government organ of their own, promptly declared war on Germany through press announcements.

Perhaps worst of all, Ní Mheara also repeated her Bergen-Belsen conspiracy theories. Claiming to have met an eyewitness, she asserted that Jewish inmates were well-fed, and deaths had only occurred among prisoners delayed on transport trains due to Allied bomb damage. Another of Ní Mheara’s theories stated that photographs of corpses from the camps had been staged using Germans killed in a bombing raid on Dresden. The book employs the typical one -two punch of the hardcore Holocaust denier – the Holocaust didn’t happen, but if it did, the Jews deserved it.

The book was widely condemned by reviewers at the time, and Mervyn Taylor, a Jewish Labour Party TD acting as Minister for Equality and Law Reform said “it would be scandalous if this book were to receive any help from a government-funded agency.” The Coiscéim publisher, Pádraig Ó Snódaigh, defended publishing the book as a marvellous historical document and compared critics of the work to Hitler. Seán de Fréine, Secretary of Bord na Leabhar Gaeilge, a state body which had provided funding for the book denied that the book was antisemitic. Other commentators weighed in on issues of censorship and freedom of the press, while being less enthusiastic about the Nazism. Perhaps the main attraction to the Irish language community was that the book was atypical of the standard memoirs of impoverished rural dwellers that make up a fair proportion of the Irish language autobiographies. Having an opportunity to discuss global events through the medium of Irish is understandable, but it seems more than a little unfortunate that the writer was a former Nazi who still propagated the worst bigotry and hatred towards jews possible. Despite being an Austrian resident at the time, Ní Mheara faced no criminal charges for Holocaust minimisation or denial, and one can assume that translation issues from a minority language such as Irish would play no small part in that decision. The book was published at a time when Holocaust revisionism and denial was gaining ground, as exemplified by David Irving, who was pursued by Austrian legal system and spent some time in prison for similar work.

The significance of the book should not be underestimated. Holocaust denial material written in Irish remains thankfully very limited, but this book was made possible through a major Irish language publisher and received Irish state funding. The controversy died down in large part because the work was published in Irish, a language that few are fluent in. The event raises questions about how minority languages can be used to further the aims of fascist movements and the impact such ideas can have on nationalist cultural movements through fascist creep into arts and language spaces. Like many of the fascists throughout modern Irish history, Róisín Ní Mheara’s supporters find it hard to discern between a person who’s work they admired and respected, and her genocidal tendencies, falling into a trap of supporting a personal connection and refusing to condemn their political beliefs for the horrific and bloody bigotry. This is a pattern that becomes clear when studying the aftermath of the war, when unlikable German Nazis such as Ludwig Mühlhausen were easily vilified, but likable German Nazis such as Helmut Clissmann were quickly rehabilitated into Irish circles.

Despite the controversy surrounding Cé hÍ Seo Amuigh?, another autobiographical work covering her post-war years, titled I gCéin is I gCóngar (Far and Near), was published in 2006 by the Historical Society of Armagh. Phyllis Ursula ‘Rosaleen’ 'Fodie' James, aka Nora O’Mara aka Frau Vinard aka Róisín Ní Mheara died in 2013 aged 94.

Sources:

Douglas, R.M. (2006). The Pro-Axis Underground in Ireland, 1939-1942 The Historical Journal , Dec. 2006, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec. 2006), pp. 1155-1183 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Elborn, Geoffrey (1990). Francis Stuart – A life. Dublin: Raven Arts Press

Hull, Mark and Moynes, Vera (2017) Masquerade – Treason, the Holocaust, and an Irish Imposter Norman: University of Oklahoma Press

Hull, Mark (2017) Holocaust Denial, Treason and Irish Identity History Ireland Issue 6 Vol. 25 November/December 2017

Lee, Celia (2020) Jean, Lady Hamilton 1861-1941 Diaries of a Soldier’s Wife Philadelphia: Pen and Sword

Ní Mheara, Róisín, (2015) Recollections London: Xlibris

O’Donoghue, David (2010). The Devil’s Deal – The IRA, Nazi Germany and the Double Life of Jim O Donovan Dublin: New Island Books

O’Donoghue, David (2014). Hitler’s Irish Voices – The story of German Radio’s Wartime Irish Service. Bantry, Co. Cork, Ireland: Somerville Press.