The Irishmen enslaved by Hitler
Merchant seamen with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, they were caught up in Britain’s WWII effort and nothing could have prepared them for the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp
BY the time he reached middleage, William Hutchinson Knox had travelled the world many times over. But nothing he had seen could have prepared him for the sights and experiences that were to come.
For more than three decades in Britain’s merchant navy he worked on long-distance routes to China, India, Australia, New Zealand, and both North and South America. Things took a turn for the worse, though, when the ships owned by his employers were commandeered by the authorities at the outbreak of the Second World War.
Along with 31 other merchant seamen from Ireland, Knox ended up at the notorious Bremen-Farge concentration camp. Among the Irish prisoners, he was the first in the camp to be captured by the Germans. Of the five who died there, he was the last.
William Hutchinson Knox was born in Glasthule, only a few minutes’ walk from Dún Laoghaire, in the mid-1880s. His father Francis, a doctor, was originally from nearby Dalkey; his mother Alice came from Cashel, Co Tipperary.
Given that he grew up in a well-to-do Protestant family, Knox might have been expected to follow his father into one of the professions. But he instead opted for a life on the ocean waves and, by September 1939, he was working as an able seaman for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
When war was declared, the British government requisitioned the company’s entire 92-strong fleet. The only difference in the crews’ daily routine was that they were now transporting fuel to the Allied armed forces, which of course made them a target. By the time the conflict ended, nearly half of Anglo-Persian’s vessels had been sunk and more than 600 crewmen killed.
In August 1940, almost a year after the war broke out, Knox was on board the SS British Commander as it carried a consignment of oil from Falmouth, Cornwall, to India. About 300 miles south-west of Madagascar, the ship was intercepted by the Germans. The crew members were taken prisoner and, three months later, transported to Bordeaux in occupied France.
Most were subsequently sent to Germany to be interned, but Knox — in common with other Irish captives — was moved to Drancy concentration camp near Paris. Elements in the Nazi leadership were at this stage firmly convinced that Ireland could be of major strategic importance, especially in the event of an invasion of Britain.
It was in that context that German military intelligence officers tried to persuade the Irishmen to become collaborators. According to Hitler’s Irish Slaves, a book by veteran TV executive David Blake Knox — a cousin of William Hutchinson Knox’s — the plan was to establish an ‘Irish Brigade’ to assist in the Nazi war effort.
When they refused, the men were first sent to the Stalag X-B prisonerof-war camp near Sandbostel, northwest Germany, and then to the nearby Milag Nord merchant navy internment camp.
The pressure to join the Nazi side continued. But, in the face of both inducements and threats, the men steadfastly refused to sign contracts to become so-called voluntary workers at the Messerschmitt aircraft plant, on merchant ships or indeed anywhere else.
By early 1943, the Germans had clearly accepted that they were unlikely to make any progress. On February 6 they woke up a total of 31 Irishmen late at night, including Knox, and dispatched them to Bremen-Farge in two lorries. Another prisoner, Christopher Ryan from Tramore, Co Waterford, joined them shortly afterwards.
It was more than just a change of location. Though conditions in the men’s previous places of detention were tough and unpleasant, they were just about bearable. But now their captors were the SS, rather than the German navy, and the situation was about to get worse.
Nor did it take long for that to manifest itself. When they arrived at the camp in the small hours of the morning, the Irishmen were directed to a makeshift dormitory where there were old mattresses and single blankets strewn around a bare cement floor. ‘About an hour later we were bedded down when the door flew open and a group of SS guards rushed in,’ recalled Harry Callan, at the time a 19-year-old from Derry, decades later. ‘That’s when the rubber hoses came out and the beating started.’
Mr Callan, now aged 93 and the last surviving member of the group, is quoted in Hitler’s Irish Slaves as describing this as an early lesson in ‘the meaning of terror’. After that, he said, ‘we didn’t know what the next day would bring. There was just the hope that at least one of us would survive.’
The beatings on that first night went on for more than an hour. Next, the men had their heads shaved, were deloused and relieved of whatever few personal possessions they still had with them. There was some brief respite when each of them was served a bowl of soup. Immediately afterwards, however, they were marched through the darkness to begin their first day’s work. It wasn’t even four o’clock in the morning.
