Is Irelands neutrality stance in WW2 unfairly criticized? (see Mod note 217)

The Irish Government knew about the conditions of the Irish prisoners from a letter smuggled out in 1944 by a Swiss inmate leaving the camp. They also knew about it after the war of course but it was hushed up.

NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP SLAVE LABOURERS FROM WEXFORD Patrick Breen was born in Wexford town on 12 March 1888 to Moses, a baker, and Anne (née Doyle). The family lived on King Street and later in The Faythe. Patrick worked as an able seaman on merchant ships out of Liverpool. During World War II, he was on board the Athel Line’s MV Athelfoam on a voyage from Liverpool to Cuba. On 15 March 1941, the tanker was attacked by the German battleship Scharnhorst and sunk about 500 miles southeast of Newfoundland. Forty-five survivors, including Patrick, were taken on board as prisoners of war. Patrick Breen and the other 44 survivors of the Athelfoam were landed at Brest in German-occupied Brittany by the Scharnhorst. From there they were first transported to Drancy internment camp in Paris and later to Milag Nord POW camp, about 19 miles north-east of Bremen. Milag held mainly captured British merchant seamen. Conditions at the camp were spartan but better than the forced labour and concentration camps across Germany. Many Irish merchant seamen ended up in Milag. Some were pressured by the Gestapo to collaborate with the Nazi regime by joining German forces or to return to Ireland and spy for them. They suggested to them that, being Irish, they ought to work against Britain in the war but they all refused. They also refused to sign contractual agreements to become voluntary workers for the Third Reich. Offers were made to work in the Messerschmitt aircraft plant or to be employed on the merchant ships out of Hamburg but the Irish prisoners were sceptical and refused all offers. They were told that the alternative was that they were to be sent to labour camps. On 6 February 1943, thirty-two Irish prisoners were awoken in the middle of the night by the Gestapo. They were taken on two lorries to Bremen-Farge concentration camp in the small inland port of Farge on the River Weser, north of Bremen. The camp had been erected close to a naval fuel oil storage facility and some of the prisoners were held in an empty underground fuel tank until the new slave-labour concentration camp was completed. Initially the camp was run by the SS. The prisoners at Farge were used as slave labour to construct the massive bomb-proof Valentin submarine construction facility, the largest in Germany, between 1943 and 1945. Germany was developing a revolutionary larger and faster diesel-electric submarine called the XXI or Elektroboot. It was designed to operate entirely submerged up to several days. But these new U-boats had to be built quickly at Valentin. Up to 12,000 slave workers from seven concentration camps were used to build the gigantic Valentin bunker. It is estimated that by the end of the war 6,000 workers had died.Conditions at Bremen-Farge were horrendous. About an hour after the Irishmen arrived the beatings by a group of SS guards with weighted hosepipes began. The prisoners’ heads were shaved, they were deloused and all personal possessions confiscated. The Irish seamen were told by the SS that they were no longer being held under the protection of the Geneva Convention and they would have no further contact with the outside world. For two years they lived in hellish conditions. Many prisoners died of disease, starvation and exhaustion in the camp or on the construction site. Others were beaten to death or shot on the spot. At first the Irish prisoners were put to work laying the railway tracks leading to the planned Valentin bunker that were necessary before construction began. They worked in all weather, often in below-freezing temperatures in flimsy clothing. Prisoners caught wearing sacks, extra fabric or pieces of blankets under their shirts were beaten or shot. Instead of socks, they wrapped rags around their feet. Work on the Valentin site took place day and night, with the prisoners working at least 12-hour shifts and Admiral Dönitz reporting directly to Hitler on its progress. (Dönitz would succeed Hitler for just one week following his suicide in 1945). Each section of the giant electric submarine was to be built throughout Germany and transported to the new facility. A door on its western wall would open into the River Weser to allow completed submarines to enter the river directly and on into the North Sea. It was designed to build the most modern and deadly submarines in the German fleet at a rate of one every 56 hours. Each day at the Farge camp started with a roll call that could take one hour while the prisoners were forced to stand to attention without speaking. They were beaten and then marched the three or four miles to the Valentin site, which they reached around 6am, and had to start work immediately. Those who were put to work moving huge steel and iron girders often perished in accidents. These detachments were known as ‘suicide squads’. Many workers collapsed and died from exhaustion, some run over by trucks. At the end of each day they were marched back to Farge, where they had to wait for up to two hours in silence before finally getting a bowl of watery turnip soup. Many died from starvation. The Irish in Farge were the only group whose first language was English and they tried to stick together in the hope that they might survive the