On 15 January, 1943, Frank Ryan was laid low by an apoplectic fit. Francis Stuart visited him in the Charite and found him with his eyes half closed and his right arm paralysed. Ryan recovered, but one complication followed another. “He went to various hospitals. It was a bad time to be ill. All hospitals were crammed full with wounded. Food was poor and scarce and air attacks heavier and heavier.”

Life in Berlin was now a complete nightmare for the dying man. Ryan’s German friends had left the capital. Dr Hoven was now a parachute officer at the front. As one of General Ramcke’s staff officers he was finally captured in the garrison at Brest.

Ryan died in June 1944 at a hospital in Loschwitz in Dresden. His funeral in Dresden was attended by Elizabeth Clissmann and Francis Stuart. Clissmann eventually forwarded details of Ryan’s fate to Leopold Kerney in Madrid. According to Stuart and Clissmann, the cause of death was pleurisy and pneumonia.

In 1963, historian Enno Stephan located Ryan’s grave in Dresden, German Democratic Republic. Three volunteers of the International Brigades, Frank Edwards, Peter O’Connor and Michael O’Riordan travelled to East Germany as a guard of honour to repatriate Ryan’s remains in 1979. On 21 June his remains arrived in Whitefriar St. church – his local church when he was in Dublin. The church was packed with all shades of Republican and left-wing opinion, as well as those from his past such as the anti-Semites Francis Stuart and the Clissmanns, as well as Peadar O’Donnell (who spoke at the service), George Gilmore, and ex-comrades and sympathizers from all over the world.

The cortege on its way to Glasnevin Cemetery halted at the GPO in memory of the dead of 1916. His coffin was borne to the grave in Glasnevin Cemetery by Irish veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Frank Edwards, Peter O’Connor, Michael O’Riordan and Terry Flanagan. Con Lehane delivered the funeral oration while a piper played “Limerick’s Lamentation”.

So ended the Hidden History of Herr Hoven himself. But of Francis Stuart and his admirers there is still much to tell, even until this day..And for the 1,000 civilians, men, women and children, who lost their lives due to the Nazi bombing of Belfast 75 years ago following the activities of the Abwehr, there has been no oration…and no Lament.

To be continued

Among the people of Northern Ireland, reactions tended to blame the mediocre Ulster Unionist government for inadequate precautions. Tommy Henderson, the great Shankill working-class hero, an Independent Unionist MP in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland, summed up their feelings when he invited the Minister of Home Affairs to Hannahstown and the Falls Road, saying “The Catholics and the Protestants are going up there mixed and they are talking to one another. They are sleeping in the same sheugh (ditch), below the same tree or in the same barn. They all say the same thing, that the government is no good.”

Another claim was that the Roman Catholic population in general and the IRA in particular guided the bombers. Dr Barton, an expert on the Belfast Blitz, has written: “the Catholic population was much more strongly opposed to conscription, was inclined to sympathise with Germany”, “…there were suspicions that the Germans were assisted in identifying targets held by the Unionist population.” This view was probably influenced by the decision of the IRA Army Council to support Germany. As we have seen, however, German Intelligence had been very active both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with both the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) through the German Academic Exchange at Queen’s University, Belfast, as well as the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the SS) sending agents there. Yet this fact is generally ignored by the whole Irish Academic Establishment in books on the Belfast Blitz to cover up the complicity of their predecessors.

There was a later raid on Belfast on 4 May; it was confined to the docks and shipyards. Again the Southern Irish emergency services crossed the border, this time without waiting for an invitation. On 31 May 1941 German bombers bombed neutral Dublin.  German intelligence operations effectively ended in September 1941 when An Garda Síochána made arrests on the basis of surveillance carried out on the key diplomatic legations in Ireland, including the United States. I think this was a result of the Blitzing first of Belfast and the realisation that Hitler’s intentions in the South were not so benign as de Valera had first thought. During the First World War the German objective was to roll back the borders of the Latins and return to those of a more ancient Greater Germany. Protestant Britain was to become a German colony, Roman Catholic Ireland an Austrian one. For Hitler the Second World War was merely an attempt to clear up the unfinished business of the First.

