In standing guard against the Jew, I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.
ADOLF HITLER in Mein Kampf
During the thirties many Nationalist Party leaders and wide sections of the Afrikaner people came strongly under the influence of the Nazi movement which dominated Germany from 1933. There were many reasons for this. Germany was the traditional enemy of Britain, and whoever opposed Britain appeared a friend of the Nationalists. Many Nationalists, moreover, believed that the opportunity to re-establish their lost republic would come with the defeat of the British Empire in the international arena. The more belligerent Hitler became, the further hopes rose that the day of Afrikanerdom was about to dawn.
This opportunistic attitude towards Germany paved the way for the gradual acceptance of many of the basic principles of Nazism itself. Hitler's successes in Germany evoked widespread Nationalist admiration. Partly under the direction of the Germans themselves, imitation Nazi organizations were founded in South Africa - the Greyshirts, the Boerenasie, and later the New Order - while anti- Semitism began to rear its head as well. Currents stirring the people soon enough washed the higher ranks of the Nationalist Party and even spread to the United Party itself.
There had been a strong infusion of German blood into the Afrikaner people from the earliest days of settlement, and many Afrikaners fancied a natural affinity between themselves and the German people. J.F.J. van Rensburg, later Kommandant Generaal of the Ossewa Brandwag, noted in his autobiography: ' I started learning German: carefully, assiduously, gratefully . . . their language was the language of a kindred people, reeling in titanic battle for survival against most of the nations of the world. Another passionate Germanophile, himself of German origin, was Oswald Pirow, Hertzog's Minister of Justice and later Minister of Defence. Pirow made several trips to Europe, the most publicized being just after Munich, when he made a special point of paying his respects to Hitler, Goering, Mussolini, and Franco.
Pirow's daughter Else caused some consternation on her arrival in England on 6 June 1939, when she was interviewed by the Daily Express: '... my father was a boy in Germany, my grandparents on both sides are German. I have heaps of relatives there. At home we speak German . . . though I have never been there I feel Germany is "home".' Miss Pirow was on her way to train in a German women's camp. ' I am going to try my best to be a good German - for a year at least,' she said.
With war about to burst upon the world, such remarks hardly reassured those in England who looked to South Africa's support in any struggle against Germany.
But most prominent victim of the Nazi philosophy was General Hertzog himself. While still Secretary for Justice under the Hertzog regime, van Rensburg was offered the post of Administrator of the Orange Free State, but he was reluctant to accept because he believed that he was being edged out of his current job at the instance of General Smuts.
Van Rensburg told Hertzog, by way of excuse for turning down the offer: ' If I have to make a self-diagnosis, I could only call myself a race-conscious Afrikaner, with tendencies which many people today would regard as "fascistic. Hertzog smiled and replied: ' Well, well, possibly we have far more in common than most people would believe. Van Rensburg took the job.
Germany at this time was issuing a stream of strident propaganda for the return of her colonies, taken from her by the Treaty of Versailles, and Hertzog himself was one of Hitler's firmest supporters in the campaign. In 1935 he was reported to be trying to create a favourable atmosphere for the grant of colonial possessions to the Reich. Naturally reluctant to cede South-West Africa, he believed that Germany would be satisfied with a reasonable substitute, and he proposed Liberia as the most suitable sacrifice. Neither Liberia nor the United States thought much of the suggestion.
Another prominent Nationalist who gave his support to the German campaign for the restoration of their colonies was J. G. Strijdom, who told the Transvaal Congress of the Nationalist Party in 1937 that he would not move a finger to prevent the Germans from recovering South-West Africa.
Well disposed though he was, Hertzog was eventually to be driven by the sheer extent of Nazi activities amongst the Germans in South-West Africa to take action against them. Provocative processions were being organized in the territory, and the Union flag had been hauled down from government buildings and replaced by the German flag. The Union Government in 1936 appointed a commission of inquiry, which reported the existence of Nazi cells, Labour Front groups, Hitler Youth cadres and Winter Help centres, not only in South-West Africa but also in the Union. Acting on this report, the government declared the Nazi organization illegal.
