IX

Endgame

In a state in which all power of decision is concentrated in the hands of one man, the orders of this one man are absolutely binding on all members of the civil service hierarchy. This individual is their sovereign, their ‘legibus solutus’.

DR KARL DOETZER, DEFENCE COUNSEL FOR DR EDMUND VEESENMAYER, 11 MAY 1948

Early on the morning of 6 June 1944 the largest seaborne invasion in history began. Allied forces from America, Britain, Canada and other nations began their assault on the beaches of Normandy. As the French Resistance sabotaged phone and train lines, the Allied forces launched a deadly assault that aimed to drive the Germans back towards Paris and ultimately to Berlin. With Stalin’s forces pressing from the east, Hitler’s regime was in its death throes. The Normandy forces made up the greatest armada the world had ever known and the lives of millions across Europe depended on its success. The planning that had gone into the landings had taken years and every measure was taken to ensure they achieved their objectives. In the months leading up to the landings Allied reconnaissance aircraft flew spying missions over northern France to capture photographs of key enemy positions and defences. A team of over 1,700 photo analysts pored over the images and were able to build detailed pictures of French coastal towns such as Saint-Lô, Carenten and Caen.

Many of these coastal towns were crucial strategic targets that the Allies hoped to capture within the first 24 hours of arriving on French soil. From 1942 the BBC had issued a public appeal for postcards and photographs taken by holidaymakers before the war of the coast of Europe as far inland as the Pyrenees. The public duly complied and millions of photographs were sent in, helping the Allied forces create three-dimensional models, which helped in the selection of landing sites. Such was the level of detail that covert operations had even retrieved sand samples and measurements of water levels and beach gradients. All this went into the invasion plans.

From dawn on 6 June, Allied forces began an extensive aerial and naval bombardment of Normandy. An airborne assault involving parachute regiments was followed by the deployment of 24,000 airborne troops. With these troops dropped behind enemy lines, the amphibious assault began. At 6.30 a.m. Allied infantry and armoured divisions began landing on an 80km stretch of the Normandy coast, which had been subdivided into five sectors codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword and Juno. In addition to enemy gunfire, they had to contend with strong winds, which had blown troop carriers off course. The coast along the beaches had also been heavily mined by the Germans. Barbed wire fences and tripods made it almost impossible to clear the beaches of incendiary devices. Allied troops met the fiercest resistance on the American beaches of Utah and Omaha, while troops that had landed on the British and Canadian beaches were engaged in house-to-house fighting in many of the heavily fortified coastal towns. While the Allies failed to achieve any of their objectives on the first day of the landings, they did secure enough of a foothold to push forward in the days and weeks ahead. Carentan, Saint-Lô and Caen were liberated in the weeks thereafter and in the following months it became clear that Operation Overlord had been a success. But it had come at a huge cost. At least 10,000 casualties were recorded on 6 June, with 4,414 confirmed deaths. German casualties were estimated at between 4,000 and 9,000 men. The Americans alone had lost 184 Sherman tanks. But Hitler was now fighting a war on two fronts and public opinion was that the odds were firmly stacked against him.

By August 1944, American troops had liberated Paris, ending four years of German occupation. It had been feared that fierce fighting would lead to Paris being destroyed; indeed, Hitler had ordered his generals to leave the city in ruins. However, General Dietrich von Choltitz defied the Führer’s orders and handed the city back to the French authorities undamaged. Over the course of the next eight months the Allies made advances in most facets of the war. In April 1945, Hitler’s forces attempted a last-ditch offensive in the Ardennes – the Battle of the Bulge – but it was all in vain. The Allies had pushed further up through Italy and had made huge inroads into Germany from the west. By early April 1945, Soviet forces were about to make a final push into Berlin. By 30 April the Reichstag had been captured and Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker. His successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, instructed Alfred Jodl of the OKW to sign the instruments of surrender on 7 May. The war with Germany was over.

The war had been won at a great cost. An estimated 50 to 80 million lives had been lost, in addition to the genocide of the Holocaust and the first use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in May 1945. The war had lasted a gruelling 2,294 days and had left Europe in ruins.

News of the German surrender was met with jubilation across the world, even in Germany, where people had lived under the brutality of Hitler’s totalitarian regime for over a decade. In London huge crowds gathered in Piccadilly Circus and bonfires were lit along the River Thames. Churchill declared that the next day would become known as Victory in Europe Day – VE Day. In New York, Times Square became a focal point of celebrations, with large numbers of people gathering to celebrate.

