Review: Dublin Nazi No 1

Dublin Nazi No 1. The Life of Adolf Mahr – Gerry Mullins (Liberties Press)

When Adolf Mahr came to Ireland in 1927 to take up a post as Keeper in the National Museum of Ireland, he arrived in an institution that retained a British worldview. Archaeological and historical objects were, according to Mahr, ‘intermingled with the worst rubbish’, including a collection of dolls, one of which was ‘naked except for a banner across its stomach, which reads “USA”.’ He encouraged new acquisitions, and helped reorganise the collections to create a museum that reflected the ideals of a fledgling Irish nation. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, and by the late 1930s, was the head of the Irish Nazi Party, had been promoted to Museum Director, and was a widely-respected prehistoric archaeologist. In 1939, Mahr and his family left Ireland. His wife Maria and their children, Hilde, Gustav, Brigit and Ingrid, were sent on holidays while Adolf attended a conference of prehistoric archaeology and the Nuremberg rally. War broke out before they could return.

During the war, the Mahrs were in Germany, unsure when they would be able to return to Dublin. Adolf got a job with the Foreign Office, eventually managing an English propaganda radio service, where his intimate knowledge of Ireland proved useful. By the end of war, Adolf and Maria Mahr’s marriage had broken down (her support for Nazism waned even before the war), and the family had been separated. He still held his Museum directorship, on leave of absence without pay, until he was pensioned off in 1949.

Author Gerry Mullins uses archival sources, interviews, and enthusiastic co-operation from the Mahr children. Equally interesting is the story of Hilde, the eldest Mahr daughter, whose experiences bring wartime suffering – which undoubtedly knew no ethnic or political boundaries – into sharp focus. Like many children of former Nazis, the younger generation of Mahrs have long ‘shunned the hatred and intolerance that the Nazi creed promoted’; they and their contemporaries remain anxious that the lessons of Nazi history be learned in earnest.

This is a well-researched document, and as engaging as a historical biography should be. It provides an important and long-overdue contribution to the understanding of the Second World War through an Irish lens. He acknowledges the difficulty of separating Mahr’s professional life as an archaeologist from his politics, but avoids delving into these connections, keeping his narrative at the personal level. While he does not shy away from highlighting Mahr’s vicious anti-Semitism, he sometimes has difficulty reconciling it with what allowed the Holocaust to happen. He insists that there is not enough evidence to say Mahr was informed was about such matters, or that his motives were in line with them. Here, it becomes problematic.

Ingrid Mahr returned to Dublin after the war. She retrieved some of her father’s books and papers from the National Museum, and as instructed by Dr Michael Quane, burned a proportion of them. If there was indeed evidence to mar what remained of his legacy, some of it may have gone up in smoke. But is such evidence even necessary?

Mahr may have been unaware of Hitler’s despotic and genocidal plans, but being in regular correspondence with people in Germany, he likely knew about ongoing persecution of the Jews. Mullins even cites evidence that Mahr may have been involved with monitoring Jews in Ireland. And even though he had individual Jewish friends, some of whom he helped escape certain death, the fate of the rest may not have bothered him. More importantly, it would be naïve to assume that people in Europe of the 1930s, especially those with an academic background like Mahr’s, were unable to understand the consequences of reducing the status an entire section of the population to that of sub-humans.

It is at the level of the individual, especially one as controversial as Mahr, that concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ disintegrate, and true motives are always matters of speculation, existing in the vague and muddled space between the words, objects and actions that are our only evidence. Under the microscope, history’s heroes don’t seem so dignified, and its villains emerge as complex social beings with redeeming human qualities that are equally unsettling. Perhaps such moral conflict indicates that history should make us very uncomfortable indeed.

Once Mahr is fleshed out into three dimensions, the image resembles that of a trapped civil servant in an itchy suit, a cog just doing his job in an unfortunate bureaucratic machine, who would rather be at home with his children. The machine of tyranny is driven, not by individual maniacs, but by those who are just doing a job within a climate of collective mania where seemingly ordinary humans are capable of unspeakable things. Rather than wonder about his motives, if there is a point to writing about the past, this is perhaps most important lesson of Nazi history. Mullins’s work is certainly food for thought.

(From Magill, March 2007)