Hertzog's sympathy for the Nazis did not, however, wane with time. According to his biographer, van den Heever, he became 'bitterly disappointed in the democratic system, with its capitalist foundations and Press influence, for he had cause to know that the voice of the majority is not always the voice of wisdom. . . . He was convinced that a new world order was on the way.' After his retirement or rather ejection from politics, he became more and more 'inclined towards National-Socialism by which he meant the adaptation of the old Free State model republic to modern conditions, using the best from recent European experiments.... He regarded National-Socialism as suited to the moral and religious outlook of the Afrikaner; indeed, he considered that the constitution of the old Free State Republic was based on it. Hertzogs equation of National-Socialism with Christian Nationalism did not go unnoticed by his admirers, least of all by those in the ranks of the Nationalist Party. The fact was that the Nazi doctrines of race and blood found a ready acceptance amongst wide sections of the White Supremacists in South Africa. No Nationalist, it is true, needed Hitler's urging to formulate a creed of White superiority over Black. But there is no doubt that the activity of the Nazis in Europe encouraged the appearance of the grosser forms of racialism amongst White South Africans, English- as well as Afrikaans-speaking. During the thirties and forties the Nationalist Party itself was to adopt anti-Semitism as an official plank in its platform, and some of the most prominent Nationalist leaders have not managed to free themselves from anti-Semitism to this very day.
It had not always been like that. Jews had belonged to and played a prominent part in the Nationalist Party during the twenties, some of them holding official positions. Nationalist leaders had been cordial in their references to their Jewish fellow citizens. In 1929 General Hertzog declared:
In their life in South Africa, these two sections of Afrikanerdom (the Jewish and the Afrkaans communities) have always been closely associated, no matter how much individuals might sometimes have left them in the lurch. Both are deeply imbued with the spirit of South African nationalism.... If ever there was a section that has been looked upon by the Afrikaners as fellow-Afrikaners, it is the Jewish section.... Where it concerned nationalism, love of people, hatred of oppression, the Jew and the Afrikaner always stood together.
Dr Malan himself proclaimed in 1930:
I think the people of South Africa, generally, belonging to all parties and sections, desire to give to the Jewish people in this country full equality in every respect, every opportunity which every other section enjoys, full participation in our national life, and I am glad to say that we are still in that position today in South Africa to appreciate, and appreciate very highly what the Jews have done for South Africa.
Yet Dr Malan's professed esteem for the Jews did not extend to the point where he wished to add to their number in South Africa. It was Dr Malan who, as Minister of the Interior, introduced the Immigration Quota Act which came into force on 1 May 1930. This placed a strict quota on immigrants of any race or creed born in countries other than those specified in the Act, and the specified did not include the countries of southern and eastern Europe from which most Jewish immigrants came. It was officially denied that the law was directed against Jewish immigrants, but a sharp drop in Jewish immigration resulted and Dr Malan years later admitted that this had in fact been its object.
Introducing the Quota Bill in Parliament, Dr Malan said that it was based on three principles: (1) the desire of every nation to maintain its basic racial composition; (2) the doctrine of assimilability; and (3) South Africa's desire to maintain its own type of civilization. The civilization of eastern and southern Europe was, to a large extent, different from that of Western Europe to which South Africa claimed to belong. He maintained that the new law, although not directed against the Jews, was in the interests of the South African Jewish community, because the steady flow of Jewish immigrants had created 'a nervousness among all sections of the population'.
The beginning of Nazi persecution led to an influx of Jewish refugees from Germany, which was not one of the restricted countries. In 1933, 624 immigrants came from Germany, of whom 204 were Jews. In 1934, the corresponding figures were 1,026 (452); in 1935, 996 (410); in 1936, 3,648 (2,549). Agitation by organizations like the Greyshirts reached unprecedented heights.
