Dateline 15th February 2006
In the Irish Political Review of November 2005 we see remarkable proof that Nazism and Fascism did not die (as most politicians and voters naively believe) in 1945. In civilised political discourse you will doubtless not have heard (since the passing of those two great humanitarians Hitler and Mussolini) that Germany in both world wars and Italy in the Second were innocent parties and that the United Kingdom started both wars. But in the Republic of Ireland such rantings can be published in a serious political journal today.
There is no pretence by this Irish Nationalist writing in the year 2005 that he is attacking certain (to him) politically unacceptable English people. He is not even attacking the “British”. He is a simple racist thug who hurls his hatred at all English people. How just like the Nazis with whom he has so much in common and whose version of history he accepts. We of course know precisely where to categorise him – as a Nazi sympathiser and anti British bigot – the kind who inspires the IRA but was rejected by most of his fellow Irishmen during the war as tens of thousands joined the British army and laid down their lives to defeat Nazism and fascism.
Nevertheless a large minority of Irishmen aided the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s cause in two wars and inspired many to join General O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade to fight for the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War – Franco gave him the title of “General” but his badly led troops left Spain, having quarreled with Franco, in the summer of 1937. (O’Duffy was at various times Chief of Police in Dublin and IRA Chief of Staff).
The De Valera Government was not at all clear in its condemnation of Nazism and De Valera’s notorious signing of the book of condolences at the German Embassy on the death of Hitler in 1945 remains a blot on Irish politics. Equally extraordinary was the Irish State’s censorship of the Charlie Chaplin film “The Great Dictator” in 1940. This was after the outbreak of the war, the concentration camps, the Krystallnacht attack on Jews, the Nuremburg Race Laws and the burning of books etc etc. Ireland was the only country in the world – outside Nazi Germany and Nazi Austria which banned the film!
Undoubtedly Mr Brendan Clifford would be rejected by most Irishmen today. But the fact that such attitudes and such writing is today tolerated as part of mainstream Irish political discourse demonstrates the continuing power of European fascism in the 21st century. It also demonstrates the continuing threat to democratic nationhood by that institution which is so precisely based on the structures, philosophy and political economy of the 1930s and 1940s – the European Union (see Europe’s Full Circle and Fascist Europe Rising on this website)www.freenations.freeuk.com/publications.html
See also Germans in the Irish Free State 1920 to 1940 www.freenations.freeuk.com/gc-58.html
The following article from the Irish Political Review of November 2005 contains the necessary correctives in italics. It is followed by the sober and rational assessment of the Republic of Ireland during the Second World War by Edward Spalton (Who was De Valera neutral against?) – the article which prompted Mr Clifford’s tirade.
The Propaganda That Never Sleeps
Brendan Clifford, Irish Political Review, November 2005
The morality of world wars is determined after the event on the basis of the military outcome. There is in the modern world no recognised source of moral authority which stands apart from the conflict and passes moral judgment on it when the shooting stops. Moral judgment is invariably given in favour of the victor, because it is the victor who delivers it.
In both its world wars of the 20th century the British State absolutely refused to consider ending the war by a settlement. A settlement would have left the morality of the war in doubt (only in the diseased minds of the fascist, which is precisely why the total eradication of the Nazi and Fascist regimes had to be achieved). Only total victory was a certain guarantee of moral righteousness. Britain therefore had no war aim in either war, except the unconditional surrender of the enemy to its will. By means of this approach it inaugurated the era of total war, war without restraint or conditions, totalitarian war on a scale which would compel the world to accept the outcome as the determinant of morality in the following generation.
The United States (HE MEANS OF COURSE THE FASCIST POSITION OF THE AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY AS REPRESENTED BY HITLER’S FRIEND OLD JO KENNEDY!) was sceptical of British moral professions during the first two years of both world wars – which, therefore, were less than World Wars in these years. This made Britain uneasy on moral grounds, even before it became desperate for American military assistance, because a major power on the wings seemed to be too much like an impartial moral arbiter.
