Folens of Tallaght- A wily fox, publisher and Nazi collaborator

 

Albert Joseph Marcel Folens

Folens

One of the later and more interesting companies to relocate to Tallaght as part of its rapid industrial and commercial development in the 1970s was Folens Publishers in 1974.   The previous year, Folens began developing a printing works in a 42,000 Sq ft purpose built factory, constructed on a 4.5 acre site on the Airton Road, Tallaght, at a cost of £250,000. The land had previously been part of the Urney complex, and the development of Airton Road as a business park had been part of the vision of Redmond Gallagher, son and heir of Urney Chocolates.  In the summer of 1974, Folens moved their operations from their six year old factory in John F. Kennedy Drive on the Naas Road to Airton Road in Tallaght.  For the next few decades, school children throughout Ireland would come to know of Tallaght, as the place from which many of their school text books came.  But few school children or teachers, knew that their history book, and many others, was published by a man who had his own intriguing history.

 

Albert Folens- A Wily Fox- Publisher, Flemish Nationalist and Nazi Collaborator

Albert Joseph Marcel Folens was born in Bissegem, Flanders in Belgium on the 15th October 1916.  He was training as a De la Salle Seminarian and school teacher when he abruptly left the Order without taking final vows.  In 1941 he travelled to Germany and joined the Flemish Legion of the Waffen SS, to fight alongside German forces fighting Russian Communists. The Flemish Legion was a collaborationist military formation recruited among Dutch-speaking volunteers from German-occupied Belgium, notably from Flanders.  The Flemish Nationalists aligned themselves to and underwent training with the occupying German forces during WWII.  Folens was an educated 25 year old man, fluent in several languages, when he made the decision to join the Waffen SS.  When many in the Flemish Legion went to fight on the Eastern Front, Folens was left behind due to a medical condition. He was suffering from a perforated ulcer.  Folens, a small man with lively eyes, served as a translator or interpreter for Gestapo Headquarters in Brussels.  Retreating to German territory in response to Allied advances, he was captured by American Forces in 1944 and handed over to the British army.  He was charged with membership of the Flemish Legion and after a military trial by the British, was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

Albert Folens had never been to Ireland but now found himself sharing a prison wing in the Prison Saint-Gilles in Brussels with an aging Dominican cleric, Rev. Fr. Juul Callewaert OP (1886-1964).  Callewaert, as a younger man, had lived for a time in the Dominican Priory in Tallaght Village. Having been radicalised by Nationalist Ideology during the First World War, the Flemish Nationalist and Dominican Priest was sent to Tallaght, to distance him from the Flemish Nationalist movement.  While in Tallaght he became close to Fr. John Heuston OP, whose brother Sean had been executed by the British after the 1916 Easter rising.  Fr. Callewaert, after his time in Ireland, returned to Flanders in Belgium after the First World War and set about writing a 700 page tome on Irish Nationalism, “Ierland en het lersche Volk (Ireland and the Irish people )”.  It was published in Louvain in 1923.  

Folens was taken under the wing of the elderly cleric. Both men had much time on their hands and being Catholic, Nationalist and incarcerated, also had much in common.  Fr. Callewaert impressed upon Folens the many qualities of Ireland and the Irish.  It was perhaps this that, on escaping from prison, prompted Folens to look to Ireland, to make a new life.  After 31 months in prison, Folens managed to escape and went on the run for six months with what he later described as “Vegetarian hippies living a Franciscan lifestyle”. He was smuggled out of Belgium by Trappist Monks.  Arriving on a ‘Doctored’ passport in Ireland in 1947, he rented a room in Dun Laoighaire before moving to 16 Harty Avenue, Walkinstown in the early 1950s. 

Albert Folens had acquired a number of languages as a young Seminarian, studying Church Missals in a variety of translations. He spoke Flemish, English, French, German, Italian and Russian and could read Latin.    It wouldn’t take him long to pick up Gaelic.

After studying for a H. Dip. Ed., in U.C.D, he began teaching in Fairview CBS and teaching French in the ‘direct method’ in the all-Irish Coláiste Mhuire on Parnell Square, in Dublin.  As was perhaps common at the time, as a teacher of French in Ireland in the late 1950s he was often called “Froggy” Folens by the schoolboys.  One of his students was the future Irish Government Minister Alan Dukes (now remembered for The Tallaght Strategy).  After six years in Ireland, Folens was naturalised as an Irish Citizen in 1954. 

