Dublin school urged to apologize for French ex-Nazi teacher who abused students

DUBLIN — A Dublin school that employed a French former Nazi officer as a teacher who physically abused pupils over decades should apologize, according to former students cited by Tuesday’s Irish Times.

Louis Feutren, who died in 2009, served in the notorious Nazi SS military unit during World War II and was a member of a Breton nationalist group “Bezen Perrot” that hunted for Jews and French Resistance fighters.

Born in 1922, Feutren was sentenced to death in France after the war before fleeing to Ireland in 1945 where he gained a university degree and taught French at St Conleth’s College in Dublin from 1957 to 1985.

According to Uki Goni, who studied at St. Conleth’s in the 1970s and has coordinated a letter campaign sent to the school asking it to apologize over Feutren, the Frenchman regularly abused pupils during class.

In Goni’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.

One pupil said he was ordered to strip in front of the class because he forgot French words for clothing items.

An extract from my letter to my former Dublin school Saint Conleth’s requesting a public apology for inflicting convicted SS war criminal Louis Feutren on its students for nearly three decadespic.twitter.com/cjf9n7fV9x

— Uki Goñi (@ukigoni) October 3, 2023

Describing Feutren as a “monster,” Goni, 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 organization of the 20th century, the Nazi SS.”

Goni said the school’s current management cannot be held responsible for employing Feutren but it should “apologize for actions… that were carried out under the name it still bears today”.

There was no immediate comment from the school, the newspaper said.