To be continued

By 6am, within two hours of the request for assistance to Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, 71 firemen with 13 fire tenders from Dundalk, Drogheda, Dublin, and Dún Laoghaire were on their way to cross the Irish border to assist their Belfast colleagues. In each station volunteers were asked for, as it was beyond their normal duties. In every instance, all volunteered. They remained for three days, until they were sent back by the Northern Ireland government. By then 250 fire men from Clydeside had arrived.

De Valera formally protested to Berlin. He followed up with his “they are our people” speech, made in Castlebar, County Mayo, on Sunday 20th April 1941 (Quoted in the Dundalk Democrat dated Saturday April 26 1941): “In the past, and probably in the present, too, a number of them did not see eye to eye with us politically, but they are our people – we are one and the same people – and their sorrows in the present instance are also our sorrows; and I want to say to them that any help we can give to them in the present time we will give to them whole-heartedly, believing that were the circumstances reversed they would also give us their help whole-heartedly”

Initial German radio broadcasts celebrated the raid. A Luftwaffe pilot gave this description “We were in exceptional good humour knowing that we were going for a new target, one of England’s last hiding places. Wherever Churchill is hiding his war material we will go … Belfast is as worthy a target as Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol or Glasgow.” William Joyce “Lord Haw-Haw” announced that “The Führer will give you time to bury your dead before the next attack … Tuesday was only a sample.”

However Belfast was not mentioned again by the Nazis. After the war, instructions from Joseph Goebbels ordering it not to be mentioned were discovered. It would appear that Adolf Hitler, in view of de Valera’s negative reaction, was concerned that de Valera, and the Irish American politicians he controlled, might encourage the United States to enter the war.

To be continued

There had been little preparation for the conflict with Germany. Craigavon had said: “Ulster is ready when we get the word and always will be.” And when asked in the N.I. parliament: “if the government realized ‘that these fast bombers can come to Northern Ireland in two and three quarter hours”, he replied: “We here today are in a state of war and we are prepared with the rest of the United Kingdom and Empire to face all the responsibilities that imposes on the Ulster people. There is no slacking in our loyalty.”

Yet Dawson Bates simply refused to reply to army correspondence. When the Ministry of Home Affairs was informed by imperial defence experts that Belfast was a certain Luftwaffe target, nothing was done.

Unlike other British cities, children had not been evacuated. There had been the “Hiram Plan” initiated by John MacDermott but it failed to materialise. Fewer than 4,000 women and children were evacuated but there were still 80,000 children in Belfast during the Blitz. Even the children of soldiers had not been evacuated, with calamitous results when the married quarters of Victoria barracks received a direct hit.

From papers recovered after the war, we know that there had been a Luftwaffe reconnaissance flight over Belfast on November 30, 1940. The Germans established that Belfast was defended by only seven anti-aircraft batteries, which made it the most poorly defended city in the United Kingdom. From their photographs, they identified suitable targets:

• Harland and Wolff Ltd shipyard
• Die Tankstelle Conns Water
• Short and Harland aircraft factory
• The power station of Belfast
• Rank & Co mill
• Belfast Waterworks
• Victoria Barracks

There had already been a number of small bombings, probably by planes that missed their targets over the Clyde or the cities of the north-west of England.

On 24 March 1941, John McDermott wrote to the Prime Minister, John Andrews expressing his concerns that Belfast was so poorly protected. “Up to now we have escaped attack. So had Clydeside until recently. Clydeside got its blitz during the period of the last moon. There [is] ground for thinking that the … enemy could not easily reach Belfast in force except during a period of moonlight. The period of the next moon from say the 7th to the 16th of April may well bring our turn.” Unfortunately, McDermott was proved right.

(Die) Tankstelle can mean “petrol station”. But here it probably means “Fuel Depot” or possibly “Oil Refinery”.

