The IRA and the Nazis
In the Fall of 2001 secret service files were published by the British Public Record Office that revealed a plot by the IRA to collaborate with the Nazis to invade Northern Ireland during the Second World War.
A key story line in The 53rd Parallel is built around this little known historical fact.
The files included MI5 records about a German spy parachuting into Ireland in 1940 to assess the feasibility of the plan after being approached by the IRA.
The plan was foiled after the spy, Dr Hermann Goertz, aka “K”, was arrested a year later by the Irish government.
The MI5 report, written in 1943, read:
“On the 5th May 1940 Goertz landed by parachute at Ballivor, Co Meath, Eire. Earlier that year the IRA had been in touch with the German SS through the intermediary of Stephen Carroll Held. Held had visited Berlin with a proposal from the IRA for an attack on Northern Ireland by the Germans to be supported by 5,000 IRA recruited in Eire and Northern Ireland. Goertz’s mission was to examine this proposal and to obtain the military information on which the joint attack by the Germans and the IRA on Northern Ireland could be based.”
The 53rd Parallel takes you to that meeting.