IRA

[WEISWEILER]

U2, New Year's Day from the album War

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=zHzLWLFTPPI


"Under a blood-red sky
A crowd has gathered in black and white
Arms entwined, the chosen few
Newspaper say, it's true and true"


In this videoclip some WWII archive footage is used, and I just wonder... What is shown and what did the Irish band mean by this song? To me it's a strange mixture of cold war sentiment, IRA- or let's say - Irish cause sympathy and at the same time longing for a girl and for war to end.

This tricky question to start a thread on German support to the Irish liberation movement in its battle against Britain. Please share your knowledge and visuals on this item here.

/W

All the best for 2008.

[WEISWEILER]

An interesting film about this subject?

From: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3602802/Hid ... _(XviD-WS):

In the aftermath of World War 2, the unsuspecting Irish public gave safe haven to some of the Nazi regime's most notorious collaborators and war criminals. Protected by church and state, many made their homes in Ireland, or used it as a staging point for escape to America.

Veteran broadcaster Cathal O'Shannon has a personal interest in this story: during World War 2, he joined the RAF to fight the Axis powers. But after the war had ended, Cathal suggests that the Irish state seemed to give a greater welcome to former Nazis and their collaborators than they did to returning war veterans. In this two-part series, he sets out on a journey across three continents to uncover the true story of Ireland's Nazis.

Cathal O'Shannon investigates how the cold war opened new channels for Nazis seeking sanctuary here. He tells the story of 'the most dangerous man in Europe' and Hitler's favourite soldier - Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny, a James Bond figure who famously rescued Mussolini from a mountaintop fortress. Skorzeny was feted by the Dublin social glitterati, even hobnobbing with a future Taoiseach. He also looks at Helmut Clissmann, the man tasked by the Nazis to recruit the IRA for their war against Britain. Cathal moves on to investigate the Flemish nationalists who became Nazi collaborators - men like Albert Folens, who went on to become a successful publisher of Irish schoolbooks, Albert Luykx, who fled justice in Belgium and later conspired with Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney to import arms for the IRA, and Staf Van Velthoven, the last surviving of 'Ireland's Nazis'.

The style is intriguing and investigative, utilising archive, interviews and drama reconstruction. On a journey that crosses three continents, Cathal O'Shannon discovers who these men were and asks why they were allowed to build lives in postwar Ireland. Steeped in political and religious intrigue, this groundbreaking documentary series reveals the truth about one of the most sensitive and unexplored areas of Ireland's past.

[WEISWEILER]

This film fragment talks about a 120 man strong German SS-force to organise Irish engagement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97GxY8zHb88

[WEISWEILER]

The IRA during World War II

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Repu ... 22-1969%29.

During the Second World War, the IRA leadership hoped for support from Germany to strike against Britain during the war, and Seán Russell travelled to Germany in 1940 to canvass for arms. He became ill and died on board a German U-boat which was bringing him back to Ireland in August that year (See Operation Dove). Stephen Hayes, the acting Chief of Staff prepared an invasion plan for Northern Ireland and sent it to German Intelligence in 1940, this plan was later called Plan Kathleen, but it was discovered by the Irish authorities within one month of its creation.

Gunther Schuetz, a member of the Abwehr parachuted into Ireland and was almost immediately arrested. On 28 February 1942 he escaped. The IRA intended to send him back to Germany with a request for weapons, ammunition, explosives, radio equipment and money. The IRA Army Executive met on 20 April and sanctioned the requests. They resolved “to give military information to powers at war with England, which would not endanger civilian lives, even before any definite contacts have been established with these powers.” An IRA courier was arrested on the Dublin-Belfast train with documentation of the decisions taken, and details of the German contact. This led to the arrest of Schuetz, on 30 April, only hours before he was due to set sail. The boat was seized and the crew arrested.

In 1942, the IRA launched an armed campaign in Northern Ireland. It has been rumoured that during the war period IRA members may have attempted to aid the German aerial bombing of industrial targets in Northern Ireland. Information recovered from Germany after the war showed however that the planning of raids such as the Belfast Blitz was based exclusively on the aerial reconnaissance of the Luftwaffe.

