Rigorous censorship stopped the Irish media from reporting any details of the Holocaust until after the end of the second World War, writes Joe Carroll.
The mass extermination of Jews revealed as concentration camps such as Auschwitz were liberated could not be reported in Irish newspapers until after the war. Despite photographic evidence, such horrific scenes were regarded as "propaganda" and banned under the official censorship system.
When the censorship was lifted after the German surrender in May 1945, many Irish people found it hard to grasp the scale of the atrocities they had been shielded from during what was officially described as the "Emergency". Some still clung to the belief that it was Allied propaganda at work. A newspaper reader in Kilkenny wrote that the British had faked the newsreel showing victims of Belsen by using "starving Indians".
The censorship of newspapers, radio and films brought into force in September 1939 to protect Ireland's neutrality was so strict that by the end of the war the censors were sounding like parodies of themselves. The chief censor, Thomas Coyne, was writing in May 1945 as the Nazi death camps were being revealed to the world: "The publication of atrocity stories, whether true or false, can do this country no good and may do it much harm." When an Irish Jesuit publication tried to publish an account of how hospitals in the Pacific area were being bombed by the Japanese, the editor was told by the Irish censor that "the Censorship does not allow hospitals to be shelled or bombed in our press by either side whatever the facts may be".
This was the logic of the censorship system carried to Orwellian lengths by bureaucrats with enthusiastic support from the minister responsible, Frank Aiken. He frequently censored war reports himself and fought with The Irish Times and other newspapers as they tried to give their readers a coherent account of the struggle of the Allied powers against dictators in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo.
When I interviewed Aiken years later for my book on Irish neutrality, he brushed aside the charge that he prevented the Irish public from judging which side was in the right by suppressing reports of German and Japanese atrocities. "One side was as bad as the other," he said.
To another author, Robert Fisk, he said, "What was going on in the camps was pretty well known to us early on but the Russians were as bad. You only have to look at the what happened in the Katyn Forest." This was a reference to the massacre on Stalin's orders of thousands of Polish officers who had been taken prisoner when the Russian armies invaded Poland in September 1939.
As early as 1942, Aiken and Coyne were prepared for "a spate of atrocity stories" and ordered that details of specific atrocities were not be to be published. Only general allegations in official statements or communiqués would be considered for publication.
Even when Irish priests were the victims of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines, Aiken and his censors stuck rigidly to their rules to the rage of the US ambassador in Dublin, David Gray. He had supplied details of how four priests from the Maynooth Mission to China had been locked in a house in Manila and burned to death during the fighting to liberate the Philippines. But Irish newspapers could only report that the priests died "during recent fighting in Manila", letting readers speculate whether the Americans or the Japanese were responsible.
Gray protested strongly at the censoring of the report, but his letter to the newspapers was also censored. The editor of the de Valera-owned Irish Press, Bill Sweetman, defended the censoring of the original report, telling Gray, "We merely omitted a part which I would consider it contrary to journalistic ethics to have published." He went on, "You may have noticed that it is not our practice to publish news correspondents' stories against any of the belligerents. The trouble is that they are usually entirely undependable, have no other value than to inflame passions and are quite impossible for us to verify." The censorship in neutral Ireland through newspapers, radio, postal and telephone services, cinema, theatre, and even shops is described in Donal Ó Drisceoil's Censorship in Ireland: Neutrality, Politics and Society, the details of which can be studied in the National Archives.
It was understandable that the government of a neutral country would want some control over the flow of news from countries at war and to filter out the propaganda and lies. But Aiken wanted to go much further and ban expressions of opinion. There would be no debate allowed on the merits of the conflict, he told his censors.
Reports of atrocities could not be permitted because they might be false. But even if true they must be censored because people might then form opinions on which side was morally right. This could endanger neutrality.
Commenting on how neutral Ireland was banning war films and newsreels, the Daily Mail wrote in January 1942, "Mr de Valera insists that Irishmen shall be neutral in thought word and deed - and also neutral at the pictures." But Ireland was not totally cut off and living in "Plato's Cave" as historian F.S. Lyons described the Emergency years. People listened to the BBC. Thousands of Irish citizens joined the British forces, but could not wear their uniform home on leave.
The censorship even clamped down on reports from the Vatican about the persecution of the Catholic Church, especially in Poland, by the Nazis. In some cases, Irish bishops had their pastoral letters censored when they denounced this persecution. A book on the subject with an introduction by Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster was banned here, leading to criticism in Catholic publications abroad. Ireland's Catholic newspaper, the Standard, was censored when it tried to highlight the persecution of Catholics under the Nazis.
A positive effect of censorship was a clampdown on anti-Jewish comment in publications. Anti-Semitic references in the Standard were censored, as well as the cruder attacks on Jews in Penapa, the organ of the pro-Nazi People's National Party whose supporters included General Eoin O'Duffy, founder of the Blueshirts. The paper disappeared after its second issue was seized.
Attempts were made in the Dáil and Seanad by the few pro-Allied members such as James Dillon and Frank MacDermot to debate the more ludicrous examples of the censorship. Aiken would concede nothing. "By and large we operate this censorship to keep the temperature down internally and to prevent it from rising between ourselves and other countries," he told the Seanad.
One exception to the rule against criticising the belligerent powers was Northern Ireland. The censors could allow "non-violent" criticism of the British and Northern Ireland governments over partition and the internment of republicans.
Once the war in Europe was declared over in May 1945, the censorship was lifted, and the media could publish whatever they wanted. Newsreel footage ran of camps being liberated, and pictures of prisoners appeared in newspapers.
The Irish Press had told its readersin April 1943: "There is no kind of oppression visited on any minority in Europe which the Six-County nationalists have not also endured."
The historian, J.J. Lee, has commented drily that, "This was a revelation that would no doubt have helped the victims lining up for the Auschwitz gas chambers. If only circumstances had permitted them to gratefully clutch their copies of the 'Truth in the News'."
Joe Carroll is the author of Ireland in the War Years 1939-1945 and is former Washington correspondent of The Irish Times
Irish playwright Denis Johnston, who spent the second World War as a BBC correspondent, was the first journalist into the concentration camp of Buchenwald after its liberation. In his memoir, Nine Rivers From Jordan, he describes being taken through the camp by two emaciated prisoners. But they were the lucky ones, they said, as they could stillwork, and they steered him to the block for those who could no longer work.
"I went in. At one end lay a heap of smoking clothes amongst which a few ghouls picked and searched - for what, God only knows. As we entered the long hut the stench hit us in the face, and a queer wailing came to our ears. Along both sides of the shed was tier upon tier of what can only be described as shelves. And lying on these, packed tightly side by side, like knives and forks in a drawer, were living creatures - some of them stirring, some of them stiff and silent, but all of them skeletons, with the skin drawn tight over their bones, with heads bulging and misshapen from emaciation, with burning eyes and sagging jaws. And as we came in, those with the strength to do so turned their heads and gazed at us; and from their lips came that thin, unearthly noise.
"Then I realised what it was. It was meant to be cheering. They were cheering the uniform that I wore." From Nine Rivers From Jordan by Denis Johnston