At first the Nationalist Party reacted unfavourably to the protests. Die Burger on 27 October 1933 said:
We are definitely of the opinion that such a racial struggle is absolutely undesirable and that all national leaders and all newspapers with a sense of responsibility must issue a serious warning against it.... There is not one single misdeed of which a Jew has been guilty that is not also to be found in wider circles. You cannot attribute any misdeed to the Jews as a group.... In our view a racial struggle of this sort would be harmful to the country and unjust to it's Jewish citizens.
Even a year later, in October 1934, Die Burger could declare in an editorial: ' We believe that this party, generally known as the Greyshirts, under the cloak of an anti-Jewish movement, strives for a dangerous form of government in South Africa. The Greyshirts have as their aim to set up a dictator in South Africa.' It was not very long, however, before the Nationalist Party itself succumbed to the virus and took the lead in anti-Jewish agitation. The government began to waver, and it was announced that new restrictions under the immigration laws would be introduced on 1 November 1936. To beat the ban, a boat was chartered, the S.S. Stuttgart, to bring 600 Jewish refugees from Germany to South Africa. The ship became the object of disgusting and degrading propaganda amongst the Nationalists and their allies in the various 'shirt' organizations.
The Stuttgart eventually arrived in Cape Town on 27 October, beating the ban by a few days. The night before it docked, the Greyshirts held a protest rally in Cape Town, reported to be the largest meeting they had ever held there, and afterwards the more militant amongst them braved the rain to stage a demonstration in the area of the docks, A similar Greyshirt meeting in Paarl was attended by 1,000 people.
Not to be outdone, the Paarl branch of the Nationalist Party held a protest meeting against Jewish immigration on the night of 4 November, a few days after the Stuttgart had arrived. It was addressed by, amongst others, Dr T.E. Donges, later Minister of Finance, who said: 'The Jew is an insoluble element in every national life.' Dr H.F. Verwoerd, then a professor at Stellenbosch University, later Prime Minister, declared that the protest movement had been conceived at Stellenbosch long before the Stuttgart had even been chartered. In traditional style, he attacked the English Press for misrepresenting the situation and maintained that such immigration menaced the English-speaking South Africans far more than the Afrikaans-speaking. The meeting passed a resolution calling for an end to Jewish immigration on the grounds that the Jews were an unassimilable element.
During the same period Dr Verwoerd and five fellow professors from Stellenbosch went in deputation to the Smuts Hertzog government to protest against the immigration of Jews from Nazi Germany, One year later Dr Verwoerd, then Editor of Die Transvaler, published a long article in his paper captioned: 'The Jewish problem regarded from the Nationalist point of view. A possible solution. Proportional distribution in trades and businesses the first great necessity.' Dr Verwoerd proposed a quota system for Jews in all occupations and pressed that Jews should be refused further trading licences until every section of the population had its proper share (Die Transvaler, 1 October 1937).
In response to all this agitation, the Hertzog government in 1937 introduced a new law known as the Aliens Act, in terms of which every alien immigrant would have to be screened by an Immigrants Selection Board. The Aliens Act specified 'assimilability' as one of the qualifications, but did not define it.
The Nationalists regarded this Bill as totally ineffective and moved an amendment in Parliament pleading for: (1) the prohibition of Jewish immigration; (2) the deletion of Yiddish as a recognized European language for immigration purposes; (3) no further naturalization of Jewish immigrants; (4) the closing of certain professions to Jews and other non-assimilable races; (5) a ban on the changing of names, retrospective to 1 May 1930; (9) electoral divisions to be delimited on the basis of Union nationals (so excluding Jews not yet naturalized).
The Nationalists wanted 'alien' to be defined as 'a person not born a British subject or a Union national, and further includes all members of the Jewish faith living outside the Union' (i.e. whether British subjects or not).
