Adolf Mahr was a most unusual Nazi - although he was a supporter of Hitler, he bore no ill-feeling towards the Jewish people. He was also director of the National Museum of Ireland, writes Gerry Mullins
Easter of 1936 was a memorable one for the Mahr children of Waterloo Place, Dublin. The Hitler Youth group to which they belonged held its annual get-together at Hampton Hall, Balbriggan, but this year, they were joined by a group of Hitler Youth from Britain. On the large estate in the north Dublin countryside, the two groups marched, saluted the Swastika, watched Nazi films and sang songs around a campfire.
The children's father, Dr Adolf Mahr, director of the National Museum of Ireland, also led the group on a tour of cultural sites in Leinster. They visited the monastic ruins at Mellifont Abbey, and the high crosses at Monasterboice, as well as the Neolithic tomb at Newgrange. Mahr was both an expert on Celtic archaeology and head of the Nazi party in Ireland, and used his positions to emphasise to the children the shared Celtic past of the Irish and German people.
MAHR HAD ARRIVED arrived in Ireland from his native Austria in 1927. He had been recruited by the Irish government to manage the Irish Antiquities division of the National Museum. Other high-ranking Germans and Austrians brought in to fill such roles included Colonel Fritz Brase who became head of the Irish Army's School of Music; Otto Reinhard who was Forestry Director with the Department of Lands; and Heinz Mecking, chief advisor with the Turf Development Board.
These men became the nucleus of the Nazi party in Ireland. Civil Servant rules at the time prohibited staff from becoming members of Irish political parties, but there was no rule against membership of a German political party. So, the Nazi party in Ireland, from its beginnings in 1933 until its demise in 1939, was led by members of the Irish Civil Service.
Mahr had come to Ireland with his Dutch wife Maria, their son Gustav (5) and daughter Hilde (1). Ingrid, their first Irish-born child, was born in 1929, followed by Brigit in 1933. The children attended Tullamaine primary school, which stood on the site of the Burlington Hotel. Their secondary school was Wesley, which at the time was on St Stephen's Green, a short cycle from their home.
Mahr took to his new role with typical Germanic industry and efficiency. It quickly became apparent that nobody else could run the National Museum as well as him, and De Valera made him director in 1934. It was a golden era for Mahr; his museum went from strength to strength under his stewardship, while his political party grew ever-stronger, also under the stewardship of an Austrian.
Mahr's Nazism was a nationalistic one. It seems to have had little to do with the hatred of Jews or other groups, and a lot to do with the dissection of Germany after the 1914-18 war. Mahr's parents were from the Sudetenland, which was given to Czechoslovakia at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. He himself was born in Trent, a part of Austria that was given to Italy the same year. Some 16 million Germans were cut off from their homeland in this way, and one of the elements that made Adolf Hitler so attractive to the likes of Mahr was his determination to bring these people back into the Reich.
Writing to his Jewish friend Albert Bender in San Francisco in 1933, Mahr defended the new Nazi government saying: "The Irish have filled the whole world for several centuries with their grievances. Could anybody expect that a people, 20 times as numerous, would silently rot away in misery and humiliation in order as not to disturb the equanimity of the powers and people that are responsible for the 1919 'treatises' . . . which put hundreds of thousands of children, old people, etc, etc, to death?"
In March 1938, Hitler united Germany and Austria, a move that delighted Mahr and millions of other Germans and Austrians. But the Nazis immediately closed Jewish community newspapers and confiscated homes. Within a month all Jews were removed from their jobs. In Mahr's home city of Vienna, some 60,000 of the city's Jews became destitute, and there was a wave of suicides in the Jewish community.
Mahr couldn't claim to be ignorant of this, because one of his former Jewish colleagues in Vienna, Dr Alfons Barb, wrote to him in desperation in October 1938. Mahr, in turn, wrote to Bender in San Francisco to see if he could help Barb get a visa to the US. It was true to Mahr's seemingly complex attitude towards Jews; Mahr (a Nazi) asked Bender (a Jew) to help his friend Barb (a Jew) to escape from the Nazis.
MAHR AND HIS family left Ireland for Germany during the summer of 1939. He had been under the scrutiny of An Garda Siochana and Ireland's military intelligence unit, G2. His departure was seen as an escape, and rumours spread that he had fled Ireland with maps and other material that would be useful to an invading army.
However, the truth is that the Mahrs were due to return on September 14th, but war was declared on September 3rd, the ports were closed, and the family was stranded. The extent of their crisis wasn't felt initially. Nobody expected this "phoney war" with Britain to last more than a few months, or that it would conclude with anything other than a German victory. They stayed with relatives in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl, borrowed winter clothes from their cousins, and the children enrolled in local schools. Adolf Mahr expected to be back in his museum by early 1940.
Mahr travelled to Berlin that winter, where he eventually found work with the Foreign Office. He became head of Irland Redaktion, the propaganda radio service that broadcast programmes in Irish and in English into neutral Ireland throughout the war. Once established in his new city, he was joined by his family. It was a relatively happy time for them; the German capital that wouldn't feel the full effects of war for some time.
During the autumn of 1941, Gustav was drafted into the German Army. The boy from Wesley College who had spent summers on the beaches of Skerries and Malahide, and who had more than a cúpla focail Gaeilge, began to train for deployment on the eastern front.
The winter of 1942/3 saw the tide of the war change. German forces became trapped near the Russian city of Stalingrad, and bombs began to rain down in Berlin. Maria Mahr along with Ingrid and Brigit were evacuated south again to Bad Ischl. Their apartment was destroyed in an air raid shortly after they left. Hilde, now a senior girl in school, was placed on air raid duty on the roofs of Berlin buildings. She had the perilous role of catching firebombs and throwing them on to the street before they could ignite.
Mahr's Berlin studio was destroyed. His team moved to the relative safety of northern Germany where they continued their broadcasts. Only Gustav was safe. He had managed to avoid the eastern front, and was deployed in Tunisia instead. There, in 1943, he was taken prisoner and would sit out the war in a POW camp in the US.
THROUGH A COMBINATION of luck, bravery, perseverance and ingenuity, the six Mahrs survived the war. They lived in dire poverty as refugees in post-war Germany, and often went hungry. Mahr's several appeals to the Irish government for permission to return to Ireland, and his old job, were not successful. He died in poverty in Bonn in 1951.
Only Ingrid Mahr returned to Ireland for an extended period. Because she had been born in Dublin she carried an Irish passport, and had no difficulty in coming here in 1948, where she worked in Arnotts department store. She returned to Germany in 1952, where she married, had two children, and got involved in politics. She became a local representative of Willy Brandt's SPD, "the party most favoured by anti-Nazis", she says. Hilde also reneged on her Nazi heritage, and married a Jew in 1947, much to her father's dissatisfaction. Brigit became very religious, and at her home in Hanover involved herself in the running of her local church and their children's school.
Gustav followed in his father's professional footsteps, becoming a leading archaeologist in Berlin. He returned to Ireland several times, and even spent six weeks on an archaeological dig in Falcarragh, Co Donegal, in 1976.
This week, the three Mahr sisters return to the National Museum of Ireland for the launch of a biography of their father, Dublin Nazi No 1: the life of Adolf Mahr. Gustav, who lives in Berlin, will be represented by his daughter.
Gerry Mullins's book, Dublin Nazi No 1: the Life of Adolf Mahr, will be published on Thursday by The Liberties Press, €25 (hardback), €16.99 (paperback)