Mr Butler wrote in response to such comments: “I was as Irish as Oliver Flanagan and I was determined that Jewish refugees should come to Ireland.”
Fintan O’Toole, a journalist for the Irish Times, discusses in the documentary how Mr Butler managed to “hustle, hassle, manoeuvre and manipulate to get things done”.
Fluent in Serbo-Croat, Mr Butler, in association with Irish Quakers, managed to organise papers via a number of embassies for Austrian Jews, getting them across the Austrian border into what was then Yugoslavia.
They would then travel to England, where they would be met by Peggy Guthrie, Mr Butler’s wife, who would bring them into Ireland illegally.
“He got a lot of people out of Vienna who otherwise would have died,” Mr O’Toole says in the documentary.
“There’s no question of that.”
The Nuncio and the Writer airs on RTE One on August 8