News of the Allied victory began to filter through to Ireland by two o’clock via BBC radio, but the news was received very differently than in London or New York. While there was undoubtedly great relief and celebration, there were also mixed opinions on the ending of the conflict. Allied flags, including that of the Soviet Union, were flown from the roof of Trinity College with the Irish tricolour positioned much lower than the others. The flags were soon replaced by the American star-spangled banner and the tricolour was burned, while students of the largely Protestant university sang ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. A counter-protest was arranged by a number of students at the mainly Catholic UCD, among them a future Taoiseach, the 18-year-old commerce student Charles J. Haughey. Haughey had served in the LDF as a second lieutenant during the war and, like many other students, had taken umbrage at the disrespect shown to the Irish flag.

The counter-demonstration marched to the offices of the Irish Times on Fleet Street brandishing a Union flag that had been torn from a lamp post nearby. The flag was set alight at the bottom of Grafton Street and windows were broken at the newspaper’s offices – the Irish Times had been specifically targeted because it was perceived as pro-British. The group then proceeded to scale the railings of Trinity College when a mêlée broke out and gardaí baton-charged the mob. The Irish Times had the last laugh, though – it published pictures of the Allied leaders in a V-shape layout on its front page on VE Day.

It was in this maelstrom of mixed public opinion that the Irish government found itself when the war ended. De Valera’s government had to decide what to do with German internees and G2’s counsel would be sought on this delicate security issue.

From July to August 1945, military personnel being held at the K-Lines camp in the Curragh were sent back to mainland Europe, as Ireland was bound by international law to do. The Allies viewed the German spies held in Ireland very differently. It was largely felt that they couldn’t be released so quickly for security reasons. The British believed that all Germans interned in Ireland should be transferred back to Germany immediately to be debriefed and tried if necessary, in line with the Allied policy of denazification, which sought to purge all remnants of the Nazi regime from German society. The Irish authorities were eager to obtain assurances that these German detainees would not be treated as prisoners of war. Joseph Walshe at the Department of External Affairs communicated this view to the British Representative Sir John Maffey in June 1945 and made his thoughts known in a memorandum to the Taoiseach the same day:

Sir John Maffey came to see me this morning after his return from London where he had spent a few days. Before going over, we had had one or two talks about the German internees during which I made it clear that, if they were to be repatriated to Germany, they should not be treated as prisoners of war either in transit or on their arrival in Germany.

Maffey told me today that his authorities would endeavour to arrange for the transfer to Germany direct by air. Should that method prove impossible or too inconvenient, the internees would have to be taken through England on their way to Germany but would not be regarded during the passage as German prisoners. On arrival in the British zone in Germany, they would be treated as ordinary disarmed German service personnel, but, when disbanded, if their homes happened to be in the Russian zone, the British could take no responsibility for their treatment there.

On being questioned, Maffey said that there was no idea of forcing them to go into the Russian zone against their will.

It seems to me that this offer should be accepted. The internees arrived here in the course of war operations, and they must have understood from the beginning that they would be repatriated to Germany at the first opportunity. They can have no objection – and it is unlikely that they will offer any – to going back [to] their own country.

To placate the British, an agreement was reached between the Department of External Affairs and the Department of Justice, via senior civil servant Peter Berry, that German internees would be allowed to move freely around Athlone during the day, provided they spent the night in Custume barracks under armed supervision. Such an arrangement afforded the prisoners greater opportunity to socialise and to hear news of how events were progressing in Germany following the establishment of Allied control of the country.

Görtz used his new-found freedom to spend hours walking around Athlone town and going into cafés and shops. During this time, he befriended some local women, who told him that they had seen Commandant Power in town with Fr Joseph Mulreane, a native of Mullingar, County Westmeath, who had served as chaplain to the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Görtz was eager to speak to Fr Mulreane because his daughter had fled Germany following the Allied invasion and had gone to Spain, where she was working as a maid. Görtz hoped that the priest might be able to find out if his daughter was safe and well. He called at Commandant Power’s house on Retreat Road to see if he could arrange the meeting for him. Power reluctantly agreed to facilitate the meeting with the proviso that he be there while it took place. Mulreane agreed to help find Görtz’s daughter and during the meeting he relayed to Görtz and Power the appalling conditions in which Germans found themselves following the war. Much of Berlin lay in ruins and over 600,000 apartments had been destroyed. The city had been divided into four sectors, to be administered jointly by the occupying powers of the USA, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Ordinary Germans were forced to get up at dawn to find wood for fuel and many people had gone as long at three months wearing the same clothes. Mulreane’s reports greatly affected Görtz, who began to slide further into depression. As he left Power’s house and returned to his lodgings in Athlone, he resolved that he would not return to Germany. It was a promise he was determined to keep at any cost.

