Two Voices One State: Ireland 1937–1945

How a country remembers a period is often less simple than what actually happened during it. Thinking about Ireland’s years in the Second World War, we first look for a single story, either heroism or guilt. But what historians digging through the archives have found is neither, it’s the story of two voices standing against each other inside the same state.

In 1937, Ireland’s new constitution formally recognized Judaism as a distinct faith alongside the country’s other beliefs. The Taoiseach of the time, Éamon de Valera, had built a personal friendship with the country’s first Chief Rabbi, Isaac Herzog, whose son Chaim would become president of Israel nearly half a century later. This wasn’t an incidental courtesy, de Valera’s own record shows he argued the door should be opened to Jewish refugees.

But the internal correspondence historian Dermot Keogh uncovered shows a far more complicated picture. De Valera himself, together with the Department of External Affairs and the Department of the Taoiseach, argued for a more open line toward refugees. But the Department of Justice, under Patrick Ruttledge, backed by the Department of Industry and Commerce under Seán Lemass, stubbornly held to a restrictive visa policy, despite de Valera rebuking his own bureaucrats on more than one occasion. The state wasn’t speaking with one voice, it was fighting an internal battle, and the side that wanted to open the door was the side that lost.

Ireland’s ambassador in Berlin, Charles Bewley, stood at the most extreme end of that restrictive line. His antisemitism was never a secret, and the government had known about it for a long time. In 1921, still a young trade representative, he targeted Irish Jewish IRA officer Robert Briscoe at a Jewish-owned music hall in Berlin, insulting Judaism, and was thrown out in a drunken brawl. In 1922, diplomat George Gavan Duffy openly objected to sending Bewley to Germany, writing that “his semitic convictions are so pronounced that it would be very difficult for him to deal properly with all the persons and questions” in Berlin, “where the Jewish element is very strong,” suggesting Munich or Vienna instead. But Bewley was sent to Berlin anyway, in 1933, seven months after the Nazis took power, and, presenting his credentials to President von Hindenburg, openly praised Germany’s “national rebirth.”

He deliberately obstructed Jewish refugees’ visa applications, writing that he wanted to save the country from what he called a Jewish “infection.” Bewley’s reports were, quite literally, his story, the narrative of his own prejudice, and that narrative became an official document that shaped real people’s fates. In a report sent to Dublin after the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, he argued the Nazi government hadn’t engaged in “deliberate cruelty,” in language that largely justified the attack. Even the name of the body set up in November 1938, the Irish Coordinating Committee for the Relief of Christian Refugees, summed up this line, only Jews who had converted to Christianity were granted settlement, while those who hadn’t were expected to be looked after by the American Jewish community. At the Evian Conference in July 1938, the Irish delegation stated that the country “can make no real contribution to the settlement of refugees,” and one delegate, in private conversation, compared it to the persecution Irish Catholics had suffered under the Penal Laws, saying “didn’t we suffer like this in the Penal days and nobody came to our help.” As the journalist Fintan O’Toole later put it, Irish policy at the time was “infected with a toxic combination of antisemitism and self-pity.” The result was that only around thirty Jewish refugees found permanent shelter in Ireland between 1933 and 1939, with a limited number of additional admissions during the war. De Valera only removed Bewley from his post in August 1939, right before the war broke out, but Bewley stayed on the continent throughout the war, placed himself at the disposal of the Nazi government, and passed information about Ireland to German intelligence.

Robert Briscoe, the man on the other side of that youthful Berlin brawl, later became Ireland’s first Jewish TD, and twice Dublin’s first Jewish Lord Mayor, one of de Valera’s closest friends and a co-founder of Fianna Fáil. During the war years, from inside his own government, he fought to secure visas for Jewish refugees, arguing directly with Bewley. He lost. A hundred and fifty members of his extended family, including his own aunt Hedwig and her daughter, died in Auschwitz, a loss that, by his own account, never left him for the rest of his life.

This posture found its voice inside parliament too, showing that the restrictive wing wasn’t confined to bureaucracy, it found an echo among voters as well. A party founded in 1942, Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, called openly in its manifesto for “discrimination against Jews and freemasons,” and by 1945 had grown to two thousand members. On July 9, 1943, newly elected TD Oliver J. Flanagan, in his maiden speech, said “there is one thing that Germany did and that was to rout the Jews out of their country,” proposing Ireland do the same. No one objected. The following year, Flanagan was re-elected to the same seat with twice as many votes as before, and held it continuously for forty-four years.

