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IrelandQuestion:
Andrew Mathis answers:I am one of the volunteers who answers questions for the Holocaust History Project. The number of 4,000 Jews in Ireland probably comes from the Wannsee Protocol, the minutes of a meeting held outside Berlin in early 1942 to discuss the Final Solution. You can view the document here: http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/places/germany/wannsee/ You'll notice that this document does, in fact, include Jewish figures for the U.K. and Finland. Ireland was indeed neutral during the war, so the only Irish-Jewish casualties that I can imagine would be Irish Jews from Ulster conscripted into the U.K. armed forced and killed in battle. No statistical records that I'm aware of regarding Holocaust deaths by country mention Ireland at all. One thing you may want to investigate are allegations that Irish authorities allowed Nazi spies to operate on Irish soil during the war. These activities, if true, probably had little bearing on the Holocaust and were more a matter of the Nazis trying to negotiate easier ways of cracking British intelligence through geographic proximity. Andrew E. Mathis, Ph.D. back to the list of questions | ||||
Last modified: September 24, 2000
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