Not long after his visit to Power’s house Görtz was arrested by the Irish authorities and brought in for questioning. He was asked about his mission to Ireland and what he had been up to in the months following his release. Görtz gave a bogus account of his activities, stating that he had communicated regularly with the Fatherland and had sent and received messages to Berlin using invisible ink. He also tried to claim the credit for the attempts to send Seán Russell and Frank Ryan to Ireland on their abortive missions. Görtz was blissfully unaware that he had already given an accurate account of his activities to Richard Hayes in an 80-page coded report that he mistakenly believed had gone to his handlers in Berlin. Görtz became even more withdrawn and gradually developed a depressive disorder. He became even more determined to avoid returning to Berlin at all costs. As a member of the Wehrmacht during and after World War I, he had been involved in quelling the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 and believed that he would be treated harshly by the Russians should he be brought back to face trial.

In September 1946, the Irish government had reached a consensus that German spies would be released and that the Irish state would offer them asylum. Most of them returned to Germany over the next few years, but Wilhelm Preetz returned to Tuam, County Galway, where he lived with the local GP, Dr Tubridy, and faded into obscurity, and Günther Schütz married a local woman named Una Mackey whom he had met at a dance in Athlone. However, Görtz continued to be a problem for the government. He had moved to Glenageary, where he was staying with the Farrell sisters and he travelled almost daily to the National Library where he studied volumes of Irish law to find the elusive loophole that would grant him permanent residence in Ireland. On one visit he met with Dr Hayes, who had returned to his role as director of the library. Hayes took Görtz to a café on Nassau Street and told him that he had broken his code and that it was he whom Görtz had been communicating with. Görtz congratulated Hayes, but the revelation only increased his anxiety and his decline into mental instability.

By April 1947 the international political climate had changed dramatically. Following the Nuremberg trials, many of the leading members of the Nazi regime had been executed for crimes against humanity and for genocide, newly constituted crimes that had been defined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin and British lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht. Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hermann Göring were among the many leaders to be sentenced to death during the proceedings. Göring evaded the hangman’s rope when he committed suicide by ingesting a phial of cyanide in his cell on 15 October 1946. Görtz held Göring in very high regard and told Schütz that he would rather die like Göring than be taken back to Germany against his will. Both Görtz and Schütz fought against their extradition in a high-profile court case but were only successful in gaining an extension so that they could tidy up their personal affairs. Görtz became increasingly erratic and wrote to Frederick Boland and the Department of External Affairs as well as directly to de Valera to ask for an intervention on his behalf for him to be allowed to stay. The Farrell sisters also wrote to the Taoiseach to petition him to allow Görtz to stay in Ireland. In all likelihood Görtz would have been safe, and it’s likely that he would have been granted permission to stay in Germany or could perhaps have relocated to Argentina. Dan Bryan had his own thoughts on why Görtz was so afraid to return to Germany, as the tapes he recorded with Prof. Carter reveal:

He had all these friends here and they regarded him as an immensely important person, on the same scale of importance as the people that were tried at Nuremberg. They only saw what happened here while in terms of world affairs Görtz was a very small person, but they probably kept pushing this idea in his head and there was even some political people here I think, strangely enough on the fringe of the government party, and they encouraged him in this idea. That was one reason it was effective. Another reason it was effective was the failure of his mission. It didn’t matter, the war was over. Nobody was going to blame him, but he was probably depressed the whole time because everything went wrong. His mission had completely failed. He had achieved nothing. I would have thought that affected him too. And then, of course, he was depressed about conditions in Germany.

Fearing that his deportation was imminent, Görtz travelled to Frederick Boland’s house to ask him to prevent it. Boland explained to Görtz that he should have nothing to fear in returning to Germany; in all likelihood, he would simply be detained for interrogation and then released. Boland’s assurances didn’t convince Görtz and he returned to Glenageary in a distressed state. On arriving at the house he found a letter instructing him to report to the Aliens Registration Office at Dublin Castle at 10 a.m. on 23 May 1947. Günthur Schütz had received a similar letter. An Allied aircraft had been granted permission to land at Baldonnel aerodrome to fly the spies back to Germany where they would be detained by the provisional government under US General Lucius D. Clay. Görtz duly travelled to Dublin Castle, where he exchanged pleasantries with members of the Gardaí. But before he was called into the office, he took from his breast pocket a vial of cyanide, which he had had since the start of his mission to Ireland. He bit into the capsule and, in a macabre mirror image of his hero Hermann Göring’s death, Ireland’s most infamous Nazi spy died by poisoning.