The US found it expedient to declare war on Germany in the Great War for actual motives which are unclear, (The US Irish fascists were as active in trying to prevent attacks on their German friends in the First World War as they were in the Second. Those who most viciously attacked anti Nazis in the 1930s and early 1940s were Irish Roman Catholic priests, particularly in Boston, Massachusetts) but which certainly included the consideration that a German victory would make it impossible for Britain and France to repay the immense debts they had incurred to the United States. The Royal Navy made it impossible for Germany to get heavily into debt to the US. America was willing to trade with both sides, but Britain stopped German trade with the US.
But, after the United States declared war on Germany, the anti-German alliance mushroomed. In 1918 there were more than twenty countries at war with Germany (and this Irishman thinks they were all wrong!). This was not brought about by sordid deals and secret treaties, but by the influence of the United States as a presence on the American Continent. The States to the South had been broken in to the Monroe Doctrine, and they knew that it would not be good for them not to declare war on Germany.
To declare war on a state which has done you no harm, (sinking of the Lusitania and the killing of thousands of US civilians, spying on the USA and sytematically destroying American allies does not come under the heading of “harm” to Mr Clifford!) and against which you have no ambitions, might appear immoral under a system of abstract and general morality. But, in these affairs in modern times, morality is a concrete affair. To curry favour with the imminent victor (there was absolutely NO certainty of the Allies victory. Indeed even after the US help Germans were easily persuaded that they had been “stabbed in the back – the “Dolchstossluege” – because German troops had not even retreated behind their own borders) by declaring war on his enemy is a moral action. And the victor has no objection to people jumping on his bandwagon. Au contraire. The jumpers on his bandwagon moralise his war. (So the war was not one of German aggression but British aggression! Such is the twisted hatred of this Irish bigot, but unfortunately not only to this individual, he being symptomatic of a wider fundamentally fascist malaise which permeates Irish politics to this day)
There have been few in high places in the victor states who dissented from the practice of totalitarian morality in this matter. One of the few was Lord Hankey, perhaps the most influential British civil servant since Elizabethan times. He disapproved of putting enemy leaders on trial as criminals for doing things which the victors themselves did as a matter of course (No German was put on trial for waging war, but for committing war crimes, like killing unarmed civilians, and prisoners of war but even so most of the trials were left to the Germans and they effectively did nothing! So by hook or by crook the Germans did what Hankey wanted!).
He knew, for example, that the British Empire had made preparations for war on Germany long before 1914 because he had himself been in the thick of these 15 preparations as Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Then, during the War, he was Cabinet Secretary: he actually created the position. At the end of the War he would have liked to take the pretensions of the War propaganda in earnest by becoming Secretary of the League of Nations and making it the centre of a new departure in world affairs. But Government gave him to understand that the League was to be a facade and that the world would be ordered by the British Empire. (The League needed no help in devaluing its own “services”, which amounted to giving cover to and distracting from the German plans for European conquest. Like all supranational organisations the league succeeded in only neutering those powers which might have stopped the Nazis at an early stage)
So he remained in Downing Street as Cabinet Secretary. And a generation later he was against the “war crimes” trials at Nuremberg. (So Hankey really was the kind of fascist appeaser who would appeal to the writer of this drivel) The Nuremberg Trials were a travesty of law on many grounds. They were held under laws which did not exist (the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis had not previously existed but the law that was developed in Nuremberg is recognised to this day – except perhaps in the wilder excesses of Irish politics!). They were conducted by the victors acting as judge, jury and executioner. The guilt of the accused was presumed by the Court from the outset (so why were so many acquitted – in particular the war criminals of IG Farben and other industrial conglomerates? Many of them went on to hold important positions in post war German industry and helped to found post war institutions, several leading Nazis taking up leading roles in the European Economic Community) and they were displayed as debased criminals (So what were the organisers of the massacres of millions of Jews, Germans, Serbs and gypsies, the medical experiments on prisoners, the ethnic cleansing of “racially inferior” Slavs and the conductors of the screaming, ranting show trials put on by the Nazis – humanitarians? They were nevertheless tried according to principles of international law and given able counsel to defend them)
The defence lawyers were impeded and intimidated. Actions which were known to have been the work of the prosecuting Powers were charged against the defendants (and pigs fly upside down over Nuremberg to this day!). The conduct of the prosecuting Powers, which might have served as a substitute for the law which did not exist, was ruled out of order as a basis for defence. And all military actions of the prosecuting Powers were exempted from the presumed law.