So, in the Second World War, the “Irish Brigade” consisted, after careful weeding out, of a derisory ten men. In order to keep their employment on Germany’s behalf secret from their comrades, the subterfuge of an attempted break-out was staged, and succeeded as planned. The ten Irishmen ear-marked for special tasks were all taken to Berlin and accommodated in a house there – they all wore civilian clothes. “Then,” Dr. Hoven tells us, “they were given instruction, at the Abwehr training establishment on the Quenzgut, in the improvised manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries and such like. Also, in the district of a troop training area in western Germany, they were instructed in Abwehr radio procedure.”

In the early summer of 1942 Dr. Hoven, who was tired of his thankless task, left the Abwehr service and went to a parachute unit. About the Irishmen selected, he said: “As a result of ‘unsatisfactory circumstances’ they were without exception never employed.” But the information he had supplied about Belfast had already caused enormous damage in the Blitz of April and May 1941.

It is obvious that, during the Second World War, the Government of Northern Ireland lacked the will, energy and capacity to cope with a major crisis when it came. And come it did in April and May, 1941. James Craig, Lord Craigavon, who was Prime Minister of Northern Ireland since its inception in 1921, until his death on November 24, 1940, had become very frail. Richard Dawson Bates was the Home Affairs Minister. According to Sir Wilfred Spender, the cabinet secretary was “incapable of giving his responsible officers coherent directions on policy” Only Sir Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture, actively pursued his duties and successfully performed with the task of making Northern Ireland a major supplier of food to Britain in her time of need.

John Clarke MacDermott, the Minister of Public Security, after the first bombing, initiated the “Hiram Plan” to evacuate the city and to return Belfast to ‘normality’ as quickly as possible. MacDermott was the person who sent the telegram to de Valera seeking assistance. There was unease with the complacent attitude of the government, and resignations followed:
• John Edmond Warnock, the parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Home Affairs, resigned from the Northern Ireland government on 25 May 1940. He said “I have heard speeches about Ulster pulling her weight but they have never carried conviction.” and “the government has been slack, dilatory and apathetic.”
• Lt. Col. Alexander Robert Gisborne Gordon, Parliamentary and Financial Secretary at the Ministry of Finance (i.e. Chief Whip), resigned on 13 June 1940, explaining to the Commons that the government was “quite unfitted to sustain the people in the ordeal we have to face.”

Lord Craigavon died on Sunday, 24 November 1940 and was succeeded by John Miller Andrews, then 70 years old, who was no more capable of dealing with the situation than his predecessor. The minutes of his cabinet meetings show more discussion on protecting the bronze statue of Carson than the provision of air-raid shelters and other necessities for the civil defence of the population..
On 28 April 1943, six members of the Government threatened to resign, thus forcing him from office. He resigned on 1st May.

To be continued

On his arrival in Berlin, Ryan was introduced to SS Colonel Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer. As part of his roving SS and German Foreign Ministry brief, Veesenmayer was intimately involved in the planning of all Abwehr operations in Ireland during 1940 – 1943, particularly those involving Russell and Ryan. The day after arriving, Ryan was asked by Russell to accompany him to Ireland as part of Operation Dove (“Unternehmen Taube” ) Although Ryan had not been involved in the training or preparation for Dove both he and Russell departed aboard U-65 on 8 August 1940. When Russell became ill and died during the journey (of a perforated ulcer), Ryan asked the Captain of U-65, Hans-Jerrit von Stockhausen, to cable Germany and ask for fresh instructions before proceeding. The mission was subsequently aborted and Ryan returned to Germany via Bordeaux. After the failure of Operation Dove, Ryan remained in Berlin.

The Abwehr felt that Ryan might have other uses and that was to persuade Irish Prisoners-of-War to work for the Germans. According to Clissmann: “All Irishmen in prisoner-of-war camps were therefore invited to give their names with a view to going to a special camp which offered better conditions.” There were naturally no illusions on the German side that among the applicants for special treatment would be Irishmen who had only now discovered their Irish national consciousness on the strength of their Irish names. It was also recognised that from among the English prisoners some stool-pigeons would be deputed to apply for the special camp in order to establish what really went on there.

