The maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” prevailed within the Irish Republican Army (better known as the IRA, for its English acronym). During the thirties and forties of the last century, this terrorist group sought an alliance with Nazi Germany to achieve the unification of Northern Ireland with Dublin. In the same way, from sectors of the Third Reich, this organization was seen as a useful tool to obtain information and carry out sabotage against Great Britain.
In the 1930s, the IRA was still healing its wounds from the Irish Civil War (1922-23). Its members had been divided between those who accepted the partition of Ireland (and joined the Army of the new republic) and the “anti-Treaty” faction, which did not compromise with British sovereignty over Ulster and continued to fight. Likewise, within it there had been an ideological evolution from conservative Catholicism to a discourse more favorable to left-wing positions.
Those divisions had reduced their operational capacity. It was no longer the organization of the times of Michael Collins or the one that, in the seventies, would put London on the ropes. The arrival of Seán Russell as IRA Chief of Staff changed that dynamic, after organizing a more coordinated resistance against British forces in the late 1930s.
The IRA’s attempts to revive it did not go unnoticed by German military intelligence, the Abwehr, which saw in the group an interesting asset for the conflict that was brewing between the Third Reich and the United Kingdom at the end of the 1930s.
With this approach, between 1938 and 1943, the Abwehr sent thirteen agents to Irish territory (they acted throughout the island, not only in Ulster) with very different luck. The first of them, Oskar Karl Pfaus, traveled to Dublin under a false identity as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. The IRA was not easy to reach, as he had been outlawed in Eire in 1936.
In the Irish capital, Pfaus contacted Eoin O’Duffy, leader of the local fascist Blue Shirt movement, hoping he would bring him to IRA officials. His attempt was a demonstration of the little knowledge the Abwehr had of Irish reality. The far-right leader refused to collaborate, as his organization was a staunch enemy of the Republicans, whom he considered communists because of their recent leftward turn.
Fortunately for Pfaus, a lieutenant of O’Duffy’s, Liam D. Walsh, knew of several former IRA veterans of the Irish War of Independence and made it easy for him to contact them.
Russell and the rest of the IRA leadership were delighted to start collaborating with the Germans. The Northern Irish hoped to obtain arms from Berlin for the bombing campaign they were about to launch. Despite the terrorists’ hopes, however, Pfaus had no orders to negotiate such close collaboration yet, agreeing only that the Catholic organization would send an emissary to Germany.
Why did a group that had taken an ideological turn to the left accept Nazi aid? Pragmatism prevailed. The IRA needed a strong ally to effectively confront the British, regardless of their ideology. The Northern Irish believed that collaboration with the Third Reich would only be a step to achieve the long-awaited reunification of the island.
The chosen messenger was another prominent IRA member, Seamus “Jim” O’Donovan. He was the ideal candidate, not only because he was fluent in German, but because he had designed Plan S, the campaign of attacks against British interests, which had begun on January 16, 1939. So he was perfectly aware of the weapons needs for his actions. O’Donovan traveled to Germany three times during the first half of 1939.
The pre-war climate that Europe was experiencing encouraged the Abwehr to increase its collaboration by sending a radio. However, German intelligence was unable to adequately train the IRA envoy, and the broadcasting equipment was used only for internal propaganda within the Irish group. In addition, the lack of knowledge in encrypted communications led to the British seizing the device at the end of the year.
Beyond the problems with the radio equipment, the campaign of attacks was advancing, despite the scarcity of IRA resources. Between January 1939 and May 1940, there were 300 bomb attacks that caused 10 deaths and 96 injuries, mainly civilians.
British intelligence made a very pessimistic assessment of the situation. He considered that Hitler’s spies were behind Plan S, a position that was picked up by a good part of the country’s press. Thus, London sought the collaboration of Dublin, which did not want to be dragged into a conflict by the action of German spies in its territory.
The Abwehr was skeptical of the IRA’s bombing campaign. He thought that attacking civilian targets was a waste of time. Reich intelligence understood that it was better to focus on obtaining information and carrying out sabotage against military bases in the north of the British Isles.
Finally, the IRA raided a Dublin arms depot on Christmas Day 1939, stealing copious amounts of ammunition. The action was really bold and impressed the Germans, who were convinced that the Northern Irish group could be a valuable asset against Great Britain.