In 1939 there was much condemnation of the bombing of Warsaw, but it did not figure among the crimes charged against the Germans. The situation was that the Polish armies had been defeated and Warsaw refused to surrender, although it was surrounded and was without hope of relief. The city authorities decided on a street-by-street resistance to occupation. In effect the city declared itself a fortress and was treated accordingly. (!!!)Sieg heil! What a loyal Nazi this man would have made!
The point I am making is not a moral one. Morality has no real application to the kind of war inaugurated by Britain in 1914. (And this is the kind of Irish bigot with whom Heath, Blair and others in Britain have gleefully collaborated against the genuine anti-fascists in Northern Ireland)
The point is that the war for which Britain prepared in the 1930s was a bombing war, and the major British war effort lay in the bombing of cities with a view of exterminating the workers in them. The bombing of cities was therefore excluded from the category of war crimes at Nuremberg. (Because bombing cities indeed the fire bombing of cities was carried out first by the Germans and then by the Allies. More people were killed in one day of Nazi bombing of Belgrade than in any other bombing raid of the war, including the London and Coventry Blitzes)
The British propaganda, which never sleeps, is intent on cleaning up the record of the British involvement in Ireland, and that can only be done by blackening the record of the Irish. The view of the Irish as volatile fantasists (I wonder where anyone could have got that idea from, surely not from reading the work of Mr Clifford and his ilk?), who deny realities which irk them, and who are therefore at their best entertainers of the matter-of fact English, but are also liable to indulge in atrocities without quite knowing what they do, is cultivated today as much as it ever was. (there is no pretence by this bigot that he is attacking certain (to him) politically unacceptable English people. He is not even attacking the “British”. He is a plain, total, racist thug who hurls his hatred at all English people. How just like the Nazis with whom he has so much in common! We of course know precisely where to categorise him – as a fascist and racist anti English bore – the kind who was rejected by most of his fellow Irishmen during the war as tens of thousands joined the British army and died in the war against Nazism and fascism and would undoubtedly be rejected by most Irishmen today. But the fact that such attitudes and such writing is today tolerated as a part of mainstream Irish political discourse demonstrates the continuing power of European fascism in the 21st century)
I also remember the critical moment in The Emergency. That was when people who had been involved in the War of Independence twenty years earlier began to make preparations to meet a new British invasion. One of the preparatory measures was that my uncle took down the signposts in the area. (What a poor terrified existence such Irish must have had – fighting spectres – only English ones of course! If there were any reason for a British attack it could only have been if German troops or facilities had been welcomed to Ireland. But who would fear that except a true Nazi willing Hitler’s victory?)
A realistic estimate made in the realities of the time had grounds for seeing a British invasion as an immediate probability and a German invasion as a remote possibility-except as a counter to a British invasion, as in the case of Norway. (Britain sent a few troops to Norway, at that country’s invitation, to try – in vain – to resist a German invasion. To categorise this as an invasion of Norway is a bigotry of such breathtaking awfulness that it is extraordinary that sane people of any nationality – except perhaps the Neo Nazi thugs in today’s Germany – could even conceive of such drivel. It is of course remarkably clear that those very countries which resisted Nazism and Fascism in the 1940s (Serbs, Norwegians, Poles, Czechs, British) are today the most resistant to the European Union while those who allied themselves with the Axis powers were the first to approve – but not of course by popular vote – the European Union’s Constitution.