Folens set about revolutionizing the teaching of French in Ireland, introducing the continental approach to the teaching of languages, focusing on “Speaking, Reading and Grammar” in that order.  At the time the principal French text book was “Moran’s Grammar”, a dry and condensed grammar book without pictures. In 1955 with Donchadh Ó Céileachair, who taught him enough Irish, Folens wrote Nuachúrsa Fraincise, a French primer using Irish and published by Sáirséal agus Dill.   The book sold well and prompted Folens to suspect that there was a significant gap in the Irish market for new study aids and books.

Roneo & Juliette 

In the following years Albert continued to lecture in U.C.D and, operating out of his own home, recruited up to 40 teachers to write study guides, exam notes and school books across a variety of subjects.  Along with his wife Juliette, whom he had married in 1943 before being imprisoned in Belgium, he hired a Roneo (Rotary Neostyle) Copying machine and started printing and issuing study Notes and Guides at home. Through developing national correspondence with schools throughout the country, Albert was selling Study Guides quicker than Juliette could print them. The company quickly went from strength to strength.  Folens had quite rightly identified a significant gap in the Irish market.

Folens was living in Rockfield Avenue in Terenure in 1963 when he built a new home with an adjoining factory on the Scholarstown Road in Rathfarnham. The business quickly outgrew the premises and four years later he developed a new 6,000 square foot factory at John F. Kennedy Drive on the Naas Road at a cost of £53,000.  Albert Folens eight year old daughter cut the ribbon on the factory.  “We didn’t invite a public figure to open the factory because we didn’t think anyone would be interested in it” he said.  He did however, invite the local Parish Priest of Clondalkin to bless the new factory.  By the late 1960s Folens was producing up to 400,000 school books annually and had ambitions to start exporting to UK and American markets.

After leaving Rathfarnham, the Folens family settled into a sprawling mansion in Enniskerry. Albert Folens called his home “Malpertus”, after the Castle in the epic poem, Reinaert de vos, often considered the pinnacle of Gothic literature in the Netherlands.  Reinaert de vos, tells the epic tale of Raynard the Fox- one who is accused of various crimes but generally outwits his accusers and is eventually sent into exile.

Folens Publishers adopted as a corporate logo, a “Bee in a Cell”. Folens explained the logo- "we are always as busy as bees.  But if you hurt us we sting!"  Folens was suspicious and critical of organised labour and unionisation.

 

By 1978, the now Tallaght based company had an annual turnover of £1 million and was employing 75 staff including four full-time editors and up to 20 freelance artists.  Like all successful businesses it had its occasional setbacks.  Folens lost about £83,000 investing in the development of a twelve volume Irish language Encyclopaedia which never went to print, after the Department of Education pulled out of the project.  Folens successfully sued the Department for breach of contract.  Folens lost another £20,000 publishing a series of ‘Classics’ which flopped.  The trappings of success brought its own occasional misfortunes to the Folens family.

 

In 1978 Albert Folens’ son Dirk, was one of three men injured in a light aircraft crash. Albert de Voss, Audrey Leggett and Dirk Folens had departed Baldonnell airfield on a sightseeing flight over the city when their aircraft cut out and came down on Kippure in the Wicklow Mountains.  The airplane was a write-off but all three men managed to scramble from the plane with only minor injuries.

In 1983, the Folens were the subject of a high profile kidnapping and robbery, one of a number of such incidence in Ireland around that time. On the 21st March 1983, Juliette Folens answered a knock on the hall door of their home in Enniskerry. She was met by two armed men wearing balaclavas and brandishing sawn-off shotguns. One spoke with an ‘educated’ or ‘cultured’ accent. He remained cool, calm and courteous throughout. The raiders ordered Juliette up the stairs to a bedroom and took £500 cash from a bedroom before removing a ring from Juliette’s finger.  A safe in the home contained only £100 and some jewellery.  The raiders demanded £25,000.  Albert Folens pleaded that he could not access such a substantial sum without raising suspicions.  He agreed he could access £10,000.  Juliette Folens was taken at gunpoint to a deserted wood at the back of their home. Albert Folens made a lonely journey, driving from Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow to the Allied Irish Bank on the Oldbawn Road in Tallaght Village to withdraw the £10,000 ransom. On returning to his home at 3.15pm he handed over £10,000 in small used notes to the kidnappers.  The raiders locked the couple in a shed at the back of their house before making good their escape. It took the couple fifteen minutes to break out from the shed and raise the alarm.  It was one of a series of kidnappings in Wicklow that year.