Dan Bryan was dismayed when he heard what had happened and cursed the official protocol that had prevented him from visiting Görtz to reassure him that he would come to no harm if he returned to Germany. The Carter tapes reveal his extreme dissatisfaction with the matter:

He had never been back to Germany once he had come here. I still feel that if I had been allowed to see Görtz, to discuss with him, I would have told Görtz, ‘It’s your duty to go back to Germany and stand by your nation now in her difficulties. If you assure me that there was nothing against you but your activities in Ireland, I would assure you, you would certainly be rounded up for interrogation but that you have nothing further to fear and that there’s no reason, and it’s your duty to go back to your family’ … Görtz would have clicked his heels and said, ‘You’re right.’ I may be wrong about that. It may be a bit egotistical for me to say that, but I feel that. But there were all those people, and even people in official circles here who didn’t understand conditions and they in a sense, became mixed up in this. He [Görtz] got mixed up in a kind of row between two departments here, the Department of Justice and the Department of External Affairs. Justice, as the legal custodian and all that, said, ‘We’re responsible.’ External Affairs said, ‘We’re responsible because we handle international affairs and have some understanding …’ and that. When he had been out for some time and when he was re-arrested, the Foreign Office rang me and said, ‘Oh we’re very much afraid he will injure himself or do something. He’s been re-arrested.’ I didn’t know this at the time. I said I’ll go see him. He’d been taken back to Mountjoy. I rang Freddy Boland, whom I think had taken over External Affairs and he said ‘Oh, go and see him by all means.’ But then I rang Justice and Justice said ‘No’. And that’s all. If that were published the permanent head of the department would have been looking for my head under the Official Secrets Act or something.

Görtz was buried in Deansgrange Cemetery on 27 May 1947. The funeral was well attended and the Farrell sisters were chief mourners. One of the coffin-bearers was Dan Breen TD, and the coffin was draped in a hand-stitched swastika flag. As the coffin was lowered into the ground there were cries of ‘Heil Hitler!’ and the fascist salute was given. Ellen Görtz travelled to Ireland to see her husband’s grave but made no arrangements to have his body repatriated to Germany. In later years she petitioned the Irish state for the money that Görtz had on him when he was initially arrested, but she was informed that the money had been forfeited to the Irish state. In 1974, Görtz’s remains were dug up in the dead of night by a group of former Germany army officers and reinterred in the German Military Cemetery in Glencree, County Wicklow.

Günthur Schütz was eventually deported to Germany but was less apprehensive about being sent home than Görtz had been. He was flown to Frankfurt on a US bomber plane and was questioned in a nearby POW camp. He was asked about Irish neutrality and the purpose of his mission, but the Allies realised that he was a very low-level agent and he was soon released. In 1965 he returned to Ireland and paid a visit to the internment camp in Athlone. He and his wife, Una Mackey, opened a hotel in County Wicklow. He died at his home in Shankill, County Dublin in 1991.

Edmund Veesenmayer, the Nazi official who had overseen much of the Abwehr operations dealing with Ireland, had played a leading role as a member of the German diplomatic staff in Zagreb in what was then Yugoslavia (now Croatia). During his tenure there he was a fearless advocate of Nazi Party policy and was responsible for the persecution of Croatian and Serbian Jews. With Slavko Kvaternik, a leading Croatian fascist, Veesenmayer arranged for the proclamation of an Independent State of Croatia in order to install a puppet regime in the country. In March 1944, Veesenmayer was promoted to the role of SS Brigadeführer, thus becoming a Reich plenipotentiary. He was then sent to Budapest, where he became the leading Nazi official in German-controlled Hungary. Until the Nazi occupation, Hungary had been governed by a legitimate, elected parliament and government. It had had an official opposition, freedom of the press and all the hallmarks of a normal functioning democracy. When Veesenmayer was installed as the de facto leader of the country, he began to strip away all these rights. The Nazis’ occupation had been aimed at securing control over Hungary’s material and human resources in order to gain final victory in the war. The newly installed puppet government under Veesenmayer attempted to crush the spirit of the Hungarian people by instilling fear into everyday life. It wasn’t long before Nazi Party policy in relation to the Jewish community began to be carried out in Hungary, to devastating effect.

