- Former pupils at a school in Ireland are demanding an apology over a former WWII Nazi teacher's bullying.
- Louis Feutren worked as a French teacher at a Dublin school despite having been a Nazi collaborator.
Former pupils at a private school in Dublin, Ireland, are demanding that the institution apologize for a former teacher's bullying and physical abuse.
Louis Feutren took a position as a French teacher at St Conleth's College in the Irish capital after fleeing the aftermath of World War II.
He remained at the school from 1957 until he retired in 1985 — despite his past as a Nazi collaborator being well known, The Guardian reported.
Feutren, who was fond of talking about World War II, had been a member of the Breton nationalist group "Bezen Perrot," a collaborationist force that, during the Nazi occupation of France, wore the uniforms of Hitler's infamous Schutzstaffel (SS).
In the unit, Feutren held the rank of Oberscharführer, a junior officer. He was sentenced to death by France for crimes against Jewish people and French resistance fighters after the war, Uki Goñi, a writer who attended St Conleth's College, said, per The Guardian.
Feutren evaded capture in France and escaped in 1945 — first to Wales and then to Ireland, where he became a student at the University of Galway on the west coast of Ireland before he took up his role at St Conleth's.
"I learned the first day I was there that he was a Nazi. It was just normalised," Goñi said, per The Guardian.
Goñi, who attended the school between 1968 and 1971, has led a campaign backed by other former pupils asking the school's board members to apologize for Feutren's actions.
'He was a volcano ready to erupt at any moment'
Kieran Owens, a student at the school from 1966, told The Guardian that "no one would consider crossing" the French teacher.
"He was a volcano ready to erupt at any moment. If there were any sort of transgression he would be very, very, very swift and violent. I witnessed him bashing a guy; the guy flew across the room," he said.
He also reportedly forced children to remove items of clothing if they could not recite the correct French word for them, per The Irish Times.
In response to a statement from the school on Feutren, which said it was "shocked" to learn the former teacher could have played a role in wartime atrocities, Goñi said that St Conleth's had "passed up the opportunity to make a clean break with its bleak past," The Irish Times reported.
"It has opted instead for a non-apology anchored more in 1970 than in 2023."
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "collaborators committed some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust era," with the Nazis using "indigenous auxiliaries (civilian, military, and police) to carry out the annihilation of the Jewish population."
St Conleth's College did not reply to a request for comment from Insider, which was made outside of regular working hours.