{"id":237690,"date":"2023-10-04T11:29:10","date_gmt":"2023-10-04T11:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lovemainstream.com\/?p=237690"},"modified":"2023-10-04T11:29:10","modified_gmt":"2023-10-04T11:29:10","slug":"nazi-ss-teacher-forced-pupils-to-undress-at-dublin-school-victims-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lovemainstream.com\/world-news\/nazi-ss-teacher-forced-pupils-to-undress-at-dublin-school-victims-say\/","title":{"rendered":"Nazi SS teacher forced pupils to undress at Dublin school, victims say"},"content":{"rendered":"
Former pupils of a Dublin college have called on the private school to apologise for hiring a French former Nazi officer who subjected pupils to abuse over decades.<\/p>\n
Louis Feutren served in the SS during World War II and was a member of a Breton nationalist group ‘Bezen Perrot’ that hunted for Jews and French Resistance fighters.<\/p>\n
He was sentenced to death in France\u00a0after the war before fleeing to Ireland in 1945 where he taught French at St Conleth’s College in Dublin from 1957 to 1985.<\/p>\n
Feutren died in 2009, but former students have now called on St Conleth’s to apologise over Feutren, who signatories say regularly abused pupils in class.<\/p>\n
Uki Go\u00f1i, who studied at St Conleth’s in the 1970s, has coordinated a letter campaign sent to the school asking it to ‘apologise for actions… that were carried out under the name it still bears today’.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Louis Feutren died in 2009. He worked for St Conleth’s in Dublin from 1957 until 1985<\/p>\n
In Go\u00f1i’s letter, cited by the Irish Times, several testimonies by pupils recall physical abuse inflicted on them by Feutren even after a 1982 ban on corporal punishment in Irish schools.<\/p>\n
Mark Collins, a former pupil, said he was told to stand in front of the class and remove any item of clothing he could not name in French.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘So you have a 13-year-old boy thinking “am I going to be stripped naked here?”‘, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Collins, who studied at the college in the 1980s, said Feutren would ‘twist your ear or smack you’. Corporal punishment in schools was made illegal in Ireland in 1982.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Other pupils said Feutren was ‘a volcano ready to erupt at any moment.’<\/p>\n
Kieran Owens said: ‘If there was any sort of transgression he would be very, very, very swift and violent.’<\/p>\n
He added: ‘If he was attempting to get you to pronounce a word he would use his hand to mould you jaw into whatever position it required to get it right.’<\/p>\n
Describing Feutren as a ‘monster’, Go\u00f1i, whose father was the former Argentinian ambassador to Ireland, said the Frenchman ‘was a boastful, unrepentant and proud former officer in the most evil and tyrannical organisation of the 20th century, the Nazi SS’.<\/p>\n
Go\u00f1i said the school’s current management cannot be held responsible for employing Feutren – but called for a formal apology and acknowledgement.<\/p>\n
He wrote in a letter to the board:\u00a0‘We cannot be judged for the behaviour of those who came before us, but that doesn’t absolve us from distancing ourselves from that past today.’<\/p>\n
The letter also included testimonies from other former students of the college.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Feutren was employed by the school from 1957 until his retirement in 1985.<\/p>\n
Despite being a known Nazi collaborator, he remained respected as an educator until his death in 2009.<\/p>\n
Go\u00f1i said on Tuesday that Feutren’s past was never a secret.<\/p>\n
‘I learned the first day I was there that he was a Nazi. It was just normalised,’ he said.<\/p>\n
Feutren collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of France in World War 2 in the hope of establishing an independent Breton state with Bezen Perrot.<\/p>\n
The unit wore SS uniforms and guarded an interrogation centre in Rennes.<\/p>\n
‘They said he wasn’t really a Nazi but a Breton separatist,’ said Go\u00f1i.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘My reaction was, yes, but many Breton separatists didn’t join the SS.’\u00a0<\/p>\n
Feutren had been member of the Bezen Parrot in France, which was officially known as the Breton SS Armed Formation.<\/p>\n
Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, Go\u00f1i said: ‘I endured this Nazi thug up to 1971. What I didn\u2019t know is he kept tormenting pupils in same perverse, evil way up until 1985.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Sentenced to death in France in 1945. On the payroll of @saintconleths for almost 30 years. Everyone knew. Now everyone knows.’<\/p>\n
The college has since posted on its X account, but did not respond to\u00a0Go\u00f1i’s post.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
St Conleth’s is a private school in Dublin, Ireland, that employed Feutren for 28 years<\/p>\n
After the war, the unit was sentenced to death for its crimes against Jews and resistance fighters,\u00a0Go\u00f1i said, as reported in The Guardian.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Feutren managed to escape to Wales and then Ireland, studying at university before becoming a French teacher at the private Catholic school in Dublin.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his will, Feutren left \u00a3300,000 to the National Library of Wales for the study of the Breton language.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Universit\u00e9 de Bretagne Occidentale refused his offer of \u00a343,400 due to his war record.<\/p>\n
MailOnline contacted Conleth College for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n