PEELING THE ONION

In 1985 Albert Folens was "interviewed" by a journalist about what he did during WWII. It seems to have been less of an interview and more of an interrogation. The journalist seems to have come "prepared" in that he had already come to the conclusion that he was about to reveal a brutal Nazi war criminal who had penetrated the very heart of Irish society. This was to be the scoop of a lifetime. He was unprepared, however, for what he met.

A man willing to admit to having served in the SS Flemish Legion and having worked at a desk job for the SS Sicherheitsdienst in Brussels, and this only after a certain amount of pushing on the journalist's part.

However, that was as far as he was to get. Probably a scoop in itself but falling far short of a Nazi war criminal involved in the brutal interrogation, or torture, of captured Resistance fighters and shot-down Allied airmen or in rounding up Jews to be sent to the death camps.

The "interview" became heated. The journalist was convinced that Folens was sticking to a final backup script and adamantly refusing to admit complicity in the Nazi atrocities in which he had participated.

The journalist described the process as like peeling the layers of an onion.

So let's pause for a moment and reflect on what was really going on here.

Albert Folens became involved in the German military by accident during the occupation of his country in 1941. He joined what he thought was a "sports camp" in Germany which provided him with an income to support himself and his father at a time when he couldn't get a job and his father was in difficult financial circumstances.

He subsequently found that the camp was actually a training camp sponsored by the Nazi SS and it was not long before he was absorbed into the Flemish Legion, a supposedly "independent" unit in the German military. He now found himself in training for combat on the eastern front fighting the Russians. Fortunately, he was invalided out of training before he saw combat but was then assigned to the Gestapo in Brussels as an interpreter. He never took up that job as he had succeeded in talking himself into a purely desk job with the German Security Service as a translator.

He then used that job as a cover while he assisted the Belgian Resistance to the best of his ability and protected Flemish anti-German writers from the wrath of the Nazis, risking his life in doing so. After the war he assisted the Allies but was eventually imprisoned by the Belgian authorities and charged with treason and collaboration. He spent the best part of three years in prison, almost two years of it under appalling conditions, before escaping to Ireland, where he attempted to put his traumatic past behind him and start a new life.

Then some forty years later, into his life comes this blundering journalist trying to stir the pot and not only make him relive buried trauma but make him out to have been a monster. Is it any wonder the interview got heated?

We need to remember here that Folens' time in prison in Brussels was horrendous. He was a wreck. His lawyer feared for his life and was constantly trying to get him medical, including psychiatric assistance. His wife even made a special plea directly to the court. Had Folens not escaped he might not have seen the end of his sentence. When he came to ireland he tried to put all that behind him. It was necessary for his survival.

And now, more than three decades later, he was faced with a journalist, who did not believe him, even when he admitted what he had done, and who spent a full three hours trying to wring a confession out of him that he had been a war criminal, which he hadn't. All the journalist's accusations, other than Albert's own admissions, were without a shred of evidence.

The journalist's editor, unsurprisingly, refused to publish the journalist's piece.

You might think that bad enough. Yet some twenty years later still the same journalist was to recycle these accusations on the national airwaves after Albert's death, vilifying Albert and traumatising his widow and family.

This was certainly not the kind of journalism I aspired to in my naive youth.

If this story makes your skin crawl, you have every reason to read Leentje's book to discover the real Albert Folens, this time in an atmosphere of love and respect.

DE MORTUIS NIHIL NISI BONUM

Get the book here or via Amazon if you are outside Europe.