The Irishman who courted Hitler: Seán Russell’s deadly gamble for freedom

In the summer of 1940, as bombs rained down on London, an Irishman dined in comfort in a Berlin villa under Nazi protection. Seán Russell, a working-class Dubliner turned IRA chief, believed Hitler’s Germany could help deliver Ireland’s independence—an alliance that would define his legacy as both hero and traitor.

It is the summer of 1940. The Nazis have disarmed and occupied much of Western Europe and have begun their bombing campaign against the United Kingdom. In a villa in leafy Grunewald, located just outside Berlin, however, an Irishman is shielded from the unfolding horror. Seán Russell, an IRA man from a working-class Dublin household, has access to extra rations, a gramophone and even his own driver, luxuries denied to all but the most senior Nazis. How did he end up there? How did an Irishman of modest means become so valuable to the Third Reich?

In this essay, I tell the story of Seán Russell. I discuss his IRA activities as a young man, as well as his hatred for the British presence in Ireland. Though he was not himself a Nazi, he was willing to collaborate with the Third Reich to expel the English from the island. His usefulness to Hitler’s regime did not go unacknowledged – he was permitted to live in Germany for three months for training to sabotage the British war effort. His controversial legacy endures to the present – even today, his statue in Fairview Park is both a symbol of reverence and revulsion for nationalists and unionists alike. Let’s tell his story.

Born in North Inner City Dublin in 1893, Seán Russell joined the Irish Volunteers after leaving school and fought in the 1916 Rising. Following the Rising, he was incarcerated in Knutsford and Frongoch for his involvement with the group. He noted for his bravery even then – during the Rising, he was stationed in the Metropole Hotel, next to the GPO. The hotel was set alight by the British, yet Russell was able to dig holes to allow his comrades to escape the fire. He impressed his commander, Oscar Traynor, who called him “an inspiration to us all”.

Adolf Hitler.

After leaving prison in 1918, Russell joined the IRA, the successor organisation to the Volunteers, and served as its Director of Munitions. In November 1920, he was tasked by Michael Collins, then the IRA Director of Intelligence, with tracking down and murdering British intelligence officers who were living in Dublin. Russell assembled a group of young assassins, and, on Sunday the 21^st, they massacred 15 British officials, earning praise from Collins, who commented that “the very air is made sweeter” by the killings. However, their cordial relations would not last.

Hostile to the British throughout his life, Russell opposed the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which granted dominion status to the 26-county Irish Free State, and mandated that Dáil members take an oath of allegiance to the monarch. Now at odds with Collins, he and his anti-Treaty allies resumed their mission to fully eject the British from the island, igniting the Irish Civil War. The Anti-Treaty IRA attacked National Army facilities and pro-Treaty politicians, for which they were imprisoned and sometimes even executed by the new Free State government.

Russell ran bomb-making factories during this period and, during the summer of 1922, even helped his comrades to occupy the Four Courts briefly. He was imprisoned in the Curragh Camp in Kildare shortly after the Free State retook it. Russell, along with hundreds of other IRA prisoners in the Curragh, went on hunger strike -  he would endure 41 days without any food. By mid-1924, he had been released from prison.

Many of the jailed Anti-Treaty fighters left revolutionary politics after their release and went on to lead mundane lives, but Russell was not one of them. He rejoined the IRA and attempted to generate international support for the anti-Treaty cause, even visiting the Soviet Union in 1925 on an arms-buying mission. Russell’s vision of an Irish republic, free of British suzerainty, had still not been realised, and he would campaign to achieve it for the rest of his life.

Russell’s activities were not looked upon with favour by the pro-Treaty governments that came to dominate Irish parliamentary politics. In 1931, the day before he was due to give an oration at the burial site of Theobald Wolfe Tone, he was arrested and put in jail for several months. Having come to the realisation that the government was unwilling to support his fight against the British, Russell found a new patron – the Nazis.

After Hitler’s accession to the German chancellorship in 1933, IRA publications initially condemned the Third Reich, criticising the “bloody coercion” that it imposed on Jews and socialists. Russell himself had little sympathy for Hitler’s regime, telling friends that “I am not a Nazi … I am an Irishman fighting for the independence of Ireland”. The Irish government even accused him of being a Communist spy after his trip to Moscow.  