On 20 January 1942, Nazi leaders and high-ranking members of the SS held a meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The conference had been called by the director of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, to deal with the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. The plan involved deporting the Jewish population of German-occupied Europe to Poland, where they would be murdered. Heydrich outlined during the meeting how the plan would unfold and how European Jews would be rounded up. In preparation for the conference, Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust and one of Nazi Germany’s most feared individuals, drew up a list of the number of Jews in various European countries. Eichmann’s list was divided into two distinct groups: countries under direct Nazi control and puppet states, such as Vichy France, and Allied countries or those that had declared themselves neutral – this list included Ireland. Eichmann’s list included 2,300 Irish Jews who were scheduled for extermination. The 40,000 Croatian Jews and 742,800 Hungarian Jews on Eichmann’s list fell under Veesenmayer’s direct remit.

Hungarian Jews had already been persecuted under Nazi anti-Jewish legalisation enacted in 1938, 1939 and 1941. They were now in even greater peril. By 15 May 1944 Veesenmayer had ordered the use of deportation trains in Hungary to transport Jews to extermination camps, and within two months 437,402 Jews from regions outside Budapest had been taken to the camps. On 13 June 1944 Veesenmayer reported to the German Foreign Office that 289,357 Jews in 92 trains of 45 cars each had been transported eastwards across the Carpathian Mountains. Two days later he followed this up with a telegram to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in which he claimed that 340,000 Jews had been delivered to the Reich and promised that by the end of the year he would reach a target of 900,000 – his contribution to the Final Solution.

Veesenmayer was a Nazi loyalist who excelled at implementing Nazi Party policy in Hungary. In a sense he acted as diplomatic cover for Eichmann’s murderous policies, receiving promotion after promotion while at the same time spilling the blood of innocent people. The endgame for Veesenmayer began on 27 August 1944, when Soviet troops crossed the Hungarian border. While Hungary was overwhelmed in the fighting, the Soviets ultimately prevailed, establishing themselves in the country for much of the rest of the century. The last Soviet soldier left Hungary on 19 June 1991.

Veesenmayer was captured and was put on trial for crimes against humanity. He was tried in what became known as the Ministries Trial, the eleventh of twelve trials for war crimes held by US authorities in the aftermath of World War II. These trials took place in Allied-controlled Nuremberg in US military courts, in contrast to the international courts that had tried Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring and Ribbentrop. The trials were formally known as the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, and were also known as the Wilhelmstrasse Trials – the German Foreign Office and Reich Chancellery had been located on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. These were unique trials that were convened to try officials of Reich ministries for their responsibility in atrocities carried out during the war. The court was presided over by Judge William C. Christianson of Minnesota, Robert F. Maguire of Oregon and Leon W. Powers of Iowa. Telford Taylor acted as chief counsel for the prosecution and Robert Kempner as chief prosecutor.

The indictments against Veesenmayer and the other defendants were filed on 15 November 1947 and the hearings lasted from 6 January to 18 November 1948. In total 21 defendants were arraigned. The judges presented their findings on 11 April 1949. Edmund Veesenmayer was convicted on six of a possible seven counts: crimes against peace (count 1); taking part in a common plan or conspiracy to commit the aforementioned crimes (count 2); crimes against humanity (count 4); war crimes and crimes against humanity through the plundering and spoilation of the Occupied Territories (count 5); and war crimes and crimes against humanity through the enslavement and deportation of concentration camp prisoners and civilians in the Occupied Territories for slave labour (count 6); membership of a criminal organisation, i.e. the NSDAP and the SS (count 7). His defence counsel, Dr Karl Doetzer, claimed that Veesenmayer was acting under orders dictated solely by the Führer and that at times he had shown consideration towards the Jewish community in Hungary:

It is certainly correct that in late 1943 my client had a conversation with Prime Minister Tiso by order of Ribbentrop on the Jewish Problem in Slovakia, but, according to the evidence, it is equally clear that this was a camouflage order given to him as a liaison man which did not lead to any measures by the Slovakian State against Slovakian Jews … In this same capacity of a liaison man, Dr Veesenmayer was active in Yugoslavia after the outbreak of the revolt in 1941. On the basis of his findings at the time, he supported a request to evacuate several thousands of male Jews who were suspected of having collaborated with the rebels, which had previously been submitted to the Foreign Office by Ambassador Benzler, who was Plenipotentiary of the Foreign Office with the German Military Commander. The result of the evidence shows that this suggestion of Benzler’s had not been implemented but that the Military Commander, who was solely responsible and competent had these Jews taken as hostages and had them shot to death.