appalling conditions.But on 13 May 1943, only three months after arriving at Bremen-Farge, Patrick Breen from Wexford town died. He was 55 and was the first of five Irish merchant seamen to lose his life in the camp. His death was recorded as being as a result of pneumonia but one account said he died from a beating with an iron bar by one of the camp guards. It is not known what happened to his body but in all probability he was buried in one of the mass graves close to the camp. Typhus broke out in Farge in 1944 and caused the deaths of three of the Irish inmates. Gerald O’Hara (50) a radio officer from Ballina, Co. Mayo died on 15 March 1944. A month later, Owen Corr (23) from Rush, Co. Dublin and Thomas Murphy (53), also from Dublin, both died on the same day: 27 April 1944. One of the merchant seamen held in Milag Nord POW camp was Christopher Ryan from Tramore, Co. Waterford. He too was transferred with the other Irish prisoners to Farge. A letter addressed to the Swiss consul in Bremen, pleading for help and signed by the remaining Irish inmates, was secretly taken out of the camp by a Swiss national who was being released. The letter made its way to the Irish chargé d’affaires Con Cremin in Berlin. He soon arrived at the camp, escorted by SS officers, to meet the men. He stayed for about two hours and was shocked at their physical condition, and promised that he would have them repatriated to Ireland.Late in 1944, the Irishmen were put on a train to the port of Flensburg on the Danish border. The plan was that they were to be taken to Ireland on board a Swedish merchant ship. But Allied planes had destroyed a bridge on the route to Flensburg and the ship that was to have taken them to Sweden had left without them. The men were returned to Farge and not to Milag, despite protests from Cremin.The fifth and last Irishman to die in the camp was William Knox from Dún Laoghaire. Knox (59) was the oldest of the remaining Irish prisoners. It is believed that he may have died from oedema, also known as fluid retention. The village doctor was called and he was operated on without anaesthetic while four of his Irish colleagues held him down on a table. The doctor inserted a tube into his side and drained some water from him. But he died two days later on 2 March 1945. With the Allies already close to Bremen by March, the SS began to evacuate the remaining inmates in Farge and the other satellite camps and vast quantities of files were burned. The prisoners were moved farther from the Allied lines to other camps such as Bergen-Belsen, where many thousands starved to death and around 8,000 Jewish prisoners were slaughtered. The Irish inmates had been moved back to Milag Nord POW camp, where the other prisoners were shocked at their condition. They had not seen them for two years and had believed that they had volunteered to work for the Germans. The camp was liberated by British troops on 27 April 1945. Within a few days the Irish survivors were flown to England and some were soon on a ship on their way home to Ireland. Many were weak, malnourished and seriously ill and would not recover for several years. Survivor James Furlong from The Faythe had moved to England in 1916 to complete his apprenticeship as a marine engineer with Cammell Laird shipbuilders in Birkenhead. He joined the merchant navy the following year and remained living in England. In 1940, while on board the SS Duquesa out of Liverpool, the vessel was captured in the South Atlantic by the German battleship Admiral Scheer. Another Wexfordman who survived the horror and returned to Ireland was Thomas Cooney from Monck Street. It is believed that he had first been intercepted on a neutral Liberty ship (mass-produced in the U.S. for wartime use), released and transferred to a Swedish ship, only to be captured again by the German navy. The death in Farge of Patrick Breen from Wexford town was not reported back home until the end of the war when William English from Arklow, one of the 32 Irish prisoners, spoke to the Irish Times in May 1945. On 17 May, the newspaper mistakenly reported that Patrick hailed from Blackwater and this was repeated in other publications. The Free Press went in search of his family in Blackwater and reported on 26 May that “Exhaustive inquiries made by The Free Press failed to trace his relatives in Blackwater.” Most of the Irish survivors never spoke of their time incarcerated in Nazi Germany and their fate has been largely ignored. The surviving Irishmen were awarded between £1,000 and £2,400 each by the British government.In 1999, the German government set up the Forced Labour Compensation Fund. Volkswagen was one of the main contributors, having been compelled to admit in court the previous year that 80 per cent of their workforce during the Second World War had consisted of slave labourers. The Volkswagen car had been the brainchild of Ferdinand Porsche and Adolf Hitler. Porsche was a friend of both Hitler and his second-in-command, Heinrich Himmler. However, it was not until 2004 that the few Irish survivors of Bremen-Farge still living received any payment from the fund.At the end of the war the Valentin bunker was still unfinished and not a single XXI submarine had been built at the complex. Part of the structure has been turned into ‘a monument to the cruelty and fiendish technological capabilities of Nazi Germany.’ © Des Kiely (Extract from the complete story in ‘Fascinating Wexford History - Vol. 2’)

Have you a link to that block of text? You know in case you "shortened" it.

