Qualla: Friesack Camp

Friesack Camp: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Somewhere in Berlin in the summer of 1942, an Irishman named Andrew Walsh was waiting to be flown to Norway and parachuted into Scotland to blow up a power station. He had been trained in explosives and radio procedure and handed operational funds in cash. Sitting with a fellow prisoner from the camp, Thomas Cushing, he explained his actual plan: hide the money and walk into the first English police station he could find. Cushing reported the conversation. The Gestapo arrested them both, the mission was cancelled, and the two men went to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. That is Friesack Camp in miniature — a three-year intelligence operation in which the men doing the betraying could not agree on which side they were betraying, and which produced nothing at all.

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Friesack Camp: England's Difficulty

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The idea was not new, and its track record was poor. During the First World War, Roger Casement went into the prisoner-of-war camp at Limburg an der Lahn to raise an Irish Brigade from nationalist-minded Irishmen serving in the British Army. Between Casement's efforts and the ful...

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Friesack Camp: A Camp With Better Conditions

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The pitch was deliberately vague. Helmut Clissmann, an NCO from the Brandenburgers, the Abwehr's commando unit, later described it plainly: all Irishmen in prisoner-of-war camps were invited to give their names with a view to going to a special camp offering better conditions. Th...

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Friesack Camp: The Funnel

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The arithmetic of the vetting tells the story. In December 1940 the initial pool drawn from the entire Stalag network was a little over one hundred men, all claiming Irish nationality, fewer than five of them officers — and those officers stated flatly that they would fight only ...

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Friesack Camp: Quenzgut

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Berlin the men were housed together and put through the Abwehr course at the Quenzgut training establishment: improvised explosives, incendiaries, and radio procedure. Three operations in the Abwehr II war diary came out of it. Operation Innkeeper went to Sergeant John Codd of...

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Friesack Camp: What Became of Them

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The one man who did get sent was James Cromwell O'Neill of County Wexford, a civilian taken off an interned freighter and codenamed Eisenbart. Dispatched to spy in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1942, he turned himself in on reaching London. Back in Germany the operation folde...

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