Did an Irishman save Hitler’s life?

One of the very minor backwaters of WWI was the German attempt to form an Irish brigade from prisoners of war. Very little has been written about this story – the first I ever heard of the Brigade was in the early noughties when I bought a book by Adrian Weale called Patriot Traitors, by Adrian Weale. The book chronicled the lives and activities of Sir Roger Casement in WWI and John Amery in WWII. Both were convicted of treason and were hanged.

There is not much about the WWI Irish Brigade on the internet except for one excellent site Irish Brigade. That does make up for the dearth of information elsewhere.

Why am I interested in such a minor event? Apart from my predilection for the ripples of history, my grandfather would certainly have been one of the Irish POWs the Germans tried to recruit (as stated several times before My father Joseph XXXXXX was taken prisoner at Etreux during the BEF’s retreat from Mons. Etreux was where a few companies of the 2nd Munsters, along with some Hussars and Horse Artillery held up a whole German Corps for the best part of a day, thus putting vital miles between the German advance and the British retreat). My grandfather did not heed Casement and remained a POW for the rest of the war.

Interstingly the Belfast Telegraph carried an article on 6 August in which it stated that the memoirs of Michael Keogh, one of the Irish Bridage members, had just been published.

Dubliner Michael Keogh had an adventurous life. In 1906 he went to the United States where he studied engineering. He joined the 69th Regiment of the National Guard. In 1910 he fought in Oklahoma against Mexican invaders (the site says El Paso). He then went on to work on construction of the Panama Canal.

Returning to Ireland in 1914 (site says 1913) he joined the British Army (the 2bn Royal Irish Regiment) before being captured by the Germans in 1916 (wrong, it was 1914). While in captivity he joined Roger Casement's Irish Brigade.

The detailed accounts of Mr Keogh's life, written after his experiences, mysteriously disappeared while he was on his deathbed in James Connolly Memorial Hospital in Blanchardstown in 1964. According to his son Kevin (84), who lives in Swords, north Co Dublin, a man "dressed as a priest" took them from under his pillow two days before he died. The files were eventually found in the UCD archives and given back to the family in 2004.

The memoirs report a chance encounter with a young Adolf Hitler that changed the course of history. Shortly after the Great War Mr Keogh stayed in Germany. While serving in the German Free Corps (Freikorps), fighting against Communist rulers who had declared a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919, he recalls leading a military operation to save the life of the future German tyrant.
He had earlier met Hitler in September 1918 near Ligny on the French Border, where the pair were in the same Bavarian Regiment.

In his memoirs he describes how, as the officer on duty during the anti-Communist revolution, he received an urgent call about a riot involving 200 men and two "political agents", one of them being Hitler, in a nearby gym.

"I ordered out a sergeant and six men and, with fixed bayonets, led them off on the double."

Mr Keogh explained that two political agents, who had been lecturing from a table top, had been dragged to the floor and were being beaten.

"The two on the floor were in danger of being kicked to death. I ordered the guard to fire one round over the heads of the rioters. It stopped the commotion."

The group of soldiers managed to haul out the two injured politicians.

"The crowd around muttered and growled, boiling for blood," he added. "The fellow with the moustache gave his name promptly: Adolf Hitler.hey had come to the barracks as political agents for the new National Socialist German Workers' Party."

Keogh returned to Ireland in 1922 but went back to Germany in 1928 where he stayed until 1936. He died in 1964.

Pity he didn’t let Hitler get beaten to death.. who knows what course history would have taken...

The book in question is “With Casement’s Irish Brigade”. I certainly feel a purchase coming on

Address to the Irish POWS at Limburg, May 15th, 1915

Irish POWs taken in the early part of WWI were concentrated in a camp at Limburg - almost certainly including my grandfather who was captured at the Etreux rearguard action during the British Expeditionary Force's retreat from Mons in August 1914. Roger Casement made an attempt in 1915 at recruiting an Irish Brigade. It was an utter failure. Let's say that they failed to be stirred by Casement's words (From Searcs web guide). I wonder what my grandfather thought of it.

"You have been told, I daresay, that I am trying to form an Irish Brigade to fight for Germany; that I am a German agent; and that an attempt is being made to suborn you, or tempt you to do something dishonest and insincere for the sake of the German Government and not for the welfare of Ireland. Well, you may believe me, or disbelieve me (and nothing I could say would convince you as to my own motives) but I can convince you, and I owe to yourselves as well as to my self to convince you that the effort to form an Irish Brigade is based on Irish interests only, and is a sincere and honest one, so far as my actions with the German Government is concerned and so far as their action in the matter goes.