Back around 1960 I was surprised to find myself better informed-or at least more objectively informed-about the course of the war than English people with whom I discussed it. I suppose that was due to exclusion of propaganda from the Irish reporting. (No, don’t laugh, excruciating though it is!)
The War, which Britain began on the pretext of Danzig in 1939 and worked up into a World War, was its most thoroughly bad war rather than its only good war. Britain (and France) did not fire a shot in defence of Poland. What there was in 1939 was a German/Polish War. But, though not delivering on the guarantee to Poland, Britain (and France) used the German/Polish War as the occasion to declare war on Germany – not for the purpose of defending Poland, but for some other purpose entirely. (No this man is not in an asylum he is writing in an apparently respectable Irish political journal in the year 2005)
It is perhaps now time to read the original article by Edward Spalton which appeared in the same journal and to which this absurd article was supposed to be a reply! Edward Spalton does a superb analytical, well researched and balanced job of exploring the Irish State during the Second World War. His German sources are of particular interest.
WHO WAS DE VALERA NEUTRAL AGAINST?
BY EDWARD SPALTON
It is the fate of neutral countries to be called names by belligerents, especially by those with whom they have close social ties. Jan Myrdal(*1) recounts how the Germans referred to the Swedes as “those swine in their smoking jackets”, sitting out the war in comfort whilst the Reich fought as the champion and defender of Europe. Such name-calling did not preclude “correct” persistent diplomacy and pressure upon neutrals for concessions which would stretch the concept of neutrality to its limits and beyond.
Sweden provided transit facilities for German forces. Such cooperation diminished as the fortunes of war swung against Germany. With its far closer relationship to Britain and its near total dependence on British goodwill for coal, petrol, the morning cup of tea and much else, it is unsurprising that the Irish government stretched the terms of neutrality in favour of Britain, whatever the public rhetoric of the time.
The beleaguered Britain of June 1940 could not have spared the men or coastal artillery to garrison the Irish Treaty ports which Chamberlain had surrendered a couple of years before. If they had been in British hands, a German descent on Ireland would have had to be anticipated
– in a re-run of the French attempts during the Napoleonic wars. It was a distraction the British government could well do without. Whilst German respect for the Royal Navy rather than the niceties of neutrality was the deciding factor, their legation in neutral Dublin was an ideal observation and listening post at Britain’s back door. With a considerable traffic of people coming and going from mainland Britain and Belfast, the Irish facility for “the craic” would surely provide attentive ears with useful information.
The Irish authorities were elaborately punctilious in their dealings with German diplomats, partly playing to the gallery of extreme republican opinion as well as to an agreeable sense of the consequence and dignity of their hard won independence, whilst ever mindful of its extreme fragility in a world at total war.
Industrial Britain needed food from Ireland but Britain was Ireland’s only possible wartime customer so the bargaining was hard and tough. Whilst Ireland had nowhere else to sell, every rasher of Irish bacon or pound of butter was one less for Britain to carry past Atlantic U boat packs. Britain needed Irish labour to build its airfields and man its war industries. But above all, there were 160,000 Irishmen who volunteered to join the forces of the Crown in the fight against
Hitler. This equals an average of some 6,000 from every county of the Irish Free State. Everyone had someone they knew – relative or acquaintance, involved in the fight against Hitler.
From a small state with a population of some three and a half million, this enormous contribution of manpower to Britain’s war effort had a decidedly un-neutral aspect. Ireland’s strategem was to ignore them totally. By a far stricter system of censorship than applied in Britain, they were simply not mentioned. Indeed, until very recently, that was still the official Irish attitude to their countrymen who fought in the foreign army of the ancient oppressor.