In the course of moving his amendment, Dr Malan frankly admitted that he was discriminating against the Jews and said that this was because South Africa already had a Jewish problem. Anti-Semitism was growing stronger. Jews were getting the best jobs in business, and ' the Afrikaner is suffering in consequence'. It was undesirable that the Jews should hold the balance of political power in the country. 'Now the question arises with us, as a people, not only how we are going to keep them out in future, but how we are going to protect ourselves against those who are here.'
The good doctor claimed that when Jews amounted to more than four percent of a population there was trouble, and anti-Semitism arose. He claimed that the Jews in South Africa totalled six to seven percent. (Dr Donges at Paarl had also put the figure at seven percent, though at a meeting in Parow a month later he said five percent, a figure also mentioned by Eric Louw two years afterwards. The truth, according to figures quoted by Saron and Hotz in their book The Jews in South Africa, is that Jews have never amounted to more than four and a half percent of the White population of South Africa, a figure reached only as a result of the unusual immigration in 1936.)
Malan's amendment was defeated, but the Nationalist propaganda was not without its effect. The United Party government was put on the defensive and attempted to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants. In many instances entry permits which had been granted to the relatives of Jews already in South Africa were cancelled. Many German Jews who might therefore have found safety in South Africa were to perish in Hitler's death camps as a direct consequence of the agitation by the Nationalist Party and the cowardice of the Hertzog government. Yet Malan in his speech could claim 'I have no anti-Jewish animus' and speak hypocritically of 'my Jewish friends . . .'.
Despite the restrictions imposed by the Hertzog government, the Nationalists were not satisfied, and they returned to the attack in February 1939, when Eric Louw, later South Africa's Foreign Minister, introduced his Aliens (Amendment) and Immigration Bill as a private measure. Moving the second reading, he declared:
I am convinced that if it were possible to remove Jewish influence and Jewish pressure from the Press, and from the news agencies, the international outlook would be considerably brighter than it is today....
I, and those who feel with me, are worried about the extent to which a race, alien and unassimilable with the English- and Dutch speaking population in South Africa, has during past years been securing control of business and industry and also of the professions.... I have gone through the telephone list very carefully in Johannesburg and Cape Town and have only taken those names which I am quite sure are Jewish. What do I find? That in Johannesburg sixty-five percent of the attorney firms are Jewish, of the advocates forty-five percent are Jewish.... I have here the results of the law certificate examinations in January this year. Forty-four percent of the successful candidates in the law certificate examination were Jews.
While claiming that Jews were dominating the world of business, and hinting at the secrecy and dishonesty of their business deals, Louw at the same time alleged that most of the leaders of the Russian Bolsheviks were Jews and said: 'Communism has since its earliest days been linked with Jewry.' Then came an exceedingly ugly threat. If the Jewish problem were not faced, he said, ' we will have in South Africa a repetition of the history that has taken place in the countries of Europe.'
His Bill specified that 'no applicant who is of Jewish parentage shall be deemed to be readily assimilable', with someone of Jewish parentage defined as 'that person whose father and mother are or were either wholly or partly Jews, whether or not they professed the Jewish religion'.
The Bill provided for the deportation of undesirable immigrants as well as for the control of businesses which might be carried on by aliens or in which aliens might be employed. It stipulated that Yiddish should not be regarded as a European language for the purposes of immigration.
The attitude of the Nationalist Party is that the Jewish population of South Africa is already too large. It has exceeded the danger-point percentage.... We say that Jewish immigration must be stopped completely.'The United Party government refused to accept Louw's Bill, and the Minister of the Interior, Stuttaford, remarked: ' When I read the Bill, I appreciated that it is racial in the extreme and reactionary, and it had the musty smell of the times of the Middle Ages. ... The main object of the Bill, and the honourable member has not concealed it, is persecution of the Jews.' J.H. Hofmeyr was even more forthright in his denunciation. 'The principles which lie at the foundation of this Bill,' he said, are 'unworthy and despicable'. One provision in it, he said, 'exceeds even the worst Nazi stipulations'.