The project they were sent to work on was a key part of the Nazis’ masterplan to win the war. By the early 1940s, the production of German Uboats had been severely reduced as a result of bombing raids on manufacturing plants by Allied forces.
Against that backdrop, Albert Speer — the Third Reich’s chief architect — hatched the plan to build a giant fortified bunker to facilitate the mass production of U-boats. Speer’s calculations were that one submarine could be completed every 56 hours, assuming they were built on an assembly line using prefabricated components.
Even though the so-called Project Valentin was never fully completed, the dimensions remain impressive. The bunker, which was made of reinforced concrete, was around 426m in length and 97m at its widest point. Walls were 4.5m thick and the structure reached 27m at its highest.
Such an undertaking required a huge labour force and it is estimated that at least 10,000 people contributed to the bunker’s construction. The vast majority of them were effectively slave workers drafted in from seven local camps, including Bremen-Farge.
According to prisoner Christopher Ryan, life at the camp was ‘sheer hell’. It was also a place, he noted, where ‘death was permanently in the air’. Speaking of the winters, he said: ‘It was always freezing, and people were dying all around us from disease, starvation and exhaustion.
‘Some were shot dead on the spot; others were beaten to death.’
Regardless of the season, however, the atmosphere remained unrelentingly grim. Each day began with an hour-long roll call, during which prisoners were routinely beaten, followed by a 6km march to the Valentin site.
Once there, the 12-hour working
‘There was just hope one of us would survive’ ‘Some were shot dead; others were beaten to death’
Bunker construction: Bremen-Farge concentration camp, 1944 day was only punctuated by a 30minute punishment wasn’t over for the break for black bread and Irishmen. The very least they could watery coffee. The back-breaking expect was an hours-long wait duties included carrying 50kg bags before being given a tepid bowl of of cement and lugging iron girders turnip soup. from one location to another. But there was also the possibility
Even after marching back to the that they would be forced to run camp in a state of exhaustion, the around the camp at night for their captors’ amusement. ‘Prisoners were just slashed at random,’ said Christopher Ryan, referring to the use of lengths of hosepipe laden with weights. ‘Sometimes they used wires or whips; sometimes just their boots and fists.’
There were also Alsatian dogs that were sometimes set on the prisoners. Meanwhile, SS guards would occasionally entertain themselves by ordering prisoners to compete in boxing matches. The winner’s prize? An extra ration of bread.
If anything, the senior officers were even worse. One of the camp’s commandants, Karl Walhorn, used to leave a morsel of potato or turnip on a rubbish tip, before hiding in a hut and opening fire whenever a starving prisoner tried to take it. Walhorn later told a military court that his actions ‘might be thought to be going too far’, but that he felt entitled to shoot because he had ‘issued an order expressly forbidding potato stealing’.
Another commander reportedly went on a murderous rampage in his final weeks in the camp by shooting and strangling a number of prisoners. But various forms of illness were the main threat to life at this stage, especially given that the woeful hygiene standards allowed the deadly typhus bacteria to thrive.
Of the 27 Irishmen who survived, many were in extremely poor health when they finally gained their freedom. Christopher Ryan spent most of the following eight years in various hospitals. For his part, Harry Callan was left blind for six months due to a vitamin deficiency.
The first of the Irish merchant seamen to die was 58-year-old Patrick Breen, from Blackwater in Co Wexford, less than three months after he arrived in the camp. Though his death was recorded as being from pneumonia, at least one account says he had been beaten with an iron bar by a guard.
The next casualty was radio officer Gerald O’Hara, a 50-yearold father of two from Ballina in Co Mayo, who had been captured off the Galápagos Islands. Like him, the next two victims — Dubliners Thomas Murphy, 53, and Owen Corr, 29 — also died of typhus.
As well as being the last of those to die, William Hutchinson Knox was also the oldest. It was late February 1945 when he was taken ill with a mystery complaint.
Days later, a doctor operated upon him in barbaric-sounding circumstances. ‘There was no anaesthetic, so four of us held him down, one at each shoulder and one at each leg,’ one of the Bremen-Farge seamen recalled. At the age of 59, Knox died shortly afterwards. ÷Hitler’s Irish Slaves by David Blake Knox is published by New Island Books.
‘Sometimes they used wires or whips’