Francis Stuart’s broadcasts from Germany, 1942—4: some new evidence

The poet and novelist Francis Stuart’s sojourn in Germany during the Second World War and his broadcasting activities for the Nazis remain acnámh spairneamong historians and journalists alike. Assessments of his radio talks range from that of his biographer J.H. Natterstad, who described them as being of ‘a literary or semi-literary’ character, to that of Kevin Myers, who equated the broadcasts with ‘voluntary siding with the most bestial régime in the history of civilisation’. In October 1997 a television documentary during which Stuart was quoted as saying that ‘the Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it’ triggered off a long-running controversy in the letters pages of theIrish Times. Some prominent intellectuals rushed to Stuart’s defence, arguing, for example, that the worm metaphor was indeed a positive one, representing the ‘hidden, unheroic and critical’. On the other hand, leaving aside the question whether or not Stuart was an antisemite, two German emigrants to Ireland argued that anyone, including Stuart, ‘who lived in Germany at that time, any person working for the Ministry of Propaganda had to be an active Nazi sympathiser’. From a more scholarly perspective, David O’Donoghue has recorded that in his radio talks Stuart was neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Russian, while Dermot Keogh suggested that Stuart’s broadcasts from Germany in fact mirrored the content of antisemitic publications in Ireland at the time. Stuart himself denied ever having backed the Nazis, and rejected the charge of antisemitism in the R.T.É. interview broadcast in January 1998: ‘I never supported that régime.’