Poor Johnny Ronan. For years he waited for his day in the sun, his opportunity to excoriate NAMA with a public statement to the Banking Inquiry. After unloading himself of his frustrations, then he goes and ruins it all with three words - Arbeit Macht Frei, a German phrase meaning 'work makes you free'.
Cue an opportunity for Jewish TD Alan Shatter to rain scorn down on the property developer’s head. Suddenly everything that Ronan had outlined in his witness statement was irrelevant, with all the public focus on Ronan’s presumably ironic reference to the Nazi death camps’ slogan.
According to Wikipedia, Arbeit Macht Frei was placed over the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps during World War II, including Auschwitz.
In Association with
The expression comes from the title of a novel by German philologist Lorenz Diefenbach, Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbach (1873), in which gamblers and fraudsters find the path to virtue through labour.
The slogan's use by the Nazis is credited to SS General Theodor Eicke, inspector of concentration camps and second commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp.
The slogan can still be seen at several sites, including over the entrance to Auschwitz. It can also be seen at the Dachau concentration camp, Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and the Theresienstadt Ghetto-Camp, as well as at Fort Breendonk in Belgium.
In The Kingdom of Auschwitz, Otto Friedrich wrote about camp commander Rudolf Höss, regarding his decision to display the motto so prominently at the Auschwitz entrance:
‘He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labour does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom.’
Signs displaying the slogan at the interpretive centres which now occupy the former Nazi concentration camps have repeatedly been targeted by thieves. The sign over Auschwitz was stolen in December 2009 and later recovered by authorities in three pieces. Three people were jailed as a result. The original sign is now in storage at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and a replica was put over the gate in its place.
Five years later, the sign over the Dachau gate was stolen by unknown thieves. The November 2014 theft of the Dachau sign remains unsolved and the artifact has never been recovered.
In popular culture, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ was the name of the 1973 album by jazz fusion band Area. British indie rock band The Libertines included a track called Arbeit Mach Frei on their 2004 album ‘The Libertines’.
Apology
In a statement issued to the Sunday Independent, Ronan said he regretted using the phrase.
‘I apologise for any offence which has been caused by quoting the phrase 'Arbeit macht frei' (work will set you free) at the end of my submission to the Oireachtas Banking Inquiry. It was genuinely unintended.
'The reason for the quote I believed (perhaps mistakenly) was evident from the context of my submission. Nama promised its borrowers that they would be treated fairly if they co-operated, but that unfortunately was not the case; co-operating businesses, including Battersea Power Station, Treasury Holdings and our China business (Forterra Trust) were destroyed, with all the consequences of that for Irish jobs and the taxpayer.
‘The significance of this and continuing anger I feel over what occurred is not however comparable with the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime. I recognise that I used an inappropriate analogy in my submission and have written to the Banking Inquiry to request the offending phrase be removed.'
Nama Rebuttal
On 8 October 2015, Nama rebutted Ronan's claims, through a submission to the Banking Inquiry. You can read it here.