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. Helmut Clissmann recalls that later on there were collected in Friesack “not more than a hundred men who described themselves as Irishmen”. According to Dr Hoven the number of officers was less than would be counted on the fingers of one hand.

To be continued

Dr Hoven, who was studying anthropology in Ireland, was tasked to become friendly with Frank Ryan, the former editor of the I.R.A. weekly paper An Phoblacht, who was a student of “Celtic” philology and archaeology. It was Ryan who in 1934 took over leadership of the splintered left-wing Congress Group and fought on the side of Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War. When the Second World War broke out, Dr Hoven should have been classified as not “suitable for service” and therefore not enlisted, being adjudged to the outside world as “politically unreliable”.

Yet as an associate of Captain Dr. von Hippel, the Commanding Officer of Special Duty Construction Demonstration Company 800, of the subsequently famous Brandenburg Division, he was able to don the field-grey uniform as a member of Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr (German military intelligence) organisation. In Brandenburg circles Hoven was a well-informed expert on matters concerning the I.R.A. And at the secret headquarters of Admiral Canaris on the Berlin Tirpitzufer, it eventually fell to Dr Hoven to play an important part in the Abwehr’s Irish operation and the destruction of Belfast.

In 1930 Helmut Clissmann – then also outwardly a member of the Young Prussian League – made his first trip to Dublin as a student. He also made friends among leaders of the I.R.A. and got to know Sean Russell best of all. In 1933 Clissmann, who was continuing his studies in Germany, was able to return as an exchange student to Trinity College, Dublin. For him, Ireland was to be a land of opportunity. Not only did he establish branches of the Spy Unit, the German Academic Exchange Service, in Dublin, Cork and later Galway, but he became the director responsible for these branches.

In late 1936 Frank Ryan had travelled to Spain with about 80 men he had succeeded in recruiting to fight in the International Brigades on the Republican side. Ryan’s men are sometimes referred to as the “Connolly Column”. He served in the Lincoln-Washington Brigade, rising to the rank of Brigadier. He was attached to the staff of the 15th International Brigade in charge of publicity – writing, broadcasting and visiting the front line to see conditions first-hand. He fought in a number of engagements – at the Battle of Jarama (February 1937) he took over command of the British Battalion (the Irish were split between this and the Lincoln Battalion) after it suffered heavy losses.

He was seriously wounded in March 1937, and returned to Ireland to recover. He took advantage of the opportunity of his return to launch another left-republican newspaper, entitled The Irish Democrat. On his return to Spain, he again served in the war until he was captured by Italian troops fighting for the Nationalists in March 1938. He was accused of murder, court-martialled, and sentenced to death before being committed to Burgos Prison in 1938. He was under the death sentence for 16 months. During this time he expressed his disagreement with the IRA bombing campaign in England. His sentence was later commuted to thirty years hard labour in January 1940.

To be continued

The German Intelligence Services (Abwehr) in Northern Ireland were very effective before the last World War and played a large part in the Belfast Blitz. Why were they so effective?. The answer lies with their top spy in Ireland just before the War, Adolf Mahr. One of his academic colleagues was the fine intellectual Emyr Estyn Evans whose testimony on Mahr follows, as contained in a superlative book Ireland and the Atlantic Heritage – Selected Writings. This was given to me by his son Alun and wife Gwyneth Evans on 27 September 1996, during my tenure as Lord Mayor of Belfast, as a memento of my participation in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health’s Centenary Meeting, Queen’s University of Belfast organised by Alun that month.

Emyr Estyn Evans (1905-1989) was born in Shrewsbury, England, of Welsh parentage. He studied under H.J. Fleure at Aberystwyth and in 1928 moved to Queen’s University, Belfast, where he founded the Department of Geography and held a Chair from 1948 to 1968. He helped to establish the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra, County Down, in 1963, and in 1970 became the first Director of the Institute of Irish Studies. His books include France (1937), Irish Heritage (1942), Mourne Country (1951, rev. 1967), Irish Folk Ways (1957), Prehistoric & Early Christian Ireland (1967), and The Personality of Ireland (1973, rev. 1992).