Real names sit behind these figures, and each one is a concrete outcome of the institutional conflict described above. Jewish brothers Leo and Kurt Michel arrived in 1934, after losing their jobs in the Rhineland, and stayed with their aunt for two months. Then they were sent back, to Nazi Germany. Dublin-born Ettie Steinberg married Belgian Wojtek Gluck at Greenville Hall Synagogue in Dublin, and the couple’s son Leon was born in France. All three were rounded up by the Gestapo and murdered in Auschwitz, including an Irish citizen herself.

There were also individuals who stood against the state’s official policy. The Irish writer Hubert Butler, in prewar Vienna, personally helped more than a hundred Jews escape, despite his own government’s official indifference, a number that will never be precisely known but that far exceeded what the Irish state legally admitted. As the Irish Times writer Fintan O’Toole later put it, Butler’s actions “to some extent rescued Ireland from eternal shame.” But these individual rescue efforts were no substitute for the state keeping its own door open, because what mattered wasn’t whether individual conscience existed, but which wing of the institution held the decision and on May 2, 1945, de Valera visited Germany’s representative in Dublin to offer condolences on Hitler’s death, a gesture neither Sweden nor Switzerland made among the other neutral states.

Even that visit may reflect the same two voices inside the state. De Valera’s biographers read it as a matter of principled consistency, a courtesy required by formal protocol on the death of a head of state, not personal sympathy. The following year, a proposal to admit a hundred Jewish orphans from Bergen-Belsen was initially blocked, and only went through after de Valera’s own personal intervention, as though trying, in some way, to make up for that visit a year earlier. But the outcome stayed the same, in the eyes of the Jewish community, the Hitler visit cast one final shadow over doors that had stayed closed throughout the war.
The silence lasted fifty years. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, then-Taoiseach John Bruton formally apologized on Ireland’s behalf, naming the Berlin legation’s decision to refuse visas to German and Polish Jews in the 1930s, a policy maintained under the banner of neutrality from 1939 to 1945, and even continued after 1945 toward those who had survived the death camps. “We in Ireland have not been immune from the bigotry and the indifference which manifested itself in Europe this century,” Bruton said. In 2003, at the first official commemoration ceremony, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell once again acknowledged the state and society’s failings, tolerating discrimination, failing to offer refuge to those who sought it, failing to confront those who justified race hatred.

Sociologist Nicholas Tavuchis, in his 1991 book Mea Culpa, wrote that for an apology to genuinely work, it has to accept that what was lost can’t be undone, an apology doesn’t change the past, it only offers a new way of carrying it. Bruton’s words in 1995 did exactly this, naming the past rather than trying to clean it. Today Ireland is a full member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Holocaust education through the Crocus Project is part of the required school curriculum, and in 2022, six Stolpersteine, brass memorial stones set into the pavement, were laid in what was once Dublin’s Jewish quarter, each carrying the name of an individual victim.

President Michael D. Higgins, in a commemoration speech in recent years, said that remembrance has to turn not only toward the dead but toward “the complicit actions of silence, of the averted gaze, of culpable indifference” itself. That sentence seems to describe exactly the applications piling up on Bewley’s desk, and de Valera’s own bureaucracy, which tried and failed to open them.

A state’s memory, more often than not, holds the record of the losing side too, not just the winning one. Ireland’s constitutional recognition in 1937 wasn’t a lie. The rejected applications on Bewley’s desk weren’t a lie either. Both were the real record of two voices standing against each other inside the same state, and the apology that came fifty years later was an attempt, late as it was, to decide which of those two voices would carry the state’s true name.

Sources
Dermot Keogh’s archival research on Ireland’s refugee policy, cited in Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland, Cork University Press.
Gisela Holfter’s research on German-speaking refugees to Ireland, reviewed in the Irish Times.
Fintan O’Toole, “Culture Shock, In saving Jews from the Nazis, Hubert Butler saved Ireland from shame,” Irish Times, January 2015.
The Jewish Chronicle, “The Irish leader who prayed for a Nazi invasion,” November 2019.
Times of Israel, “When Ireland rejected Jewish orphans fleeing Nazis, this man saved dozens,” September 2017.
Irish Jewish Museum, “Ireland and the Holocaust” archive page.
Official record of the Oireachtas (Irish parliament), session of July 9, 1943.
John Bruton’s 1995 Bergen-Belsen commemoration address, as recorded in contemporary press coverage.
Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa, A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation, Stanford University Press, 1991.
President Michael D. Higgins’s National Holocaust Memorial Day address, president.ie.
Dictionary of Irish Biography, entry on Charles Henry Bewley.
Irish Times, “A deeply flawed, dangerous man,” 2001.
Irish Echo, “How Dublin’s mayor conquered U.S.,” on Robert Briscoe, March 2021.