However, by the end of the decade, circumstances had changed – in 1936, the IRA was made illegal by the Free State government, and some of the group’s members were even executed. Their anti-English stance mimicked that of the Nazis – Hitler’s regime saw the British Empire as a threat to their desire for global domination. The Third Reich, which also lent support to nationalists in British-occupied Palestine and India, saw the IRA as a useful pawn that could checkmate their Western European adversary. In an attempt to curry German support, the group began to publish anti-Semitic propaganda – stating that Jews were “the new owners of Ireland” and that Adolf Hitler was the man who “made the Britons squeal”.

Now seeing the Nazis as potential allies, in 1936, Russell wrote a letter to the German ambassador to the United States, apologising on behalf of the Irish people for Dáil Éireann’s unwillingness to grant landing rights to the Luftwaffe. He was even willing to override colleagues who were not sufficiently enthusiastic about the new alliance – in 1937, the IRA’s then-chief-of-staff, and architect of the Kilmichael Ambush, Tom Barry, had travelled to Berlin, looking for help with attacks on British military installations in Northern Ireland. However, Russell rejected the plan, believing that the IRA’s sabotage campaigns needed to be even more violent.

After ousting Barry from the IRA and appointing himself as the chief-of-staff of the organisation, Russell set to work. In January 1939, with assistance from the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group founded in Buffalo, New York, Russell led the S-Plan, a bombing campaign conducted across eight British cities. The attacks, which targeted waterways and power stations, killed ten people. However, the bombings undermined, rather than strengthened the IRA’s independence campaign, with most of the perpetrators finishing up in English prisons.

Wanted by the London Metropolitan Police, Russell left the IRA and fled to the United States, where he was detained in Detroit, before being released after protestations from Irish Americans in Congress. Fearing rearrest and deportation, he escaped the United States in April 1940, when he was smuggled on a ship bound for Genoa in Italy by a Nazi agent.

When he arrived back in Europe the following month, he was taken to Berlin in a chauffeur-driven car, where he was assigned a liaison officer, SS-Standartenführer Edmund Veesenmayer, who later helped to prosecute the deportation and extermination of Jews in Croatia and Serbia. While there, he was taken to an Abwehr training school near Brandenburg, where he was trained in the use of explosives for three months. While he was in Germany, he met with senior Nazis, such as the foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

After he had completed his training, Russell was authorised to return to Ireland to carry out espionage against the British. Accompanied by Frank Ryan, an IRA man and socialist who had fought on the side of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, he departed the coastal city of Wilhelmshaven aboard the U-65 submarine, which would take him to Galway. During their journey, however, Russell became seriously unwell and died on August the 14^th from a perforated ulcer. He was buried at sea.

German plans to use Ireland as a base from which to invade the United Kingdom would ultimately prove unsuccessful. They were certainly not unprepared - in 1940, the Wehrmacht readied 50,000 soldiers, as well as engineers and panzer units, for an invasion of Ireland, in which they would occupy Dublin and massacre the country’s small Jewish population. In December of that year, Hitler even wrote a memo stating that the Luftwaffe would be prepared to send aid to Ireland if the Oireachtas requested it.

However, a desire to stay neutral, coupled with the fact that an alliance with the Nazis may only have emboldened the IRA yet further, compelled the Taoiseach, Eamonn De Valera, to reject the Führer’s overtures. Moreover, Germany’s defeat in the Battle of Britain, as well as the need to prepare for its invasion of the Soviet Union, made the country a lower priority. Ireland would ultimately maintain its neutrality until the end of the war. In 1949, after the war, the country would even fulfil one of Russell’s most cherished goals and become a republic.

In this essay, I have presented an account of Seán Russell, an IRA man who courted the Nazis to help expel the British from Ireland. He was an Irish nationalist, but a deeply flawed and naïve one. Historian Brian Hanley describes him as a “militarist” who sympathised with neither communism nor fascism, but who was cunning enough to lobby both for military aid.

Russell was ruthless, but certainly not unique in courting support from the Axis Powers. In South Asia, independence activists from India to Indonesia collaborated with Imperial Japan to liberate themselves from European colonial rule. In Mandatory Palestine, Jewish militias in what is now Israel even collaborated with the Nazis in their own struggle against Britain. They, like Russell, were convenient allies of fascism. They, like Russell, would also come to be successful – just as Ireland became a republic, Israel and southern Asia are now free of foreign occupation.

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