The IRA was severely damaged by the measures taken against it by the governments on both sides of the border during the Second World War. IRA members were interned both north and south of the border, and a number of IRA men, including chief of staff between 1942 and 1944 Charlie Kerins, were executed for criminal offences by the Irish government during the war. Kerins had been tried and found guilty of the murder of a Garda (police officer).

[Fennicus]

Hello, Weisweiler

There is a book about the German contacts with the Irish during WW2. It is written by Enno Stephan and called Geheimauftrag Irland. Deutsche Agenten im irischen Untergrundkampf 1939-1945. Published in 1961 by Gerhard Stalling-Verlag, Oldenburg - Hamburg.

The book has 345 pages and it is based on many interviews, statements, contemporary newspaper reporting etc.

Regards
Markus

[WEISWEILER]

Thank you, Fennicus.

[WEISWEILER]

Seamus O'Donovan was a leading volunteer in the Irish Republican Army.

A native of County Roscommon, he was an explosives expert and reputedly invented the "Irish Wallflower" and "Irish Cheddar" devices. He subsequently became IRA Director of Chemicals in 1921. During the Irish War of Independence he was imprisoned in Mountjoy and Kilmainham prisons and later interned in Newbridge, County Kildare. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and fought in the Irish Civil War. In 1938, at the request of IRA chief of staff Seán Russell, he wrote the S-Plan, a bombing campaign targeting England.

As "Agent V-Held", he visited Germany three times in 1939 on behalf of the IRA. On 28 February he negotiated an arms and radio equipment delivery at the Abwehrstelle in Hamburg. On 26 April he concluded a new arms deal with the Abwehrstelle and established with the help of a Breton a secret courier connection to Ireland via France. On 23 August, O'Donovan received the last instructions for the event of war.

On 9 February 1940, Abwehr II agent Ernst Weber-Drohl landed at Killala Bay, County Sligo aboard U-37. He was equipped with a 'Ufa' transmitter, cash, and instructions for O'Donovan who by this time was the chief IRA contact for Abwehr I/II. The transmitter was lost upon landing, but when Weber-Drohl reached O'Donovan, 100 miles inshore at Shankill, Killiney, County Dublin, he was able to deliver new transmission codes, $14,450 in cash, and a message from "Pfalzgraf Section" asking that the IRA concentrate its S-Plan attacks on military rather than civilian targets. In 1940, he was involved in setting up Córas na Poblachta, a party which proved unsuccessful. Irish historian David O'Donoghue is currently writing a biography of Seamus O'Donovan.

(Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_O'Donovan; http://cgi.ebay.nl/U-37-1938-German-Sub ... otohosting)


A rare picture from U-37 on ebay.

[WEISWEILER]

Another one, taken in 1940, censored.

(Source: http://cgi.ebay.nl/U-Boot-U-37-Einlaufe ... otohosting)

[WEISWEILER]

Albert Folens - Nazi background of prominent Irish publisher exposed

By David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent
Published: 04 January 2007

The Nazi past of Ireland's foremost educational publisher is to be highlighted in a television programme to be broadcast on the state system, RTE, this month. The programme details the record of Albert Folens, a Belgian who after fleeing to Ireland following the war built up a highly successful business producing school textbooks.

Folens, who died in 2003 at 86, had not denied working for the Germans but minimised his part in the war. But his involvement with both the Gestapo and Waffen SS is to be revealed.

He was among a small number of Germans, Belgians and Dutch who arrived in the Irish Republic after 1945. Although some were suspected of having worked for Hitler, there was no determined official effort to weed them out.

Folens' general sympathies were no secret, though the particulars of his role were not generally known.

He was, the programme says, a volunteer in the Waffen SS Flemish legion, serving on the eastern front until he was wounded. After treatment in an SS hospital, he joined the Gestapo, working at their Brussels headquarters, he claimed, as a translator.