For pleasure, Albert Folens liked to read in many languages, in particular Scripture and Theology and was well versed in the ‘Lives of the Saints’.  In later life, he claimed Irish ancestry, suggesting his family had fled from Ireland to Flanders with the Wild Geese in the 1700s.  (The Flight of the Wild Geese was the departure of an Irish Jacobite army under the command of Patrick Sarsfield from Ireland to France, as agreed in the Treaty of Limerick on 3 October 1691, following the end of the Williamite War in Ireland).   It was a fanciful claim. He once wrote of coming to Ireland “I was home. Ireland was made for me and I was made for it: freedom, fresh air, hills, lakes, soft weather, friendly talk, humour".

In business circles Albert Folens had a reputation of being shrewd, upright, straightforward, witty and erudite.  He died on the 9th September 2003 aged 86 years, and was cremated in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.

Haunted by History- Irelands Nazis

In 1987, 71 year old Albert Folens gave an interview to a 23 year old freelance Journalist, Senan Molony.   It would not come to light for almost 20 years, when excerpts of the interview were featured in Cathal O’ Shannon’s 2007 documentary “Hidden Ireland- Ireland’s Nazis”.  Much of Folens 93 minute encounter with Molony was recorded on tape.  On it Folens described the Nuremburg trials as the greatest judicial scandal of the 20th Century.  He referred to President Roosevelt as a “Jew” and “A sick man with a sick mind”.    He openly confessed to having said many rosaries for General Franco in Spain and declared “Hitler was a saint compared to Joseph Stalin”.   He accused Molony of being “An Agent of the Americans” and “working for the Jews”.  Folens, as a subject, had been brought to Molony’s attention over the Christmas of 1986, by a Catholic Prelate and friend of the family who noted that the case of Folens “Stank to High Heaven”.

Molony, undertaking further independent investigations ascertained that Albert Folens name repeatedly appeared on the US CROWCASS List- the “Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects”- a four-volume list of people suspected of Nazi war crimes between 1939-1945, and published in 1947.  The CROWCASS list later became known as “The Nazi Hunters Bible”.

 

An agreement had been signed between Folens and Molony that the interview would not be used without Folens first having sight of any articles arising, and having a right to reply.  Twenty years later, and five years after Folens death, the interview was to be used in Hidden Ireland–Ireland’s Nazis”.  With Albert Folens no longer around to defend his name, his elderly widow Juliette Folens made a compelling defence, while seeking an injunction in the High Court against the documentary.  Juliette Folens acknowledged that Albert Folens had been a member of the Flemish Legion, but that he like many others had been motivated to join to fight the threat of Communism.  Flemish Nationalists believed that a German win would be the best defence against Communist Russia.  Relating to his work as a translator for the Gestapo, she argued that as an ex-Seminarian he could not be employed as a teacher by the State, and as someone who had left the De La Salle Order he would not be employed by Catholic schools.  She noted Albert Folens could never have sworn allegiance to Adolf Hitler, as a Flemish Nationalist he had already sworn allegiance to the King of Belgium.  Nor did he have the standard issue tattoo of all SS members indicating their blood type in case they needed a blood transfusion.  He did, along with 300,000 other members of the Flemish Legion, do what he needed to do, to get through the war.

 

Two days after the documentary aired, 83 year old Juliette Folens received a letter in the post. The letter threatened Juliette Folens and her family stating: "We will give you and your clan six months to leave otherwise suffer the consequences. We believe in an eye for an eye. Remember Eichmann [the senior Nazi official who organised the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps who was executed in Israel in 1961] and Mussolini. Soon you will be joining your smelly, rotten husband. We know all about your family and their movements. Israel always get their opponents."

 

Whatever the truth of Albert Folens war time activities and allegiances as a young man, there is little doubt that reports and stories published only after his death, did little to enhance his reputation as one of Ireland’s most successful publishers and business men.

In 2021, education group Folens was closing in on a deal to buy out Hibernia College, an online provider of primary and post-primary school teacher training. AIB was backing “Bissegem”, a Folens company, in the acquisition.  The company was called after Bissegem, the sub-municipality in Flanders in which Albert Folens was born. 

The headquarters of Folens Publishers remains in Tallaght and is now one of the longest established businesses in the district. It currently operates out of Hibernian Industrial Estate, a short distance from its original Tallaght base on Airton Road.

Albert Perris
A Ramble About Tallaght,
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