Irish Volunteers

Discussions on the foreigners (volunteers as well as conscripts) fighting in the German Wehrmacht, those collaborating with the Axis and other period Far Right organizations. Hosted by George Lepre.
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Marcus_Sweden
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Irish Volunteers

#1

Post by Marcus_Sweden » 27 Sep 2002, 22:46

Hello everyone!

ok, I'm putting together a website confined to the Volunteers who fought for the Waffen SS and other divisions of the German Armed Forces. ANY information (don't think YOU have nothing to say! ) is needed,

This post, I'm looking for info on Irish volunteers. I know that at least three in the Waffen SS, but only have names. any other help!!??

Ireland (esp. ireland)



so, please help me out. of course everyone who helps will be credited. so any pitcures, songs, names, bios, info etc etc is needed. I'm pleading here hehe )

thanks in advance for the help mates
Marcus

[email protected]

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Ando
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#2

Post by Ando » 30 Sep 2002, 02:09

This page mentions volunteers from Ireland but doesnt go into much detail unfortunately.

[link removed by moderator]

Ando


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harry palmer
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#3

Post by harry palmer » 30 Sep 2002, 12:41

One fairly reliable source claims that the Abwehr recruited a few POWs, members of Irish regiments of the Brirish Army, captured in 1940, but they were imprisoned after turning out to be double agents.
The Waffen SS attempted to form an Irish unit , gathering several thousand captured Irish members of the allied forces for this purpose in Luckenwald POW camp in summer 1944, but the experiment was a failure.
I was not aware that any Irishman served the Waffen SS at all. Can you name those three names?
One Irishman , John J. O'Reilly, served the Siecherdienst, but I am unsure if he actually held any rank in the SS. He was captured shortly after parachuting into Western Ireland,and when he escaped from prison, he was turned in by his own father, a former policeman. On his post-war release from prison he left the country.
I'll post more when I can find the relevant files.

Adrian Weale
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Irish Volunteers

#4

Post by Adrian Weale » 30 Sep 2002, 15:10

James Brady and Frank Stringer both served in SS-Jagdverband Mitte between 1944 and 1945. Both were eventually court-martialled and imprisoned by the British Army (they were members of the RIF who had been imprisoned on Guernsey in 1940 for assaulting a policeman). It is possible that an Irish doctor named Patrick O'Neill served as MO of SS-Sturmbataillon 500, though as this story comes from Frithjof Porsch alias Ingo Peterssen, it needs to be treated with a certain scepticism.

What the Germans seemingly failed to appreciate was that almost all of the Irishmen they captured during the war, whether from the north or the Free State, were volunteers for British service, not conscripts, and were conseqently somewhat better disposed towards Britain than the handful of IRA men they had access to in Europe.

AW

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Marcus_Sweden
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Irish Volunteers

#5

Post by Marcus_Sweden » 30 Sep 2002, 18:00

Okay, thanks for the help everyone. Those three names you mentioned between you where the ones I'd known. It seems like there was only three then? or at least three known members? any other info would of course be GREATFUL! anyone have images of these three men??

Marcus

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harry palmer
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#6

Post by harry palmer » 30 Sep 2002, 18:28

Thanks Adrian, I was honestly astonished. Is there any possibility of attaching the relevant extract from your book to this thread? Were Brady and Stringer's court-martial papers your only source here? Spies in Ireland (Enno Stephan),based mostly on interviews with Abwehr operatives, tells a similar tale about Cushing and Walsh. Have you any idea about what happened to Brady and Stringer after their release?

Adrian Weale
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Irish Volunteers

#7

Post by Adrian Weale » 01 Oct 2002, 11:28

There are some fragmentary German files on attempts to recruit Irishmen but the main sources I used were the court-martial papers (in the WO71 series at the PRO in London). Stringer's company commander - the amusingly named SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Karl Fucker - is still alive but apparently doesn't remember him and the trail for both men is pretty cold now, though it would be interesting to find them.

AW

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harry palmer
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#8

Post by harry palmer » 01 Oct 2002, 13:48

Amusingly named indeed!

Relevant extracts from "Spies in Ireland", Enno Stephan (Four Square 1965):
" The Abwehr decided after the successful French campaign in 1940 that it would possibly be useful to sound the Irishmen in the German prisoner of war camps."
"The special camp for the Irish was established close to the village of Altdamm near Friesack in Brandenburg Rhin-Luch. Helmut Clissmann, Dr Jupp Hoven and Frank Ryan were among those who had to undertake the thankless task of finding useful volunteers in this camp. Their selection was not large: when Dr Hoven made his first visit to the camp in the spring of 1941, he found about eighty Irishmen there......with each of them a personal reservation had to be taken into account from the very beginning. For example, the few Irish officers involved made it clear that they could only be counted on in the event of an invasion of Ireland by British troops."
"So, in the second war, the "Irish Brigade"-the term is used ironically-consisted,after careful weeding out ,of about ten men....Dr Hoven tells us ,"they were given instruction at the Abwehr training institute on the Quenzgut."