Despite Doetzer’s pleas, Veesenmayer was condemned by the fact that while he had been more anonymous than other high-profile Nazi leaders, he had worked closely with Adolf Eichmann in Budapest. As such, he could have easily been sentenced to death, as Ribbentrop and others had been. The weight of evidence against Veesenmayer was considerable and the details about how so many people in Croatia and Hungary met their deaths were horrific. Veesenmayer was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment on counts six and seven. Of all 21 individuals on trial, only two others received sentences as harsh as Veesenmayer’s. His crimes were of the greatest magnitude of any of his co-accused. In his final remarks, Doetzer argued that Veesenmayer’s membership of the SS was simply symbolic:

As far as Dr Veesenmayer is accused it is decisive whether or not an honorary leader of the SS – and such was my client according to the allegation of the prosecution themselves – can be a member of an organisation declared as criminal. If the tribunal adheres to the practice of the American Occupying Power in Germany, this question is to be denied without reservation. If not, the prosecution must, in the case of an honorary leader, prove that he was closely connected with the SS. This, however, they did not do. Neither did they show that the defendant Veesenmayer swore the SS oath and paid dues, nor that he did SS duty and wore the SS uniform.

Veesenmayer was sent to serve his prison sentence, but he benefited from a reduction of 10 years shortly thereafter, and in December 1951 he was released following the intervention of the UN High Commissioner in Germany, John J. McCloy, who granted him a pardon. McCloy also pardoned convicted war criminals Ernst von Weizsäcker, Josef Dietrich and Joachim Peiper, all of whom had been convicted of mass murder for their roles in the Malmedy massacre in Belgium in 1944, in which 84 American prisoners of war were assembled in a field and shot with machine guns, the survivors being shot in the head at close range. McCloy later went on to serve as President of the World Bank, as a member of the Warren Commission investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and was a senior adviser to every US president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

With his new-found freedom Edmund Veesenmayer moved to Tehran, where he was employed by a German trading company. He later moved to northern France, eventually retiring to Darmstadt in West Germany, where he died in 1977. He never faced the gallows or firing squad for his activities and he can be considered to have got off lightly for his crimes. In 1961, Veesenmayer took the stand as a defence witness for his former colleague, Adolf Eichmann, who was under trial in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. Eichmann offered the same ‘I was only following orders’ defence, but while Veesenmayer escaped the hangman’s rope, Eichmann was less lucky. He was found guilty, sentenced to death and hanged in Ayalon Prison, Ramla, Israel on 1 June 1962.

In Budapest, along the banks of the River Danube, there is a powerful memorial to fascist terror in the Hungarian capital. The Shoes on the Danube Bank is a sculpture of 60 pairs of period-appropriate metal shoes. They represent the 20,000 Hungarian Jews who were murdered by members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross party, the puppet regime over which Veesenmayer presided. Their bodies were cast into the river and carried away by the current. Even today, local people and tourists place flowers among the shoes, determined that the horrors of those years should never be forgotten.

By January 1946, Helmut Clissmann was hoping to join his family in Ireland; they had returned there via England and Denmark. He spent the latter years of the war in North Africa with the Brandenburg Regiment following the failure of his endeavours with Frank Ryan. At the end of the war Clissmann found himself interned by the British as a prisoner of war in the Bad Nenndorf camp and during his incarceration he was tortured by his captors. The camp, or interrogation centre, was notorious for its maltreatment of internees. As early as January 1947 it became evident that prisoners were being treated badly when a number of inmates were taken to a nearby civilian hospital near Bremen suffering from frostbite, malnutrition and physical injuries which seemed to indicate that they had been assaulted.

When two of the prisoners died from their injuries, a complaint was made by British personnel at the hospital and an investigation was launched into the treatment of prisoners by senior British Army officers. A British Labour Party MP visited the camp in March 1947 to carry out an inspection, and while he found no evidence of physical abuse or starvation, he was critical of the poor conditions in which the prisoners were being held. He found that most of the prisoners were kept in solitary confinement in unheated cells at temperatures of minus 10 degrees Celsius. The prisoners had been given extra blankets to compensate for the lack of heating in their cells. However, the investigation carried out by the British Army made several accusations of serious abuse.

