‘SWIFT AND VIOLENT’

Former Nazi officer employed at private Irish school subjected pupils to ‘sinister’ abuse as calls for apology made

• Published: 15:53, 4 Oct 2023
• Updated: 15:57, 4 Oct 2023

FORMER pupils of an Irish school have called for an apology from the private school after it hired a French former Nazi officer who subjected pupils to decades of abuse.

Louis Feutren served in the SS during World War II and was a member of the ‘Brezen Perrot’ group that hunted Jews and French Resistance fighters.

He was sentenced to death in France after the war but fled to Wales and then Ireland in 1945, where he took up a teaching position in St Conleth’s College in Dublin from 1957 to 1985, according to The Guardian. 

Several testimonies written in a letter by Uki Goñi, who studied at St Conleth’s in the 1970s, recall physical abuse inflicted on them by Feutren even after the ban on corporal punishment in schools was introduced in 1982.

The letter sent to the school calls on it to “apologise for actions… that were carried out under the name it still bears today”.

In the letter cited by The Irish Times, Mark Collins, a former pupil in the 1980s, said he was told to stand in front of the class and remove any item of clothing he could not name in French.

He said: “We were used to straightforward forms of punishment, but with him, it was just sinister and strange. 

“He’d make you stand in a line with a piece of chalk in your mouth and make sure your lips didn’t touch the chalk. Really weird behaviour.”

Kieran Owens, who attended the school from 1966 to 1974, said Feutren was “a volcano ready to erupt at any moment.”

He said: “If there was any sort of transgression, he would be very, very, very swift and violent.”

Mr Goñi, whose father was the former Argentinian ambassador to Ireland, described Feutren as a “monster” who was a “boastful, unrepentant and proud former officer in the most evil and tyrannical organisation of the 20th Century, the Nazi SS.”

He added that although he believes the school’s current management cannot be held accountable for employing Feutren, a formal apology and acknowledgement should be made.

In Mr Goñi’s letter to the board, he said: “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.”

Feutren maintained his post in the college until his retirement in 1985 and, despite being a known Nazi collaborator, remained a well-respected educator until he died in 2009.

‘PAST NEVER A SECRET’

However, Mr Goñi said Feutren’s past was never a secret.

He said: “I learned the first day I was there that he was a Nazi. It was just normalised.”

In a post on social media, Mr Goñi said: “I endured this Nazi thug up to 1971.

“What I didn’t know is he kept tormenting pupils in the same perverse, evil way up until 1985. 

“Sentenced to death in France in 1945. On the payroll of @saintconleths for almost 30 years.

“Everyone knew. Now everyone knows.”