*1 See lecture in “European Voices” section www.freenations.freeuk.com
2.
During the Emergency, as the war was called in Eire, every word of every newspaper, including the advertisements, had to be passed by the censors. Occasionally they were outwitted. A society columnist was able to tell his readers that a well-known figure of the Dublin scene was “recovering from his boating accident”. The gentleman in question had survived the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse by the Japanese!
Behind the screen of censorship, De Valera was able to make concessions which were of considerable benefit to Britain. Flying boats on anti-submarine patrol from Lough Erne in Northern Ireland were permitted to fly over neutral Donegal, thus adding some 100 miles
to their effective range. British air/sea rescue crews in civilian dress were allowed to operate out of nearby western Irish ports. Flying boats which landed in Irish waters from lack of fuel or
mechanical breakdown were permitted to be refuelled or repaired and sent quietly on their way. Flying boat crew who were washed ashore were classified as “mariners” and, as such, repatriated under international law. Other members of the British armed forces were interned. In the heavy blitz of Belfast, De Valera sent the Dublin fire brigade north to give humanitarian assistance.
Perhaps one of the most valuable assets to the allies was the use of the Irish flying boat base at Foynes. Over ten thousand important passengers made the transatlantic crossing by this route during the war. High ranking British officers were given papers showing that they were officials of the Forestry Commission or some such civilian body to preserve the veneer of neutrality.
The very successful Irish intelligence services passed on the results of interrogations of captured German spies to their British counterparts but refused to allow British officers to participate.
Whether simply influenced by the pressure of his much more powerful neighbour, or by what De Valera himself called “a certain consideration towards England”, the balance of Irish policy certainly favoured British interests.
Neutral states almost always come in for name-calling. In Ireland’s case, the jeering came entirely from the British and allied side. The American wartime ambassador, Gray, is still remembered for his hectoring attitude and public denunciations of Irish neutrality. When
Germany declared war on the United States, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to De Valera, urging him to join the war – “Now’s your chance. A nation once again!”. Because of Churchill’s nocturnal working habits, the telegram arrived in the small hours and De Valera was roused from his sleep, fully expecting to be handed a British ultimatum.
These and all the other anxieties and slights, to which small states are subject when great powers have urgent matters on their minds, must have added up to a fair load of accumulated resentment by the time the war was drawing to a close. Perhaps this played a part in De Valera’s extraordinary public excursion to the German legation to sign the book of condolence upon Hitler’s death. There was absolutely no requirement of protocol for him to do such a thing. The ghastly story of the Nazis’ Final Solution was being made known in newsreels all over the
world at the time. He must have realised that he would bring international obloquy upon himself and Ireland. So why did he do it?
3.
It set up a very public spat with Churchill which served to remind domestic opinion that the allied victory was not a victory for the Irish nation, whose territory still remained partitioned.
The slanging match with Churchill did him no harm at all with hard line republican opinion. One factor may have been De Valera’s high personal regard for Dr Eduard Hempel, the German minister. At the end of the war, the allies demanded that neutral states should hand over German diplomats. Apart from the Vatican, Ireland was the only European state to refuse this request. Dr. Hempel and the small staff of the German legation remained in Ireland, having claimed political
asylum. By 1948 it was obvious that the allies were setting up a West German state which would require a diplomatic service. Dr. Hempel submitted his request for de-nazification, which had by then become a German responsibility. On 24 November 1948 Hempel sent his application to the Special Commission for the Denazification of Higher Administrative Officials in Stade. It was accompanied by glowing testimonials from leading Irish personalities, the Apostolic Nuncio to
Ireland and from De Valera himself. This reads as follows (*1)
“It is a pleasure for me to testify that Dr. Eduard Hempel was German minister in Ireland from 1937 to 1945. During the whole of this time I was foreign minister and prime minister. Our official positions brought Dr. Hempel and myself into frequent contact.