Adolf Mahr Archaeologist and Nazi Spy

“It may be noted that earlier in this century the making of some axes for a commercial purpose had been a minor industry in mid-Antrim. W.J. Knowles records that genuine axes made of stone from Tievebulliagh were so plentiful (he himself said that he obtained over 2500 from Glen Ballyemon) and were so keenly sought by private collectors and museums that local farmers began making them for sale. This put an end to collecting for a time.

One of the keenest collectors of axes and other artifacts later on was Dr Adolf Mahr, Director of the National Museum in Dublin. Born in Austria, he was a good archaeologist and I came to know him well. He published a comprehensive survey of Irish prehistory in 1937. In Dublin he became a powerful force. Membership of the Royal Irish Academy is a much-prized honour to which I did not then aspire. All I know is that Mahr told me one day that I was now an MRIA. (Nowadays, quite eminent people are proposed more than once before they succeed in being elected, and I did not even know that my name had been proposed.) Mahr invented what he called ‘the ether test’, by which, he claimed, the presence of machine-oil on the surface of a polished axe could be detected and forgeries revealed. We often discussed archaeological topics and monuments, and I showed him many of the famous sites in Northern Ireland. Only later did I suspect that he may have been spying out the land for a sinister purpose.

His appointment as Museum Director in Dublin when there were, I believe, excellent applicants for the post from Britain, seemed to illustrate the strength of the hatred of all things British prevailing in Éire in the years following Partition. In fact it was another German who was first appointed, Mahr succeeding him on his early death. I could not believe the rumour that, like many other scholarly Germans, Mahr was a dedicated Nazi. But apparently he had been a young museum assistant in Germany looking for a faith, and though first tempted to join the Society of Friends, eventually he fell under the evil spell of another Adolf. I was profoundly shocked to learn subsequently that he had told a Dublin archaeologist that after the war, following the German victory, he would see I was made Gauleiter of Ulster!

Suspicion fell too on another German, a certain Herr Hoven, then living in Belfast, though officially domiciled across the border. He often called to see me, and I once asked him when he hoped to return to Germany. His unguarded reply, ‘Not until early September’, seems to have been prophetic, for war was declared on 3 September 1939. I should add that neither Mahr nor Hoven, to the best of my knowledge, was ever charged with spying, for legally they were residents in a neutral country.

Mahr wanted to enrich the collections in Dublin and questioned both the claims of the Belfast Museum and the quality of its staff and of the inspectorate in Northern Ireland. The senior civil servant who was in charge of historic monuments was a Trinity College historian who had little archaeology, and Mahr described him to me in this way: ‘He is just a big fat elephant: he is hard to move, and ven he does move, he goes in the wrong direction.’ Classical archaeology was then taught at Queen’s in Belfast but no Irish archaeology, and no prehistory.

Mahr appeared to take a special interest in coastal sites, especially on the Lecale coast of South Down, but only some years later did I discover a possible explanation. In 1941 I had occasion to check the condition of some stone monuments there which I had listed earlier. I found that the roof of one of the early corbelled structures had been removed, and when I peered inside I found myself staring into the barrels of half-a-dozen heavy machine-guns, pointing out to sea. Belfast was being heavily bombed by German planes at the time (as I well remember, for the house near the University where I then lived was hit by an incendiary bomb) and I came to realize that it was the possibility of their use as defensive posts which probably explained Mahr’s particular concern for these apparently innocent historic monuments along an ‘invasion coast’.”

Mahr tried to return to Ireland after the War. But de Valera had had enough and would not permit it.  However his influence remained strong in the perpetuation of the Hallstatt myth of early “Celtic” origins in Austria, the birthplace of both Mahr and that other Adolf, his hero and devoted master. The Gaelic myth itself originated in the nineteenth century Celtic Romantic movement and was pursued by Patriot Poets, as well as by writers of popular history and Irish nationalist political propaganda, including “serious historians”. The cell structure of academic elitism protected those Celtic scholars who continued to disseminate notions of a Gaelic Aryan Race, to whom Ireland rightfully belonged.The Hallstatt myth is slowly losing ground, although it was still being promulgated by the BBC in its recent series The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice. However this myth is unfortunately now being replaced by new myths for old. The Mallory/Warner myth of Irish/Irelander. the Koch/Cunliffe myth of Tartessian Celtic origins and the Woolf/Frazer myth of Gaelic Dalriada and the “Northern Ui Neill” will create their own continuing difficulties for the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for the forseeable future. And indeed for the whole World if the United Kingdom loses its seat on the Security Council of the United Nations. But it is to the Hidden History of Herr Hoven that we will now turn….