You've been caught lying several times today and editing quotes!

Rubbish. I never lied and if I quote one of my own quote I am quite entitled to leave out something not said already.

The block of text was taken from Historical Wexford facebook page, post on 10 June 2022.

You are the one who lied about me, claiming I said half the mechant seamen concerned died. I said nearly half, it was 22 out of 50. Some of the surviving 28 took years to recover, they were in such condition leaving the concentration camp. Some may never have recovered fully in every way, such was their ordeal.

I cannot be bothered looking it up. The sentence I made the second time, made no reference to who it was from , did it? It did not alter the point I was making which was.

Yes, the Irish government was aware of the raging antisemitism Yes, it did close its doors to desperate refugees fleeing Nazi Europe.

You put it in quotes and edited out the bit you didn't like. You don't care about arguing in good faith, you're just lying and editing stuff to try and make a point that isn't there!

I did not lie. The points I made was The Irish government was aware of the raging antisemitism and Yes, it did close its doors to desperate refugees fleeing Nazi Europe. I did not say who said that or give a link. Fact

Thanks for pointing it out because I cannot find another country who took in less than we did before or during the war. Bet you cannot either. Would be pretty hard.

As noted already, the executions of the IRA men in Irish jails could have been avoided if Dev and this government had the will. Things can be made to happen. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland granted the President the right of pardon Article 13.6, but this power was required to be exercised "on the advice of the Government" (led by de Valera as Taoiseach) Article 13.11.

Also, do not forget that Dev asked the authorities in N.Ireland not to execute the IRA man involved in an IRA gang who murdered a Catholic N.I. policeman in N. Ireland during the war.

Executions could have been avoided throughout history. What in hell is your point here, do you have one that relates to the entire government and opposition bar one TD choosing to be neutral?
You are just flinging as much shade as you can.

And what has it to do with neutrality?

What are you on about?

What have the executions or enslaved prisoners got to do with the decision in 1939 to be neutral?

We successfully resisted bullying by the Allies, cajoling and UI trinkets from Churchill and provocation from the Germans and nothing has changed our policy since.

Rubbish. I asked questions which you and FrancieBrady refuse to answer. I did not use Devs name in the questions. I asked;

Did the government here ever ask Hempel, the Nazi party rep about the Irish merchant sailors who died in the slave concentration camps?

What was the point of being neutral if Germany bombed us ( about 50 bombs ), destroyed a higher % of the merchant fleet than the Allies merchant fleet, and thought so little of captured neutral Irish seamen that they separared Irish from British and sent the Irish to Nazi slave labour concentration camps?

In my opinion, Dev is lucky the Battle of the Atlantic was not lost by the Allies - it nearly was.

If that happened, after Britain fell, we would have been occupied by the Nazis, like 6 other neutral countries were.

Would our government not have gone down as the group in history who lost western Europe to the Nazis and enabled Hitler to carry out his final solution in Ireland? And treat the rest of us like the captured Irish seamen?

At best, was our government in ww2 not fooled by the Nazis, who did not exactly put us top of the racial tree. We were lower than than English, according to the Nazis.

Portugal was also neutral, avoided being bombed more than we were, and still lent the use of the Azores to the Allies.

Usually effective neutrality requires a country to either possess a strong, self-sufficient defence force ( like Switzerland) or be geographically or diplomatically protected by neighbouring powers ( like we were in WW2 and Cold war). Being neutral did not work for Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium etc etc. We were lucky we could shelter behind Britain

Our neutrality would not have worked for us if Germany won.

Is it not the case that remaining neutral during ww2 could be viewed as a moral failure because standing idly by during the Holocaust and the subjugation of Europe really just meant tolerating the intolerable.

Shows neutral countries are not always bombed if they lend a port or military base to the Allies.

"Portugal was also neutral, avoided being bombed more than we were, and still lent the use of the Azores to the Allies."