Frank McNally: Tipperary doctor’s time in Spandau

As a teenage FCA recruit in 1940s Ireland, Vincent Maher learned how to fire a gun, throw a hand grenade, and thrust a bayonet into the guts of a strung-up dummy, twisting the blade before extracting it.

But fate decreed that he would never have to kill real people. And when a few years later he came face-to-face with some of the 20th century’s most notorious war criminals, his job, ironically, was to keep them alive.

Speaking to me by phone from his home in England this week, he still has vivid recollections of his time as a military doctor in Spandau, where his patients included Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and others of the “Spandau 7”.

He recalled having to witness the early release of Walther Funk, Hitler’s minister for economics and supposed financial genius, because of fears that the prisoner, already in poor health, “might have a heart attack” at the prospect of sudden freedom.

The news was indeed broken to him rather abruptly by a British officer. But the “small, round, unpleasant” Funk somehow survived it and lived for another three years.

Also under Maher’s care was Baldur Von Schirach, former head of the Hitler Youth, who still clicked his heels Nazi-style on greeting people but was disarmingly affable. A pipe smoker, he was pleased to learn his doctor was a Dubliner, because he always bought his pipes from Kapp and Peterson, considering them the best in the trade.

Maher was born in 1929, of Tipperary parents living in the Dublin. He got used to travelling early. The Maher boys were sent to boarding school, so at the tender age of five, the future doctor was delivered to the nuns of Presentation Convent Thurles, for primary school.

His secondary education was nearer home, in Newbridge College, although still boarding. He made it back to the capital, eventually, as a medical student at UCD. In the meantime, his parallel army reserve career notwithstanding, he had also become a top chess player, winning Irish championships and representing his country in successive olympiads.

He spent a brief period working in St Vincent’s Hospital, post-graduation, then headed for England where jobs were more plentiful and where, like many’s a doctor before and since, he fell in love with a nurse.

A well-connected nurse, as it happened: she was a great grandniece of former prime minister Herbert Asquith. But not even that spared the young Irishman one of the drawbacks of permanent residence in 1950s Britain: national service.

The many Irish building workers in England could avoid it by going home for a few weeks every year, or otherwise moving around. But Maher was newly married and of fixed abode. As he puts it: “I couldn’t do a bunk”.

Quizzing Speer 

So began his second military career, as a British army lieutenant. He was posted to Rinteln near Hannover where being an occupying officer, he lived “the life of a lord” for a time. His residence was the former home of a senior Nazi: an impeccably furnished mansion with double-glazed windows, central heating and a grand piano.

“We even had a bat woman, to do all the work and a gardener,” he recalls. “And you could live very well on an army salary. A bottle of Scotch cost 12-and-six” (less than a euro in today’s money).

After that came his time in Spandau, where he found himself quizzing Speer – Hitler’s architect and another of the more genial prisoners – about his past and hearing a variation of the infamous words: “I was just doing my job”.

Then there was Hess, who would eventually have the prison to himself, but was an isolated figure even then. Maher remembers his “deep-set eyes” and the way he sat “huddled in a great coat”, staring into the distance and refusing to speak.

When he heard the news, years later, that a frail, 93-year-old Hess had managed to hang himself with a piece of wire, Maher found it hard to believe. But he was long gone from Spandau and accepts the official assurances about what happened.

Now 85, he’s enjoying retirement in Stockport. His wife Edie died last year, but his three surviving children live nearby. He can’t play golf anymore: another game he once excelled at, winning many trophies. But having “jacked it in” with serious chess in 1970, he has recently resumed the game “for fun”. All things considered, he agrees he’s had “an interesting life”.

@FrankmcnallyIT