This change of heart by the Abwerh accelerated the launch of several intelligence operations. Far from the cliché of German efficiency, the profile of many of these agents was very picturesque, worthy of a spy novel.
For example, shortly after the Dublin arsenal robbery, Ernst Weber-Drohl, nicknamed Atlas, a former wrestler and circus strongman who was then 60 years old, was dispatched. On January 31, 1940, he arrived in Ireland in a submarine with the mission of carrying new radio equipment. His boat capsized and the radio was useless. However, he managed to contact O’Donovan, to whom he supplied a good amount of funds, until he was arrested by the Irish police.
Another agent went by the name of Hermann Görtz, a lawyer in his fifties who was looking for thrills and ended up being recruited by the Abwehr. Among his assignments, once again, was carrying radio equipment, for which he was parachuted into Ballivor, near the border in the part of the territory Dublin controlled.
The jump was not much better than the landing from a submarine: the plane missed the drop zone, and Görtz ended up a hundred kilometers from his target (he lost his radio, which had been dropped in his own parachute).
Despite such a rocky start, the agent was able to contact the IRA to negotiate the details of the Kathleen Plan, a project by the Northern Irish organization to support a landing of German troops in Ulster. It was the idea of ??Stephen Hayes, Russell’s replacement as chief of staff for the group when he went to Germany.
The Abwehr considered that the Kathleen Plan had major shortcomings from a logistical point of view, but appreciated that it could be useful in the event of an invasion of Great Britain. The problem was that the Irish police found Görtz’s safe house in Dublin and seized a copy of the documents on May 22, 1940. The Irish authorities reported the find to MI5, the British counter-intelligence service.
Fearing a possible German invasion of Ireland, Éamon de Valera’s government agreed to collaborate with the British and consented to a hypothetical deployment of troops from its neighbors in the event of a landing. Finally, Görtz was arrested on November 21, 1941 in a raid on German agents in Dublin.
Despite the interception of the Kathleen Plan, the IRA sent its own emissaries to Germany to get the long-awaited weapons. Seán Russell himself starred in one of those trips. He arrived in Germany via the USA and Italy in the summer of 1940. In Berlin he met Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Foreign Minister, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr.
The truth is that Russell was disappointed in his hosts. He wanted an alliance of equals, but the Germans treated him as a local agent to be subservient to his interests.
The Nazis wanted to “recruit” an IRA figure easier to handle than Russell, and the Abwehr then turned to Frank Ryan. This republican militant was a prisoner in Burgos after his passage through the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. By 1940 he had abandoned anti-fascist idealism and was willing to pay any price to drive the British out of Ulster.
The Abwehr convinced the Franco regime to release Ryan, although the IRA spoke of a flight to France to maintain his aura as a hero. The Germans decided to send him to Ireland, along with Russell, to organize a series of sabotages against the British.
To complete his training, Russell underwent explosives training to make IRA actions more effective. The operation, which received the code name of Paloma, was launched on August 8, 1940, when the two Republican leaders embarked on the U-65 submarine bound for Ireland.
Operation Dove failed before its members even set foot on the island. On August 14, 1940, Russell died during the journey due to an untreated stomach ailment, although there was no shortage of conspiracy theories that spoke of his murder by British or German espionage, given his little docility.
After the failure of Paloma, and according to declassified information from MI5, the collaboration between the Reich and the IRA came to be supervised by Edmund Veesenmayer, a prominent member of the SS and in charge of controlling Berlin’s relations with the puppet states that emerged in the occupied Europe.
Veesenmayer considered that Ryan could be a major asset if a major undertaking were to take place on Irish soil, for by then an amphibious landing seemed feasible. In the summer of 1940 the Battle of Britain was being fought. If Germany achieved air superiority over the English Channel, it could invade Britain.
The tables of the war turned towards 1943, and Berlin was abandoning the plans on Ireland. In fact, the last agents they sent only had the mission of collecting weather information for the operations of German submarines.
As a curiosity, the German army had also designed the Green Plan (Fall Grün) for Ireland, an addition to Operation Sea Lion (1940) that contemplated landing troops in Ulster. British espionage, aware of this, suspected that it could be a diversionary campaign to camouflage the operations before a hypothetical invasion of the islands.