His name is said to have appeared on the US Army's Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, known as Crowcass. But Folens always denied any involvement in torture or inhumane treatment.

Arrested by the British Army in Germany, he was sentenced to 10 years after a military trial. But he escaped after 30 months and fled to the Republic, on a false passport. In Dublin, he worked as a teacher then set up a publishing company, producing textbooks and copybooks for generations of Irish children. The concern flourished and he became a well-known figure.

At the time of his death, a dissident Irish republican organisation paid tribute to him as "a big-hearted benefactor of republican prisoners during the 1970s and 1980s", saying thousands of prisoners' children had benefited from his generosity.

A sympathetic obituary of him in a Dublin newspaper said he had joined Hitler's "Flemish Legion" - the 27th Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade Langemarck - for the specific task of fighting the Red Army. Another former Nazi lived in Belfast after the war. Werner Heubeck, a colourful businessman who had been a member of the Hitler Youth movement, and made no secret of his record, became managing director of the official transport company Ulsterbus.

His speciality during the Troubles, when many of his vehicles were set on fire and blown up, was to enter buses in which possible explosive devices had been placed. In many instances, he carried the devices off the vehicles.

(Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2124259.ece)

[mil-archive]

There's a reasonable book on SD + IRA efforts called 'Irish Secrets' German espionage in Wartime Ireland 1939 - 1945 by Mark M. Hull
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Irish-Secrets-E ... 071652807X

There is also a review and interview with the author here

http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/200 ... 234528.asp

[phylo_roadking]

The Erno Stephan book was actually an Irish publication LOL and it's a standard reference and classic on the period. It should be easy to pick up a copy on Ebay or Amazon althopugh IIRC it's been some years since an edition was last published. Search on "Spies In Ireland". My copy was my dad's, an original 1950's paperback copy.

[tigre]

Hello to all : a complement..............................

Agent Ernst Weber-Drohl!

On 9 February 1940, Abwehr II agent Ernst Weber-Drohl landed at Killala Bay, County Sligo aboard U-37.

Source: https://picclick.de/U-Boot-Krieg-Foto-U ... id=1&pid=1

Cheers. Raúl M .

[Tucobenedito]

In his book The IRA, Tim Pat Coogan also covers the contacts between IRA men and the Nazis during the war.

[Wim]

Hello,

Several Flemish nationalist who collaborated with the Germans found their new home in Ireland.

The Irish struggle for independance (and the Flemish one) felt alike and that was the binding factor.

Greetings

Wim

[Tucobenedito]

There was an adage in Ireland, England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity. There are two "Bloody Sunday's" in Irish history. The first one during The Irish War of Independence when an IRA unit known as the The Squad wiped out a British intelligence unit known as The Cairo Gang. The Squad knew where the officers lived in Dublin and launched multiple attacks on multiple locations. The British responded by sending an armoured car to Croke Park in Dublin and opening fire on spectators who had gathered to watch a GAA match killing spectators and players.
The second Bloody Sunday happened 50 years later in Derry in 1972. British Paratroopers opened fire on an anti internment march protesting arrest and detention without charges or trial. 14 unarmed civilians were shot dead.
The British have since apologised for both atrocities. No soldier was ever held to account for these murders.
Both events have been well documented. Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan has written a book called The Twelve Apostles detailing the men who killed the The Cairo Gang.
He has also written a detailed history of The IRA called, would you believe, The IRA. He writes about contacts between The IRA and the Germans during the first and second World Wars. The Germans shipped weapons to the IRA in 1916.
It also worth noting that British loyalists in the North of Ireland received a shipment of arms from Germany in April 1914 (Ulster Volunteer Force UVF) This was when the Irish Home Rule Bill was being proposed in the UK Parliament. The loyalists, who hated the thought of Home Rule for the Irish, usurped the will of the U.K. Parliament with the threat of German weapons. The Germans gave weapons to both sides in the hope of a civil war in Ireland creating further difficulties for Britain. War is a dirty business and there is enough dirt to leave The Germans, The British, The IRA and UVF needing a good scrub.