Saint Valentine (in Latin Valentinus) is the name of several (14 in all ) martyred saints of Ancient Rome. The name “Valentine”, derived from valens (worthy, strong, powerful), was popular in Late Antiquity. Of the Saint Valentine whose feast is on February 14, nothing is apparently known except his name and that he was buried on the Via Flamina north of Rome on February 14, he was born on April 16. It is even uncertain whether the feast of that day celebrates only one saint or more saints of the same name. For this reason this liturgical commemoration was not kept in the Catholic Calender of Saints for universal liturgical veneration as revised in 1969. But a “Martyr Valentinus the Presbyter and those with him at Rome” remains in the list of saints proposed for veneration by all Catholics.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Saint Valentine the Presbyter is celebrated on July 6, and Hieromartyr Saint Valentine (Bishop of Interamna, Terni in Italy) is celebrated on July 30. Notwithstanding that, conventionally, members of the Greek Orthodox Church named Valentinos (male) or Valentina (female) celebrate their name on February 14, according to the Typicon of  the Great Church of Christ (Τυπικὸν τῆς Μεγάλης τοῦ Χριστοῦ ᾽Εκκλησίας) Saint Valentine is not venerated on July 6, nor on July 30. In fact, there exists no Saint Valentine in the “Greek Orthodox Church”

In 1836, some relics that were exhumed from the catacombs of Saint Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina, then near (rather than inside) Rome, were identified with St Valentine; placed in a casket, and transported to the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin. to which they were donated by Pope Gregory XVI. Many tourists visit the saintly remains on St. Valentine’s Day, when the casket is carried in solemn procession to the high altar for a special service dedicated to young people and all those in love.

So, who was Valentinus really?

Born in Egypt and educated in Alexandria, Valentinus (also spelled Valentinius) (c.100 – c.160) was the best known and for a time most successful early Christian “gnostic” theologian, who founded his school in Rome. Clement of Alexandria records that his followers said that Valentinus was a follower of  Theudas and that Theudas in turn was a follower of St. Paul of Tarsus. Valentinus said that Theudas imparted to him the secret wisdom that Paul had taught privately to his inner circle, which Paul publicly referred to in connection with his visionary encounter with the risen Christ, when he received the secret teaching from him.  Such esoteric teachings were becoming downplayed in Rome by Orthodox Christians after the mid-2nd Century.

Valentinus produced a variety of writings, but his doctrine is known to us only in the developed and modified form given to it by his disciples.He taught that there were three kinds of people, the spiritual (Pneumatics), psychical (Psychics), and material (Hyletics or Somatics); and that only those of a spiritual nature (his own followers) received the gnosis (knowledge) that allowed them to return to the divine Pleroma, while those of a psychic nature (ordinary Christians) would attain a lesser form of salvation, and that those of a material or fleshly nature (all others) were doomed to perish. Valentinus had a large following, the Valentinians. They later divided into an Eastern and a Western or Italian branch.

A new field in Valentinian studies opened when the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in Egypt in 1945. Among those works classified as gnostic was a series of writings which could be associated with Valentinus, particularly the Coptic text called the Gospel of Truth which bears the same title reported by Irenaeus as belonging to a text by Valentinus. It is a declaration of the unknown name of the Father, possession of which enables the knower to penetrate the veil of ignorance that has separated all created beings from the Father, and declares Jesus Christ as Saviour has revealed that name through a variety of modes laden with a language of abstract elements.

And then, there is my chosen Ulster Cardiologist, John Joseph Valentine McMurray…and of him more will be said one day.