15-05-2025
How an Irish Catholic newspaper viewed World War II
Analysis: A supporter of European dictators, The Standard's main enemy before, during and after the war was the Godless Communism of Russia
In November 1940, a reader using the pseudonym An Coileach Gaoithe (The Weathercock) wrote a letter to the Dublin-based Catholic newspaper The Standard. Under the eye-catching headline: "If I Were Dictator", the reader outlined various gripes about elements of the Irish Free State which did not function properly. That letter prompted a series of follow-ups from correspondents who had their own ideas about what they would do if given unlimited power.
Dictators were, of course, much in vogue in Europe in 1940, and The Standard was well disposed towards most of them. So how did the newspaper view the events of the Second World War, which ended 80 years ago this month?
The Standard, published weekly between 1928 and 1978 and called the Catholic Standard from 1963, supported the policy of wartime neutrality adopted by the Irish government. But it had to contend with censorship during the 'Emergency', as the period was known in Ireland.
In 1942, it successfully sued the Daily Mail, who accused it of being "the organ of a group that would rather see Germany than England win the war". In 1945, it defended as an "act of international courtesy" the controversial decision of Taoiseach Éamon de Valera to offer condolences to the German Minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel, on the death of Adolf Hitler.
Much of the paper's wartime coverage focused on two Catholic countries which, being neutral, were exempt from censorship regulations. The Standard had been fervent supporters of Francisco Franco since the Spanish Civil War. They were even more enthusiastic about Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, viewing his social reforms as a model for Ireland. In the pre-war era, they also wrote nice things about Benito Mussolini in Italy, whose 1929 Lateran Treaty with the Holy See established the Vatican City as an independent state.
From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Prof Diarmaid Ferriter from UCD on the history of Irish neutrality
The Standard had been critical of Hitler after his rise to power, highlighting the difficulties experienced by the German Catholic hierarchy, but that criticism tapered off in the late 1930s. The paper's main enemy – before, during and after the war – was the Godless Communism of Russia. Through much of the preceding decade, the paper warned of increased Communist influence in Ireland.
When war came, The Standard devoted far more attention to Soviet aggression in Finland and Eastern Poland than it did to German activities in western Poland. When the Germans overran France in 1940, The Standard reacted with something close to glee. France's defeat was attributed in the paper to various factors: "too few children", the "poisoning" influence of liberalism, and the removal of religious orders from schools.
The Standard enthusiastically endorsed the actions of the puppet government installed by the Nazis at Vichy under Marshal Philippe Pétain: a ban on secret societies, the introduction of strict film censorship, and changes in French schools. A 1940 article by J.L. Benvenisti warned that if Britain was beaten, "her people will be reduced to conditions paralleled only by those of the Irish in the Famine Years".
Commentary about the Soviet Union became officially subject to censorship after it joined the Allied side in 1941. But, as historian Donal Ó Drisceoil notes, The Standard was allowed an anti-Soviet 'bite' by the censors before the shutters came down. The paper ran a series of extracts from the Catholic press in Britain which, "while accepting the fact of Britain's military alliance with Soviet Russia", pointed to "the dangers" that attached to it.
From RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor show, Suzi Diamond, survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Caryna Camerino, granddaughter of Auschwitz survivor Enzo Camerino, reflect on the Holocaust
By June 1945, the war in Europe was over and public criticism of both Nazism and Bolshevism by Pope Pius XII received prominent coverage in The Standard. An accompanying article disputed the "widely-reported assertion" that this address contained the first Papal denunciation of the Nazis since 1937. "The protest has been clear and continuous," argued The Universe newspaper, the claim that offered The Standard its headline.
If there was a sense there that both church and paper were repositioning themselves to take account of the new post-war reality, The Standard was on more comfortable territory discussing the rise of the Iron Curtain. An editorial in mid-June 1945 referred to Soviet-controlled Poland as 'the blackest spot in Europe' and suggested that "the one object for which the war was professedly fought" – the restoration of Polish independence – "has not yet been achieved".
Newsreel footage of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald concentration camps was met with "gasps" in Irish cinemas in June 1945. The response in The Standard was more sceptical, as film critic Benedict Kiely argued that the camera is not able "to tell the whole truth". In her book That Neutral Island, Clair Wills suggests that Kiely "tried to mute the horror of the images of the death camps by arguing that they were simply one more example of the atrocity in which all sides had been engaged".
The Standard regarded the Nuremberg trials, which investigated Nazi war crimes, as a form of victors' justice. It suggested that all the charges the German leaders had faced could also be "held at the door of Soviet Russia".
