Ireland, Germany and the Nazis

Politics and Diplomacy, 1919-1939

Mervyn O'Driscoll

• Publisher: Four Courts Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781801510745
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Now available in paperback! In the 1920s, Germany and Ireland were new European democracies operating in adverse international, political, and economic conditions. This book places the bilateral Irish-German relationship in the context of the professionalization of the Irish Foreign Service and the Irish Free State's progressive carving out of an independent foreign policy. It assesses the key Irish personalities involved in Irish-German relations. These include the successive Irish representatives in Berlin, the eminent scholar Dr Daniel A. Binchy, Leo T. McCauley, and the contentious Charles Bewley. Eamon de Valera and Joseph Walshe (Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs) also played a crucial role. Irish responses to the Wall Street Crash, the rise of the Nazis, and Hitler's policies (domestic and foreign), are all analyzed. Did Irish officials foresee the fall of Weimar and the rise of Nazism? How did they view the unfolding nature of the Nazi regime? The clashes between Bewley's apologetic justifications of Nazism after 1935 and de Valera's critical attitudes towards domestic Nazi policies are examined. The ineffective efforts to expand Irish-German trade during the Anglo-Irish Economic War shed light on Irish attempts at export market diversification in the emerging protectionist world economic environment. The analysis places Irish-German relations within the maturation of events in Europe in the 1930s, taking account of the League of Nations' failure, the popularity of Fascism, the Blueshirts, the fraught international atmosphere, and Hitler's revisionist foreign policy. De Valera's support of Chamberlain's 'appeasement' of Hitler before March 1939 is located in the framework of de Valera's attitudes towards collective security, neutrality, and Hibernia Irredenta. [Subject: Irish Studies, 20th Century History, Politics, Nazisim, Ireland & Germany]

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Dedication
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Abbreviations and glossary
• Introduction
• 1. False starts, 1919-23
• 2. Resurrection, 1923-32
• 3. Towards the Third Reich, April 1932-August 1933
• 4. Consolidating the Hitler state, September 1933–July 1934
• 5. Transition, August 1934–August 1935
• 6. International power politics, September 1935–August 1937
• 7. The appeasement triangle, September 1937–September 1938
• 8. Perception, reality and neutrality, October 1938–September 1939
• Conclusion: secret histories
• Select bibliography
• Addendum to the bibliography
• Index