The investigation, carried out by Inspector Thomas Hayword of the Metropolitan Police at the behest of the British Army, found that prisoners had been subjected to insufficient clothing, intimidation by the guards, mental and physical torture, arbitrary confinement for long periods without excuse and being locked in punishment cells in bitter winter conditions. It also found that inmates had been forced to scrub the floors of their cells and that they were doused in cold water and denied adequate medical treatment and food supplies. Many of the prisoners also complained that their personal property had been stolen by their captors. The findings of the investigation caused consternation in British political circles and comparisons were drawn between the camps and German concentration camps and the torture methods used by political police forces in Eastern Europe. Eventually the matter was brought before an army court martial and the camp was closed down in July 1947.

During his time in Bad Nenndorf Clissmann was tortured. As he said, ‘quite a number of times, you were stood in cold water for twelve hours or you were not allowed to lie down for 24 hours, you had to march round in the room, you could not even sit down.’ Clissmann spent a full year in solitary confinement and when he left prison, he weighed only four stone.

Under interrogation by MI5, Clissmann consciously tried to forget information about people he knew who had English addresses lest the authorities question them too. In October 1946 MI5 transferred Clissmann to the Danish authorities, who wanted to question him in relation to his time there with the German Academic Exchange Service. He was held in Denmark until April 1948 and was then transferred to a British clearing camp, where he was detained for six weeks before being released in May 1948. His wife, Budge, set about trying to obtain a visa for him to enter Ireland to be reunited with her and her children. By the time Clissmann was released, his visa for Ireland had been denied due to his role in international intelligence-gathering. He was offered a visa in return for spying on his former colleagues in the Brandenburg Regiment, but he declined. He decided he would get to Ireland by other means. ‘I made up my mind I would have to go illegally to Ireland. I walked over the Bavarian mountains into Austria then across into Italy then took a train to Rome. After waiting three weeks there I came by air to Shannon airport.’

Clissmann’s trip was not without its problems, and he had to overcome many obstacles to make his way to Shannon. He was accompanied on his walk through the Alps by two young Germans, a Dr Braun and his wife. The Brauns waited in Italy for over nine months for the papers and money needed to continue onward on their journey. Clissmann was much more fortunate, having benefited from an encounter with a chief of police in Ciampino airport in Rome. Since he had entered Italy illegally, the police were not permitted to let him leave the country illegally. Clissmann was able to arrange via his connections in Ireland for the chief of police to issue him with the permission needed to travel over the phone – if it were given in person, the officer would have been obliged to arrest him. This would have been a disaster, since the Italian authorities were on close terms with the Americans and British. It was a clever ploy to ease Clissmann through the airport security and onward to Ireland. Clissmann was stopped at the gate as he went to board the plane, but was able to instruct officials at the gate to call a particular official at police headquarters, who gave the go-ahead for him to board. The aeroplane stopped in France en route to Ireland before eventually touching down at Shannon airport. On disembarking, Clissmann produced his visa and birth certificate and was soon reunited with his wife. Following his return to Ireland, he set himself up as a businessman in the pharmaceutical industry.

Writing from Sligo on 19 October 1948, Clissmann expressed his thanks to Joseph Walshe, who was serving as ambassador at the Holy See, for helping to arrange for the special treatment he was given in Rome:

Please forgive me for not informing you earlier of my happy arrival in Ireland. The lively spirits of four healthy children with a new victim in their clutches have left me so far, no time for serious pursuits.

The arrangements at Ciampino worked as we had hoped and as there was no passport control whatever at Geneva or Paris the journey was happily, entirely uneventful. The family was at Shannon airport to meet me and I was delighted to find that the children had thrived so well on the Irish air and food. Maeve and Billy Ryan came in their new car at the weekend to welcome me and I have been delighted also with the hearty welcome from so many old friends. Altogether, I think you can imagine how very happy I am to have returned safely to my second homeland.

Your kindly reception and your prompt assistance have moved me so deeply and have been of so much value to me that I find it difficult to express my gratitude adequately. My journey was so risky that I would not have undertaken it if there had been any possibility of returning in a more correct manner. But as things stood, had I not been able to call on your assistance my family and I would have had to reckon with two or three more years of uncertainty and anxiety.

My father-in-law and Budge join me in thanking you most sincerely for the trouble to which you went on mine and their behalf. They send you their friendly regards and very best wishes. Perhaps we may have the pleasure in seeing you on your next visit to Ireland.

