Eduard Hempel

Eduard Hempel (1887–1972) was the Nazi German Minister to Ireland between 1937 and 1945 — in the build up to and during The Emergency (Second World War).

Hempel's time in Ireland is particularly noted for the incident at the end of his term of office when the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera and Joe 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, President Hyde also visited Hempel, the following day.

Prior to his appointment, the Irish External Affairs ministry had specified that they did not want a Nazi party member as ambassador; the solution to this requirement appears to have been that at the time he took up his position he was not a member of the party, but joined the following year, his NSDAP card being dated 1 July 1938.

[In his eight years in post, Hempel sent thousands of reports to Berlin by telegraph and shortwave radio (the latter until the German embassy's transmitter was seized in December 1943 at the insistence of the United States). Hempel came close to compromising the Irish government's neutrality policy by transmitting weather reports and the effects of Luftwaffe raids on England, as well as dooming the 1942 allied raid on Dieppe to failure by reporting Canadian troop movements on the south coast of England. It has also been claimed that even without his transmitter, Hempel was able to hinder the allied parachute landings at Arnhem in September 1944. ]

Hempel eventually returned to Germany in 1949.

References

*"Herr Hempel at the German Legation in Dublin 1937-1945", John P. Duggan, Irish Academic Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7165-2757-X