There was never any mystery about the fact that Louis Feutren, a French teacher at St Conleth’s school in south Dublin, was a Nazi collaborator.
He had a taste for violent punishments and bizarre humiliations that terrorised pupils. He liked to reminisce about the second world war, when he had joined a Breton nationalist group that fought on the side of Germany. And he showed pictures of himself in uniform.
To have a staff member who was a known Nazi collaborator and fugitive from French justice was accepted at St Conleth’s, which employed Feutren from 1957 until his retirement in 1985. He remained respected and feted as an educator until his death in 2009.
Now, however, former pupils who endured and witnessed assaults by Feutren have demanded an apology from the school’s board of management.
Feutren was a member of the Breton movement Bezen Perrot, which collaborated with Nazis during the occupation of France in hope of establishing an independent Breton state. The unit wore SS uniforms and guarded an interrogation centre at Rennes. Feutren was a junior officer with the rank of Oberscharführer. After the war the entire unit was sentenced to death for crimes against Jews and resistance fighters.
Feutren escaped to Wales and then Ireland, where he studied at the University of Galway before becoming a French teacher at St Conleth’s, a prestigious school in Ballsbridge, south Dublin.
The National Library of Wales was criticised in 2011 for accepting £300,000, along with papers and tapes, bequeathed by Feutren.