Dr. Hempel always appeared to me as a man of intelligence, refined education, manners and complete honesty. Whilst he fulfilled his duty to his country with zeal, he conducted himself in conformity with the best traditions of the diplomatic service and did not act in any way
as a propagandist for the National Socialist view of the world.
His task as envoy of a belligerent state in a neutral country was especially difficult and delicate. He fulfilled it in a way to which I never had the least reason to take exception. He knew completely how to assess the position of Ireland as a neutral country and, it is my opinion, that his clear understanding of our position contributed on more than one occasion to preventing unpleasant situations from taking a dangerous turn. No representative of a democratic state could have behaved with greater insight or intelligence.”
Hempel had become a Nazi party member in 1938 but the Commission accepted the view of Schroeder, the Head of Personnel at the German Foreign Office, that he was “without influence” and “more or less apolitical”. Schroeder recommended a denazification certificate in the second class. Along with all other Foreign Office personnel records of the Nazi era, Hempel’s were destroyed by allied action in 1943. He had not been able to send a replacement CV because there was no courier service between Dublin and Berlin. Given the evidence to hand, the Commission accepted Hempel’s account and his excellent character references. He got his “Persilschein” as the certificate of denazification was called, because it washed whiter than white. He was in category V – exonerated. Hempel could reasonably expect to resume his diplomatic career as a representative of the new democratic Germany.
(*1) This is a retranslation of the German version of De Valera’s letter, prepared for the ommission, and may differ from the original in a few words.
4.
Perhaps the glittering recommendations diverted the Commission from enquiring why the envoy to neutral Ireland had been awarded the War Merit Cross first and second class.
They were apparently unaware of the Interrogation Summary of the Reich Foreign Office State Secretary, Adolf Baron Steengracht von Moyland, at Nuremberg, dated 19 March 1947. In this, Hempel was not only named as “envoy in Dublin” but also as “Lieutenant Colonel in the SS”
(Obersturmbannfuehrer). This contradicts the SS seniority lists of 30 January 1944 and 1 October 1944 where Hempel’s name is absent. Steengracht’s allegations about other diplomats and SS officers proved to be correct.
The SS recruited people in key positions and membership conferred considerable prestige and privilege. Correspondence going back to 1936 shows that the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst ( SD – security service), SS Gruppenfuehrer Heydrich, was at pains to ensure that names of those recruited to the SD could not be traced through the SS central registry. With bureaucratic pedantry the central registry insisted that existing cards could not simply disappear. An “ersatz”
card would have to be inserted, showing service up to the time of transfer but with no indication of the transfer. Then the original cards could be transferred. These records were kept in a separate archive which was given the name “Ortsgruppe Braunes Haus, Sektion Berlin A” – (local group Brown House, Section Berlin A). Personnel in charge of these records were warned of the severest consequences of a breach of security. The name was later changes to “Ortsgruppe Braunes Haus, Gau Reichsleitung” (Local Group Brown House, District Reich Leadership). Officers recruited directly into the SD would never appear on the central registry. From 1938 to 1945, Hempel was listed in the secret section, whose records were available at the US Documentation Center, Zehlendorf. Hempel must therefore have had a special function as an SD agent, either within the Nazi party or in the Foreign Office.
A parallel can be drawn with another diplomat in this special section who combined his official mission as Consul in Glasgow with intelligence work. In May 1950 the Jewish American weekly “Aufbau” accused Hempel of having misused his diplomatic immunity in Ireland for espionage, producing evidence from German secret records. It was said that Hempel had sent cipher telegrams from Dublin via Berne to Berlin, detailing “rewarding” targets in Britain for bombing.