Meanwhile relations between the Nationalist Party and the various 'shirt' organizations had become very close. On 25 October 1937, F.C. Erasmus, later Minister of Defence and Minister of Justice, at that time Secretary of the Nationalist Party, addressed a letter to the Greyshirts in which he said:
My party is glad to give expression to the sincere appreciation of the useful work done by the Greyshirts in one important aspect, viz. that they have very pertinently drawn the attention of the people to the Jewish problem . . . we consider that a service has here been done to the nation which deserves recognition and perpetuation.
By 1938 a number of Greyshirt officials announced that they had joined the Nationalist Party. Just prior to the 1938 elections Dr Malan openly appealed for Greyshirt support and afterwards acknowledged the help that his party had received from Greyshirt leader Weichardt and his Nazis. This alliance was to continue throughout the forties and after the war the Greyshirts were to merge altogether into the Nationalist Party. Their leader, Weichardt, is today a member of the Republican Senate.
Another organization with which the Nationalists found much in common during the thirties was the ' South African Gentile National Socialist Movement', headed by one Johannes von Strauss von Moltke, whose object was to combat and destroy the alleged 'perversive influence of the Jews in economics, culture, religion, ethics, and statecraft and to re-establish European Aryan control in South Africa for the welfare of the Christian peoples of South Africa'.
Von Moltke at one stage in his anti-Semitic career was ordered by the Supreme Court to pay ú750 damages for defamation arising from the publication of a forged anti-Semitic document based on the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', which he claimed had been stolen from the Western Road Synagogue in Port Elizabeth.
Die Burger of 25 February 1938 carried a declaration by von Moltke who, in pressing his followers to throw in their lot with the Nationalist Party, proclaimed: 'The Nationalist Party has unequivocally given proof that it is protecting the interests of the people and that it wants a race-pure Afrikaner nation which will rule in its own country.' As a reward for his services, von Moltke was to become a Nationalist Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Nationalist Party in South-West Africa. He resigned from the latter position in 1961 on grounds of ill-health. Just before the 1966 General Election, when another Nationalist candidate was nominated for the Karas constituency, von Moltke declined to fight a nomination battle and stood down. He complained in a Press interview that Nationalist Party followers in his constituency were ' too whimsical and mercurial ', and announced that he intended to devote his time henceforth to research into the history of South-West Africa.
One of von Moltke's companions in the Port Elizabeth synagogue episode, a certain Inch was not so fortunate. In addition to paying ú1,000 damages for defamation, he was later prosecuted for uttering a forged document, making false statements, perjury, and receiving stolen letters knowing them to have been stolen. He was sentenced to six years' imprisonment, later reduced to three years - a misfortune which no doubt accounts for the fact that he, too, was not included in the ranks of South Africa's legislators.
During the war the anti-Semitism of the Nationalists raged unabated, and the Transvaal Nationalist Party in 1940 actually incorporated in its constitution a provision debarring Jews from membership. The enemy was called not merely 'British imperialism', but 'British-Jewish imperialism', and the tattered canards of the Nazis waved and fluttered over rallies. In 1940 Dr Malan declared that Smuts had turned South Africa into a 'Jewish-imperialistic war machine'.
After the war was over, and the Nationalists began to woo the English-speaking voters, anti-Semitism slowly became unfashionable. Yet it is a vice which, once implanted, is very difficult to uproot. As late as 1946 the garrulous Eric Louw was to write:
If the Jews can manage to find a country of their own anywhere, we shall certainly place no difficulties in the way, provided that country is not too near South Africa! If any of South Africa's surplus Jews wish to go there, our best wishes will accompany them. I hope they will be so happy and successful there that they will never want to come back to South Africa again! We want to build up a population here who know only one loyalty: loyalty to South Africa and to the interests of our country. And this also concerns the English-speaking people in our country.