Section-Leader Kurt Haller recalls: "One of the two Irishmen was the former Sergeant Codd who had been taken prisoner in the French campaign. He was a highly intelligent man but reserved and difficult. He was to have made a parachute jump (near London)with another Irishman who was known as 'Willy' and whose name was probably Le Page."
"Codd continued to stay for a time together with the other Irishmen from Friesack Camp in the house provided for them in Berlin by the Abwehr. Then he was taken over by the security authorities. At the end of the war he showed that he was not only a lady-killer but artful. Dressed as a French prisoner of war, he succeeded in getting to France with a German girl,whom he had meantime married, and from there returned unscathed to his Irish home."
"Agent Vickers of "Seagull 1" was in fact a former Irish prisoner of war by name Walsh. Agent Metzger of "Seagull 2" was also an Irishman from Friesack Camp whose real name was Brady.....They were to fly together from Drontheim by Focke-Wolf 200- the one to Scotland and the other to Ireland.
Just before the time scheduled for take-off, Haller suddenly received a telephone call from Berlin......Haller was to arrest both Irishmen straight away."
"Haller succeeded in obtaining the release from prison of Brady-alias Metzger. As far as Haller recollects, Brady was later also taken into the custody of the security authorities. Walsh, Cushing and all the other Irishmen from the private house in Berlin eventually shared the fate of many Germans and foreigners who knew too much for them to be allowed to run around free. As possessors of secret information they vanished into a concentration camp until the end of the war."

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harry palmer
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#9

Post by harry palmer » 01 Oct 2002, 14:00

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~dan/war/ssvols.htm


Adrian; I’m taking the liberty of adding this link to “Dan’s War Room”. If you don’t want this, then I’ll ask Marcus to remove it.

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harry palmer
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#10

Post by harry palmer » 01 Oct 2002, 14:26

“The Germans trained a handful of Irish civilians and prisoners of war for clandestine work in Ireland, Britain and the United States, although only three of these- Joseph Lenihan, John Kenny, and John O’Reilly were actually sent on missions [all three were detained within a few days of landing in Ireland]. Another, John Codd, was recruited from a prisoner of war camp by Jupp Hoven, and at various times was apparently to be sent to Britain, to the United States, and to Northern Ireland. On his return from Germany in 1945, he gave a lengthy.(though in G2’s view somewhat dissembling) account of his training as an agent from 1942 to 1944.”
“DEFENDING IRELAND”, Eunan O’Halpin (Oxford University Press 1999)

Adrian Weale
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Kurt Haller

#11

Post by Adrian Weale » 01 Oct 2002, 16:07

No problem with the link Harry.

Interestingly, Kurt Haller's MI5 file has recently appeared at the PRO. I haven't looked at it yet but will do so soon.

AW

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harry palmer
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#12

Post by harry palmer » 01 Oct 2002, 16:12

“ Confronted with the sustained failure of the recruiting drive in British Oflags and Stalags, the England Committee had decided in the late summer of 1944 to concentrate on Irishmen, because of their congenital opposition to all things British…..”
The first step in this plan was the concentration of all Irish prisoners of war , no matter whether they were citizens of the Irish Republic, the United Kingdom , the Commonwealth or America at Luckenwalde base camp. Eventually between 900 and 1200 Irishmen were collected there, and attempts to indoctrinate them were made by a Swiss Nazi, SS Captain Hans Lindt, propaganda officer of Colonel Lutter, the Commandant.”
“They were crowded into barrack huts, 250 together, with only wooden bunks and straw bedding for furniture. The rations supplied by the Germans were totally inadequate and even the addition of Red Cross parcels did little to alleviate the pangs of constant hunger. When the Germans stopped the supply of these parcels for two months, the situation deteriorated even further and the worried Man of Confidence, an Irish Guards regimental sergeant-major, and the chief medical orderly , a New Zealander, had to contact the Protecting Power before the parcel supply was restored.”
“Among the sentries patrolling outside the barbed wire were at least two with [British Free] Corps uniform sporting the Union Jack shield on the sleeve. The Man of Confidence advised both to seek a posting elsewhere, before a knife was slid between their ribs.A man called McGinty, who resembled a stage Irishman and who had lived in Germany since 1918, acted as interpreter for the Germans inside the compound. His first appeals for recruits fell on deaf ears, as did subsequent appeals by IRA officers. In fact, it became quickly apparent that his drive too, was going to fail completely , and [SS] General Berger recommended the return of all the Irishmen to their permanent camps without delay.”
“JACKALS OF THE REICH”, Ronald Seth, (New English Library 1972)