In the end Clissmann’s old republican connections had served him well. The First Inter-Party Government came to power in October 1948, and it was a Clissmann family friend, Seán MacBride, now the Minister for External Affairs, who had instructed Ambassador Walshe to use his influence to grant Clissmann unhindered passage to Ireland from Rome. On his return to Ireland, Clissmann became an advocate of forging strong cultural links between Germany and Ireland. He became a founding member of the Irish German Society and helped found St Kilian’s Deutsche Schule in Dublin.

He made a very positive contribution to Irish life, building on his own experiences of human rights abuses at Bad Nenndorf by helping, with Seán MacBride, to establish the Irish section of Amnesty International. He suffered a stroke in 1987, following which he retired from work to spend more time at home with his family. He visited his home in Aachen every year and spent much of his spare time gardening. He died in 1997. He was interviewed several times on RTÉ television by both John Bowman and Cathal O’Shannon about his life during the war, and his pharmaceutical company is still going strong today.

While Clissmann settled into a life of relative obscurity, Dan Bryan remained doubtful about the German’s true intent towards his adopted homeland during the war, outlining the following to Prof. Carter, although his belief was merely his own personal view and is not backed up by any evidence to date:

Well, you see, my impression is that in the first place Clissmann had a bit of an alibi in that he wasn’t originally a Nazi – that he belonged to some organisation that the Nazis looked a bit askance at. When Clissmann got back here Clissmann wanted to sell the idea to the Irish authorities that he wasn’t a person directing activities against Ireland, that he was working to preserve Irish neutrality and that if the British and Americans came in here that he was going to get the Germans to help us against them. Now he’s putting a gloss on that story – that is my impression. I may be wrong, but I don’t think I am in this case. When he came back, he didn’t want to be labelled as a Nazi and as a person that was acting against Irish interests.

While Bryan was in an ideal position to ascertain Clissmann’s true motives during the war, it is important to consider Clissmann’s strenuous denials that he acted in any way against Irish interests, as well as his distinguished contributions to Irish life in the post-war period.

Eduard Hempel was granted asylum in Ireland after the war; his close relationship with Taoiseach Éamon de Valera was probably instrumental in that. Hempel was well regarded by the Irish political establishment as it was perceived that he had afforded more respect to the Irish state than American envoy David Gray. De Valera visited Hempel to express his condolences on Hitler’s death, a move that won him widespread condemnation. Hempel returned to Germany in 1949, working with the West German foreign service before retiring in 1951. He retired to the Black Forest and died in November 1971. A delegation from the Irish Embassy in Bonn attended his funeral in recognition of his treatment of Ireland during his tenure in Dublin. His legacy in Ireland remains a contested one. He showed great courtesy to his Irish hosts, but he represented Nazi Germany at the height of its worst excesses. The Hempel residence, Gortleitragh, was destroyed in a fire, reputedly by arson, before being demolished in 1955. A modern apartment block now stands on the site, although a portion of the building’s original steps is visible from the street.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera made one of his most famous speeches, arguably the most important of his career and one that many characterise as his finest hour. In a well-crafted response to Winston Churchill, de Valera defended Irish neutrality and remarked how Ireland, a small island nation, had for centuries stood alone against aggression. The speech helped galvanise Irish public opinion and served as a riposte to Churchill’s characterisation of the Irish ‘frolicking with the Germans and Japanese’ and his assertion that the British had stood alone against Axis aggression. The speech gained widespread and deserved acclaim but was also successful in redrawing the narrative of the war in Ireland as one of isolationism and neutrality in contrast to the view of collaboration with the British and Americans that had been the general opinion during the war. While this undoubtedly garnered huge popularity for de Valera, it also diminished the role of Dan Bryan and G2 in ensuring that the Irish state was both kept neutral and free from the worst horrors of World War II.

G2 was instrumental in safeguarding the state, in preventing a German invasion or a pre-emptive Allied invasion and in thwarting spying missions by Axis powers. The war period in Ireland was certainly Dan Bryan’s finest hour, but as the decade approached its end, he found that his role in G2 became much more confined to domestic matters. Later, the Cold War was to be an active issue for Irish intelligence and he and his colleagues in G2 as well as Dr Richard Hayes sought to build on their experiences of the war to better prepare for any future conflict that Ireland might find itself in. G2 had built strong foundations, ones that would serve the state well in the future, and Bryan and the men of G2 had served the state and the people of Ireland well, despite their heroics being largely invisible to the general public.