These claims were taken up by a German Centre Party MP , Reisman, as part of a general attack on rehabilitated Nazis within the Foreign Office. On 18 December 1951 Hempel was placed on the retired list eighteen months early. Whilst he got to enjoy his pension , his former colleague in Dublin, Henning Thomsen, (who had joined the SS cavalry in 1933 and the Nazi party in 1937) flourished modestly and went on to become ambassador to Iceland. His SS central registry record shows that he was listed in the section “Foreign Service – Abroad” until 1937 (the year he was posted to Ireland). This was an “ersatz” replacement card. With benefit of hindsight, it seems highly likely that his original card was transferred to the local group “Braunes Haus, Gau Reichsleitung”. At least two of Germany’s very “correct” diplomats in Ireland seem to have doubled as intelligence agents.
5.
Whether De Valera was aware of this and wished to shield them from allied interrogation and himself from unwelcome exposure is not certain. Perhaps he had held conversations with the German diplomats as to Ireland’s position in event of a German invasion and occupation
of England. As emissaries of Heydrich, Hempel & Thomsen would have carried far more clout than simple diplomats. The Gestapo and SD were tasked with controlling occupied Britain’s civil administration. Something other than routine reports must have justified Hempel’s War Merit Cross awards. Every other German embassy or legation in neutral or occupied Europe had an officer whose task was liaison with the local police and legal authorities. These appointments were frequently camouflaged as cultural attache. There was no such appointment in the Dublin legation but the minister and his deputy were, in all likelihood, both members of the SD which supervised police work all over Europe.
It would have been unnatural if De Valera he had not considered the possibility of British defeat in 1940, but in 1945 maybe he just enjoyed taking a high moral stance alongside the Vatican and twisting the British lion’s tail. Asylum for the German diplomats perhaps served a second purpose of keeping them quiet. Certainly his government’s actions during the war had been overwhelmingly favourable to Britain and the allies.
Wartime tales of German submarines refuelling in Irish ports could hardly be true in a country which was practically destitute of petroleum products. Britain controlled the supply and was
understandably niggardly with it.
Whilst he played hard for his side and never lost sight of his goal of a united independent Ireland, De Valera seems to have played his wartime innings with a pretty straight bat. Neutrality was overwhelmingly supported by the Irish people, as it prevented the reopening of the wounds of the civil war which had followed independence. Neutrality was a policy acceptable to the former combatants of the Free State and Republican sides and not unacceptable to Britain. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many who volunteered to serve in the British forces supported it for the same reason.
The long sequel was a denial of the independent Ireland for which De Valera had striven. The formation of the post war German foreign office was a triumph of continuity. By and large, the same people were running the show in 1949 as had run it up to 1945 – often with the same responsibilities. The Cold War enabled Adenauer to insist that his core team of foreign policy specialists should be exempted from denazification. The examination of the rest, as we have seen, was hardly very searching. An early pledge that no former Nazi would be sent abroad as an ambassador was soon dishonoured. Some eighty former Nazis served as post war ambassadors for the new democratic Germany.
It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how such an ideologically orientated cohort saw the proposals for the European Iron and Steel Community of 1951. It and the European Economic Community of 1957 provided an opportunity to fashion a European polity after the model they had envisioned in the Thirties and before. As Dr. Seebohm, one of Adenauer’s ministers, expressed it for home consumption in 1951, “Will free Europe join Germany? Germany is the heart of Europe and the limbs must adjust to the heart, not the heart to the limbs”.
6.
The last fifty years of the European history have largely been a tale of how the rest of Europe, led by a gullible, treacherous or ignorant political class, sleep walked into that long-prepared destiny.
Some Sources:
The New EU Superstate from a Swedish Perspective – Jan Myrdal
www.freenations.freeuk.com/voices-jan-myrdal.html
The Donegal Corridor & irish Neutrality – Joe O’Loughlin
www.localdial.com/users/airforce/Doncor.htm
Verschworene Gesellschaft- das Auswaertige Amt unter Adenauer – zwischen Neubeginn und Kontinuitaet Hans-Juergen Doescher, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1995. ISBN 3-05-
002655-3
