“I tried to break the spell, the heavy, mute spell of wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the bush, towards the gleam of the fires, the throb of the drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.”
Joseph Conrad ~ Heart of Darkness
Into The Darkness
As the Nazis swept across Europe with Teutonic efficiency, Sean Russell was living the good life in Berlin. He was ensconced in a private villa, courtesy of Mein Fuhrer, with the status of diplomat and an Austrian aristocrat acting as his interpreter and chauffeur. Sean Russell was the IRA’s man in Berlin and a Nazi collaborator with a beguiled, unlawful soul.
Eighty years later, Irish Republicans are still in deep denial about IRA collaboration with the Nazis. There has been a mass disconnect from reality. It’s hard to put a positive spin on Nazism, what with the occupation of numerous countries, a global military conflict and the Holocaust. The IRA command had leapt enthusiastically into bed with a totalitarian regime, but later when the Third Reich was in tatters, they opted for a damage limitation strategy, playing down their relationship with Mr Hitler. The IRA’s support base clung onto the propaganda and didn’t let go. Internalising a nonsensical narrative was better than accepting the disturbing, morally bankrupt truth.
Over the years any Irish Republican commentary on Sean Russell and his merry band of rosy cheeked IRA compatriots, has emphasised how un-Nazi they were. We are told their relationship with the Nazi regime was not, repeat NOT collaboration, no matter how much it might look, sound and smell like collaboration. The party line is that the IRA were not Nazis and that there were justifiable reasons for a non-collaborative, no strings attached relationship with Nazis.
An alternative perspective is that it’s irrelevant if Sean Russell or the rest of the IRA command were card carrying Nazis, or completely uninterested in European politics. They were seeking support from the Nazis and offering to help them in return with their invasion plans for Britain, whilst other countries were toppling like dominoes during the Blitzkrieg. This can only be described as collaboration, no matter how many coats of gloss you apply to the IRA’s reimagined past.
After the war, Sean Russell was considered so un-Nazi by the IRA’s true believers that in 1951 a statue was erected in his honour, in Dublin’s Fairview Park. A crowd of five thousand turned up for the statue’s grand unveiling. Throughout the decades, when the IRA and its cheerleaders have been forced to choose between awkward facts that show ’the boys’ in an unfavourable light, or a mythology so heavily sugar coated it should come with a health warning for diabetics, they’ve reached for mythology every time.
In 2003, Mary Lou McDonald, the then Sinn Fein EU MEP candidate and now Sinn Fein president, spoke at a commemoration for the reimagined and Disneyfied Sean Russell. That would be the same Mary Lou who has been insisting more recently that Sinn Fein is just a normal political party. Sharing the platform that day with Mary Lou was Brian Keenan, who happened to be the Chief of Staff of the PIRA Army Council. Obviously Mary Lou was unaware of this, so we can only imagine her surprise if someone subsequently mentioned that fact to her.
Keenan of course praised Sean Russell and called him a patriot. As with all senior members of PIRA, when you have a catalogue of atrocities in your own past, it’s best not to set a precedent by critiquing other members of your death cult. It’s important for members of a terrorist group responsible for mass murder, maiming and wanton destruction, to circle the wagons and form a mutual appreciation society. There are reputations and an IRA mythology to protect, so you don’t dump on those who came before, and in later years the next generation of murderers will stand in front of microphones and eulogise you.
The IRA Nazi Mating Dance
Now for some details about the collaboration that wasn’t really collaboration... apparently.
The IRA had their first direct talks with the Nazi regime in 1937, when the then Chief of Staff, Tom Barry, travelled to Germany to seek support for attacks against the British army in Northern Ireland. Barry’s plans were rejected the following year at an IRA convention when his successor, Sean Russell, put forward his own grand plan for an alliance with Germany.
Russell sought the help of his IRA comrade James O’Donovan, to produce a plan for a bombing campaign in England. An objective of the bomb attacks in English cities was to display the IRA’s capabilities to the Germans. What became known as the ‘S Plan’ was to be the IRA’s mating call to Berlin.
In January 1939 O’Donovan sent a formal declaration of war by letter to the British Foreign Secretary. The letter included an ultimatum for the British military to withdraw from Northern Ireland within four days. The bombings that followed soon after had the desired effect on the Germans. Early in February 1939 an agent from the Abwehr (Military intelligence) named Oscar Pfaus, was dispatched to Ireland for talks with Russell and O’Donovan. Pfaus informed the two men that his superiors would be keen to meet IRA representatives and discuss assistance.