Six months before the 1948 election, Dr Malan issued a statement which, while denying that the Nationalist Party was anti-Semitic, reaffirmed that it stood for the cessation of Jewish immigration. He had modified his standpoint, however, since he indicated that an exception would be made on 'humanitarian' grounds for near relatives of Jews already in the country and those people required for the 'religious and cultural needs of the community'. Yet it had been against the immigration of precisely such categories of people that the Nationalists had agitated so vehemently during the thirties! After coming to power in 1948 the Nationalists considered it politic to suppress all signs of formal anti-Semitism. Yet it continues to flow underground, a hidden current of racial antagonism that bursts to the surface every now and again in the heat of political battle.
On the one hand Nationalist leaders have made friendly gestures towards the Jews. The anti-Jewish clause in the Transvaal Nationalist Party constitution was repealed in 1951. In 1953 Dr Donges, then Minister of the Interior, at a tea-party commemorating the golden jubilee of the Worcester Jewish congregation, said 'there was certainly a kinship between Jew and Afrikaner' and he praised the achievements of the Jews in Worcester. In the same year Dr Malan himself visited Israel and allowed his name to be inscribed in the Golden Book of the World Zionist Organization. Jewish business and Jewish immigration has been handled sympathetically by government departments. Such gestures have done a great deal to satisfy the Jewish Board of Deputies that the interests of South African Jewry are safe under the Nationalist regime.
On the other hand, the occasional ugly outbursts cannot be overlooked. On 18 June 1959, the Cape Times reported:
Two United Party M.P.s who launched a vigorous and well-documented attack on the farm labour scandal in the Assembly yesterday were made the target of the most violent anti-Semitic outburst heard on the Nationalist benches since the war days.
They were Mrs Helen Suzman (U.P. Houghton) and Dr Boris Wilson (U.P. Hospital). They were told by Nationalist members that, being Jews, they should be the last people to criticize farmers for ill-treating their African workers because of the number of Jewish farmers who had appeared in court in ill-treatment cases.
The most celebrated recent case of anti-Semitism, however, came from the Prime Minister, Dr Verwoerd, himself. Following Israel's vote at the United Nations against South Africa in 1961, the Prime Minister wrote a private letter to a Cape Town professional man declaring that Israel's attitude towards the Republic was 'a tragedy for Jewry in South Africa'. The fact that so many Jews had favoured the Progressive Party and so few the Nationalist Party in the last election had not passed unnoticed.
'South Africa did not want to oppress; she wanted to differentiate; and for that reason she believed in Israel. Now we begin to wonder if that support should not be withdrawn,' stated Dr Verwoerd.
The professional man had actually written to Dr Verwoerd deploring Israel's condemnation of South Africa, but was so shocked by the reply that he felt compelled to make it public. Not unnaturally, the Prime Minister's veiled threat to the Jews produced a strong reaction not only in South Africa but also in Israel. Even the Nationalist newspaper Die Burger commented that Verwoerd's remarks about the Progressive Party vote would have been best left unsaid.
Verwoerd himself was unrepentant and at a conference of the Nationalist Party Witwatersrand Executive defended his point of view.
'What is the value of the so-called threat contained in the letter?' he asked contemptuously. 'If I want to threaten the Jews of South Africa, I will threaten the whole lot of them.' He went on to show the Jews clearly where their best interests lay: 'But I do not want to divide the White people of South Africa. I want to gather them in one group. This government has never been anti-Semitic, and I urge Nationalists not to allow the propaganda which resulted from the letter to drive them to anti-Semitism.' Official Jewry was quick to draw the lesson. When Israel again voted against South Africa's apartheid policies at the 1962 session of the United Nations, the South African Board of Deputies immediately issued a statement deploring Israel's stand and affirming its loyalty to South Africa.