Adrian is far more qualified than I to decide the reliability of this account, but it does seem to correspond to an account by an inmate of Luckenwalde, a Royal Artilleryman from Dublin who was captured in north Africa. When the Third Reich lent it’s hand to matters Irish the result was often deeply farcical (one Abwehr agent landed on the Irish coast was of clearly Indian heritage and was apprehended while wandering the back roads of West Cork in a white silk suit, another was arrested while waiting at a rural railway station for a train that had ceased to operate many years previously) and this attempt to attract Irish recruits to the Waffen SS does not seem to have been any exception….

“That the native-born Irish would be well represented was only to be expected. What was remarkable was the inclusion of an incredible number of “Irishman” who had never in their lives seen the green hills of Erin. They hailed from the four corners of the earth , the descendants of the ‘Earls’, of the Wild Geese and of the refugees from the Great Famine, the only common factor being the fact that their surnames were Irish or apparently so, and indeed they were nothing if not colourful.”
These “Irishmen” apparently included a Navaho( PFC Flaherty of the US Army), , a Spaniard called O’Donnell and a full-blood Zulu whose long tribal name happened to begin with an ‘O’. There was also “Sambo” Barry from Sierra Leone, brought up by Irish missionaries, and who was apparently a very fine singer of Irish songs sung with a remarkable Cork brogue!

Such comic relief was apparently badly needed. Conditions in Luckenwalde were harsh and continued to get worse.

“With such a cosmopolitan population, it was easy for the Germans to plant their own spies within the camp, and this they did with considerable success. Every escape attempt was nipped in the bud, every contraband radio was discovered with uncanny accuracy, every attempt to smuggle in food was thwarted until the Irish played their ace- they began to communicate in Gaelic. This move created immediate consternation, for the Germans had no one who could cope with Gaelic and they soon began to get tough. Conditions rapidly deteriorated within the camp ; Red Cross food parcels failed to appear and rations were reduced to starvation level. Orders were issued that letters to next of kin allowed under the Geneva convention would not pass the censor unless written in English. It was about this time that a letter arrived in Dublin , written in English and describing conditions in Luckenwalde as being , to say the least, quite acceptable. The letter ended ,quite innocently with the words “Give my love to Moryha.” Since no such lady existed, it was not difficult to translate Moryha into the Gaelic words “mar dheadh” [something akin to “bullshit”] and from this it became apparent that the letter contained a deliberate tissue of lies. As a result of this, immediate representations were made to the International Red Cross in Geneva and in due course a delegation from Switzerland arrived at Luckenwalde to investigate. Naturally, by the time they arrived, conditions had improved beyond belief.”

When considering the case of the few Irishmen who served the Axis cause, it is important to put this in the context of the huge numbers who fought for the Allies. Some 50,000 are estimated to have fought in the British armed forces alone.

Adrian Weale
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Irish volunteers

#13

Post by Adrian Weale » 01 Oct 2002, 18:21

Seth is a dubious source and none of the BFC men ever mentioned a tour of duty as a guard at Luckenwalde: I've always had my doubts about much of this story. The seriousness with which the Germans took this idea can be gauged by the fact that in the official correspondence, they are continually muddling Luckenwalde and Buchenwald, neither of which were congenial places to be confined. When I asked Alex Dolezalek, of the Germanisches Leitstelle, about the recruitment of Irishmen he could remember very little effort being made by the Waffen-SS.

I don't doubt that the Germans welcomed any Irish volunteers who came their way, but I don't think they saw Ireland as a significant source of soldiers, and the fact that they put less effort into recruiting Irishmen than they did into the farcical BFC seems to me to confirm this. Where the Germans did hope to benefit from Ireland, and its proximity and common language with Britain, was in utilising the IRA for sabotage and perhaps espionage, but again this proved to be futile.

AW

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Mr S
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#14

Post by Mr S » 01 Oct 2002, 20:15

Hi, i got the latest issue of military illstrated, 8 pages of BFK, fan äe svensk för övrig med Nordland som favorit intresse,skicka ett mail!

Mr S

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#15

Post by David Thompson » 01 Oct 2002, 21:26

Here's another aspect to this story:

Goertz (Görtz), Dr. Hermann (?-1947) -- German agent {parachuted into Ireland 1941 in an effort to create an alliance between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Germany; arrested and held for deportation to Germany until 28 May 1947; committed suicide by poison at Dublin 28 May 1947 (NYT 29 May 1947:6:4).}

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