Product Code Database
Eduard Hempel (6 June, 1887 - 12 November, 1972) was a German diplomat. He was the representative of Nazi Germany to Ireland between 1937 and 1945, in the build-up to and during The Emergency in Second World War. When appointed to the post, Hempel was not a Nazi Party member. However, the Nazi regime soon put him under pressure to join the party, which occurred on 1 July 1938.
Technically his new role accorded with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs request that the person chosen not be a Nazi.
Earlier, in a letter to the Irish Times on 25 February 2011, Michael Drury, a former diplomat, wrote that: "Official circles in Ireland recognised that Dr Hempel behaved correctly throughout his mission, given the narrow limits of his position. For example, he respected Ireland's neutrality better than the American minister did. If he were regarded as having been 'Hitler's man', I would not have been instructed, as an official of the Irish Embassy in Bonn, to attend his funeral in 1972." Drury's assessment of Hempel was however challenged by several other Irish Times readers, who pointed to evidence of the German minister's pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic outlook. In further correspondence on 8 March 2011 he wrote, 'I agree that Dr Hempel ought to have resigned when pressured to join the Nazi party, but not all of us are endowed with heroic virtues. He had no need to use the "classical excuse" that he followed orders: he was not accused of war crimes.'
Hempel's time in Ireland is particularly noted for the incident at the end of his term of office when the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera and Joseph Walshe, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, paid a visit to his home in Dún Laoghaire on 2 May 1945 to express their official condolences on the death of German dictator Adolf Hitler. Hempel was described as being distraught at the news, wringing his hands in anguish, although after his death his wife, Eva, accounted for the incident by saying that he was suffering from eczema. According to official papers released in 2005, Douglas Hyde also visited Hempel, the following day.
In his eight years in post, Hempel sent thousands of reports to Berlin by telegraph and shortwave radio (the latter until he surrendered his radio transmitter in December 1943 at the insistence of the Department of External Affairs, and under pressure from the United States and United Kingdom). Some historians have stated that Hempel was involved in undermining the 1942 allied raid on Dieppe Raid to failure by reporting Canada troop movements on the south coast of England, although this charge has been disputed.
In a 'Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1941-1945' a letter from de Valera is quoted defending his contentious visit to Hempel following the death of Hitler. He wrote, "So long as we retained our diplomatic relations with Germany, to have failed to call upon the German representative would have been an act of unpardonable discourtesy to the German nation and to Dr Hempel," he said in a letter.
In 2011, Hempel's daughter, Liv Hempel, said, "In hindsight, I believe that the reason De Valera called to the house was out of friendship ... He visited because he knew my father, and the condolences were to my father because his position as was finished. Hitler's death didn't mean a damn thing to my father; he was happy about it – like we are happy about Osama bin Laden."
|
|