To complete the picture it should be mentioned that, while the Nationalist regime has outlawed the Communist Party, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the African National Congress, and the Congress of Democrats, and has driven the Liberal Party out of existence, openly fascist and anti-Semitic organizations and individuals are allowed to continue with their activities unchecked. World Nazi organizations have branches in South Africa, where the political climate is regarded as being particularly favourable to them. South Africa was not spared in the world-wide outbreak of anti-Semitic incidents sparked off by the Cologne synagogue desecration of 1960. In January of the same year the Wolmarans Street Synagogue in Johannesburg was blasted by dynamite and sustained damage to the tune of £3,000. In June of the following year there was an explosion at the Jewish war memorial in the West Park Cemetery in Johannesburg, and desecrations and daubings of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries have taken place from time to time in the intervening years.
During the worst years of repression following the 1960 state of emergency, terrorist attacks have been launched against many of the most prominent opponents of the Nationalist regime. Homes have been attacked by gunfire and even dynamited by night, car tyres have been slashed and engines tampered with. Nazi-type slogans have been scrawled on the doors of liberal minded university lecturers, and the wives and children of activists have been threatened by anonymous callers on the telephone. Political refugees have been kidnapped from neighbouring territories - in one instance as far away as Zambia brought back to the Republic and handed over to the police.
The notorious incident in 1961, when Anderson Ganyile and two other African National Congress refugees were kidnapped by the South African police in Basutoland, hijacked across the border and detained under the Transkei emergency regulations, helped to give substance to the widespread suspicion that the Special Branch of the police was involved in many of these assaults, either directly, or to the extent of selecting the victims and passing on details of their activities and whereabouts to the gangs responsible.
Following a series of court actions and a protest by the British government, Ganyile and his comrades were eventually released; the Attorney General for the Eastern Cape explained on 17 January 1962 that the policemen responsible had crossed the border 'unwittingly' during the night, in heavy mist, while searching for a man accused of murder. But the Nationalist government has made it abundantly clear that it is not averse from cooperating with dubious elements of the political underworld in the fight against 'Communism'. Those who in other countries are regarded as the lunatic fringe of right-wing extremists receive in South Africa the protection and even encouragement of the government.
Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, is a frequent visitor to South Africa, where he has been received by the Prime Minister and other members of the Cabinet. At one time Mosley had two functioning branches of his organization in South Africa, and one of his supporters, Derek Alexander, was stationed in Johannesburg as his main agent. On his last visit to South Africa in 1964, however, Mosley announced that he had abandoned his plans to spread his Union Movement in South Africa. ' We do not wish to set up an opposition to the Nationalist Party because there is little difference between our policy and that of the Government of South Africa,' he explained (Rand Daily Mail, 27 January 1964). Mosley, who believes that Africa should be divided up into Black and White zones, said that South Africa had been in the forefront of the problem of race relations for many generations and was setting an example for the parallel development of the races. Advising all British immigrants to join the Nationalist Party, Mosley declared: 'I think South Africa is one of the healthiest places in the world.' Eighteen months earlier one of Mosley's supporters, fifty-year old William Webster, had visited South Africa with a plan to raise £100,000 from sympathetic South African businessmen in order, he said, to put up 100 Mosleyite candidates in the next British elections and so split the Labour vote that the Conservatives would be returned to power for a further five years.
Webster's visit in itself would have been unremarkable were it not for the fact that he obtained an audience with J.F.W. Haak, Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs, who furnished Webster with the names of organizations from which he might obtain information on such South African exporters as were doing business with firms in the United Kingdom.
'The Nationalists have the right idea,' Webster told a reporter of the Johannesburg Sunday Express. 'They are much shrewder than you think. They are following the same path as Hitler did, but they will not be as hasty as he was. They are going very slowly now, but they will smash their enemies in the end.' Asked who these enemies were, Webster replied: ' I don't have to tell you the Nazis went for the Jews and the Communists.' Webster said that the Mosleyites were using the Black bogy in England too, and that the slogan of their campaign was: 'Beware of the Black man - he will steal your job, then your wife, and you will end up in his cooking-pot.' Embarrassed by the publicity given to these rantings, Haak issued a statement stressing that the advice furnished by him to Webster certainly cannot be interpreted as in any way associating myself with Webster's political activities'.