An Irish Brigade, if it be formed today, will rest on a clear and definite agreement wherein the German Government is pledged to aid the cause of Irish independence by force of arms, and above all, to aid Irish men to themselves fight for their own freedom. The agreement that is the basis on which an Irish Brigade is one now in my hands, and which I will read to you. It was signed on 28th of December last by the duly authorized representative [under Secretary for State] of the German Government and is an honest and sincere offer on the part of a great European Government to help Irishmen to fight their own battle for the freedom of their country. It is the first time in history that such an offer has been made and embodied in clear straightforward terms.

Hitherto, in the past, Irish Brigades have existed on the Continent but they were, in every case, formed to fight the battles not of Ireland, but of France, or Spain or of Austria. The foreign governments who took Irishmen, and formed them into a fighting force, did so, in all these cases not for the sake of Ireland but for the cause of these foreign governments.

When Patrick Sarsfield died at Lauden in Flanders in 1691 he said on the field of his death: 'Would that this blood were shed for Ireland.' He was giving his life for France in the battles of France, not for Ireland. Today the case is different and if any Irish man in the Irish Brigade today loses his life he can at least say that he is giving his blood for Ireland. The agreement leaves no doubt that he is pledged to one cause only and that the cause is not of Germany but of Ireland...

Your Oath binds you to serve your king and country. Now a man has only one country and he cannot have a divided allegiance. The only country that can claim an Irishman's allegiance is Ireland. The king you agreed to serve is, in law, King of Great Britain and Ireland. There is no such person as the King of England in law. How have these sovereigns discharged their duty to their Irish subjects? For remember these obligations are mutual. Our Kings, whose sole title to our allegiance is that they are Kings of Ireland, as well as Kings of Great Britain, have not once in all these centuries performed their duties to their Irish people or fulfilled any of the sacred obligations laid upon them by the title and the allegiance they claim from their subjects.

I could cite many instances: I will give only two here. King George III was as much King of Ireland as he was King of Great Britain. He drew every year from the pockets of the Irish people the sum of £145,000 for his own purse. He never performed a public act for the welfare of his Irish people; he never set foot in Ireland, but he hired foreign soldiers, and Germans even, to come to Ireland to cut the throats of his Irish people and to burn their houses and devastate their country. That was in 1798, when the grandfathers of some of us were alive and were fighting for Irish rights. King George III of Ireland, as much as of Great Britain, paid £2,400,000 to hire foreign mercenaries to murder his Irish and his American subjects and the public accounts are on record showing who received this money - some of which was money from Ireland. That was one view of a King of England's duty to his people in Ireland.

In 1848, the granddaughter of George III, Queen Victoria, who was also Queen of Ireland as much as Great Britain, regretted very much, in a letter to her uncle the King of the Belgians that the starving and disarmed Irish people did not openly rebel, so that her ample army in Ireland might have a good chance of shedding Irish blood and teaching 'the Irish a lesson'. That was her sovereign view of her duties to the people she called her subjects - she only regretted that they did not come up to the scratch to give her well armed troops a chance of shooting down unarmed and starving men. I do not know what moral claims such sovereigns have to the loyality of the people they thus treat as enemies and have never regarded as having any claim upon their consciences. I am not the only Irishman who holds this view.

Others before us today, when it came to the question of fighting for Ireland, have not hesitated to break the Oath of Allegiance that bound them to such false Kings as these.

Lord Edward Fitzgerald in 1798 was an Officer in the British army and had taken that form of the Oath of Allegiance. But he did not hesitate to break it and to lose his life fighting for Ireland. So with Smith O'Brien in 1848. He had taken two Oaths of Allegiance to the Crown - first in Parliament as Member for Clare, and also as a magistrate for that county. These men were not afraid to risk their lives for Ireland: They were brave enough to know where their duty to their country lay, and to try at all costs to discharge it.

If an Irishman serves another country then he is not loyally doing his duty to his own. It is idle to talk of Irish liberty if we are not men enough to fight for it ourselves. We are told sometimes that Ireland will be made free by acts of others; that if Germany were to win the war there would be a free Ireland. If Irishmen men themselves are not prepared to fight for Ireland and to risk their lives in that cause then it is idle to talk of Irish liberty, and cowardly too. To expect Germany or others to free our country when we are not prepared ourselves to risk anything for it is cowardly and contemptible in the extreme.

Germany has already publicly declared her goodwill and good intentions towards Ireland and has given every proof in her power of her wish to see an independent Ireland.

She declares formally, and in binding terms, that she will assist Irishmen with arms, and military help to secure Irish independence, and that she will recognise that independence if gained and do all that she can to secure it."