Hitler’s Irishmen

​

Before the war, the nascent Republic of Ireland had to navigate between the rise of Nazism and its own troubled relationship with the United Kingdom. To appease both the pro- and anti-fascist strains and IRA concerns of its citizens, Ireland opted for neutrality in the war, which it officially pursued throughout the conflict. Nonetheless, thousands of Irishmen joined British forces.
Two such Irishmen, James Brady and Frank Stringer signed up for the Royal Irish Fusiliers in the British Army in 1938. One night in 1940, while stationed in Guernsey in the English Channel, the two were denied service in a pub. As a result, they vandalized the pub and beat up a local policeman.
For their drunken outburst, Brady and Stringer served jail time in the Channel Islands, which Germany occupied at the time. Even though they were active British soldiers, the Guernsey police handed them over to the Wehrmacht.
The men eventually wound up in Brandenburg, Germany, at Camp Friesack, which was set up to win Irish soldiers over to the German cause. A British officer there advised his fellow prisoners of war to pretend to volunteer for the Abwehr, a German military espionage group, with the understanding that they would turn themselves in to the British as soon as they could. In September 1941, Stringer and another soldier offered to work with the Abwehr and left camp to train. In 1942, the remaining Irish prisoners were shipped off to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Brady and Stringer were reunited and worked as farm laborers in northern Germany until 1943, when they were offered the chance to join the Waffen-SS—Germany’s foreign legion. Whether joining the Waffen-SS to escape life as POWs or because they bought into the Nazis’ propaganda, Brady and Stringer did join and became German soldiers. They were assigned to the 502nd SS Jäger Battalion, a Nazi special forces unit composed mostly of foreign recruits and run by Otto Skorzeny, an Austrian lieutenant colonel who had an exceptional talent for infiltrating enemy lines, having freed Mussolini from captivity.
Brady proved to be an enthusiastic commando, participating in clandestine, behind-the-lines operations like Operation Landfried in Romania, a raid on Budapest, and defending the Schwedt bridgehead against Soviet forces in 1945. At the Battle of Berlin, Hitler’s dying military tried to stave off Stalin’s Red Army as Brady and Stringer survived while hundreds of thousands of combatants died.
In 1946, Brady surrendered to the British in Berlin. In London, he was court-martialed and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But his sentence was later reduced, mainly because the British Army had abandoned him to the Germans in 1940.
By the early 1950s, Brady and Stringer were back in Ireland as free men. Stringer immigrated to Britain shortly thereafter and kept a low profile, soon vanishing into history. James Brady, who had most likely assumed this name for British military service, also slipped into obscurity. Upon Brady’s return to Ireland, it seems he took back his real name.
The Two Irishmen formed the subject of Hitler’s Irishmen, a book by Terence O’Reilly written in 2008.