James O’Donovan set sail for Germany and held a series of meetings in Hamburg with his new best friends in the Abwehr, discussing IRA resources, capabilities and various issues of mutual interest. The Germans also set up a means of coded communication and provided contact details for Abwehr agents.
As no money was forthcoming from Germany, Sean Russell set off on a fundraising trip to America, meeting up with Joe McGarrity, the leader of Clan na Gael. It was through McGarrity that Russell had initially made contact with German intelligence. It was the prospect of financial and military assistance from Germany, that had earlier helped Russell secure the role of IRA Chief of Staff. Whilst Russell was in America, Stephen Hayes was appointed the new Chief of Staff.
In April 1939, O’Donovan returned to Hamburg for further discussions with the Abwehr, hoping to secure the promise of weapons and radios, but the only outcome from the trip was the setting up of a courier route.
In the middle of August 1939, two weeks before Germany invaded Poland, James O’Donovan was back in Hamburg for his third and final meeting with his Abwehr contacts. On this occasion O’Donovan stated that the IRA was seeking German support for the occupation of Northern Ireland. Whilst this was not ruled out by the Abwehr, they requested that the IRA focused for the time being on British military targets in Northern Ireland and elsewhere in the UK. O’Donovan also requested weapons, ammunition and explosives, but these failed to materialise. Germans agents did however transport money to the IRA and a radio link was established.
In the closing days of August 1939, as Britain edged closer to war with Germany, the IRA continued to detonate bombs in England. On the 25th August 1939, an IRA bicycle bomb exploded in Coventry, killing five people and injuring over seventy. Meanwhile in Dublin, the IRA stole truckloads of weapons and ammunition from the Irish army, but then managed to lose it all when police discovered where it was concealed. The Coventry bombing and Dublin arms theft led to the introduction of emergency powers in Ireland and the internment of IRA leaders.
It may be worth noting at this juncture that Northern Ireland was created in 1921 and virtually from the outset was under attack from the IRA. For now, I will leave it to readers to consider how IRA activity, including their plotting with Nazis and campaigns of terrorism, impacted not only on relations between Northern Ireland and its neighbour across the border, but also on relations between people living in Northern Ireland.
What Did You Do During The War?
In the summer of 1940, Sean Russell spent three months in Berlin having meetings with his German allies, including a conference in early August with the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Admiral Canaris the head of the Abwehr and his deputy Erwin von Lahousen. Also present was Edmund Veesenmayer of the SS, who had previously been involved in the invasion plans for Czechoslovakia and Poland. In March 1940 Veesenmayer was given the responsibility for trying to move neutral Ireland into war against Britain. Veesenmayer was a specialist in what we now euphemistically call “regime change” and his presence at the meeting points to the intentions of the Nazis and the nature of their collaboration with the IRA. The ultimate goal was not merely the invasion of Northern Ireland, but the domination of the entire United Kingdom and the IRA were viewed as collaborators in this enterprise.
Within a few days of the conference, Russell was on board a U-Boat, setting sail for Ireland. He was accompanied by Frank Ryan, a member of the IRA who had been captured by government forces whilst fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris had secured his release in July 1940, to bolster IRA support for Germany.
On the 14th
August, with the U-boat one hundred miles off the coast of Ireland, Sean
Russell’s voyage home ended prematurely when he died as the result of a burst
gastric ulcer. The German submariners buried Russell at sea and with that, his
war was over. Frank Ryan returned to Germany and replaced Russell as the IRA’s
contact with Germany. This was a peculiar turn of events, bearing in mind that
Ryan had been on the anti-Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, but as with
Russell, he too willingly collaborated with the Nazis.
Whilst the IRA and its supporters have been keen to portray the actions of Ryan, Russell, O’Donovan and the rest of the IRA as a tactical move rather than sympathy for Nazism, a July 1940 statement from the IRA, issued whilst Russell was still in Berlin, referred to the Nazis as, “friends and liberators of the Irish people”. The following month, the IRA was stating that with the help of their “victorious European allies”, Ireland would achieve absolute independence within the next few months”. Some IRA publications were also peddling anti-Semitic propaganda that claimed the Irish government was under the control of Jews and Freemasons, the “new owners of Ireland”.
In the next part of this blog, we will examine the IRA’s propaganda narrative regarding their collaboration with the Nazis, in the light of more recent events during the so called ‘Troubles'. We will compare the IRA narrative about their wartime collaboration, with the narrative used to justify and excuse Provisional IRA terrorism.
The second part is available here.