The British organization which has been most active in promoting contacts with Southern Africa in recent years has been the Candour League (an off-shoot of the League of Empire Loyalists), founded by A. K. Chesterton, official biographer of Oswald Mosley. In March 1964 Chesterton addressed a meeting at the Hotel Cecil in Newlands, Cape Town, which led to the formation of the Candour League (Cape Province Branch). A branch of the Candour League has also been formed in Rhodesia. Chesterton visits southern Africa frequently and is on close terms with leaders of the Nationalist Party and the Rhodesian Front.
The Candour League of South Africa claims to stand for ' White leadership ' and launched a counter-boycott against countries like Sweden where strong boycott movements against South African goods existed. People who replied to the 'patriotic' call of the Candour League, according to an article by Jill Chisholm in the Rand Daily Mail in June 1965, were surprised to receive not only a list of goods to be boycotted, but also the literature list of the Britons Publishing Society, an organization which includes among its literature attacks on the Nuremberg trials, on freemasonry and Catholicism; copies of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'; and pamphlets by Dr Verwoerd.
Southern Africa has also been a target for attack by both official and unofficial emissaries from Western Germany, including former Nazis and representatives of neo-Nazi organizations. A warning on the danger of this infiltration was given by a diplomatic representative of the West German government, Prince Hubert zu Lowenstein, who toured South Africa in March 1965. At the end of his tour, the Prince found it necessary to draw the attention of the South African government to the fact that Neo-Nazi groups from Germany who visited South Africa were preaching racialism and White supremacy. One of the groups was touring South Africa while he was there.
'They are neo-Nazis who tour South Africa making speeches on the supremacy of the White man and the need to defend it,' he said. 'They go to your country thinking they have found a place where their discredited ideas on racial supremacy can take root and thrive again.' The visiting groups, said the Prince, were sponsored by the weekly Deutsche Wochezeitung, which had been described by the West German Minister of the Interior as an organ of 'German White radicalism'. He himself, said the Prince, had heard one of their speakers at a meeting at the German Club in Durban putting across the well-known Nazi line. The neo-Nazis, said the Prince, appeared to be working through personal contacts in South Africa (Rand Daily Mail, 31 March and 1 April 1965).
One of those taking part in such a tour, organized by the Wochezeitung in 1963 was Adolf von Thadden, later leader of the extremist National Demokratische Partei (N.D.P.), whose successes in recent West German elections caused widespread alarm. Von Thadden has since made a number of other visits to South Africa, in the course of which he has made contact with officials of like-minded organizations and prominent members of the Nationalist Party.
Ostensibly, his main reason for coming to South Africa has been to visit his mother, who lives in East London. But perhaps it is not without significance that, in March 1967, a meeting of Germans was held in Johannesburg at which an organization was formed called the 'Deutscher Arbeitskreis Volkstreuer Verbande in Sud Afrika' (German Work Group of Nationally Loyal Associations in South Africa). The official aim of the movement is 'to end the terror of Allied-licensed political parties in Germany' and to give Germans in South Africa a 'national consciousness'. Its leader, Mr Oskar Sheffler, a motor-car salesman, was formerly a member of the N.D.P., while the main speaker at the meeting, Mr Rolf Wenzlaff, a fitter and turner, strongly supported the standpoint of the N.D.P. (Star, 7 March 1967, and Rand Daily Mail, 20 May 1967)
Barely a month after this organization was formed, Jewish youths clashed with German immigrants at a basement beer-hall in the Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow, where neo-Nazis had gathered to celebrate Hitler's birthday. Punches were thrown, and Germans chanted 'Sieg Heil!' as some of the Jewish youth were arrested and taken off to jail for disturbing the peace. Further riots took place in subsequent weeks.
The Prime Minister's reaction to the whole affair was typical. When on 8 May 1967 the Opposition called in the House of Assembly for the adjournment of normal business, to discuss the riots, Vorster placed the blame for the whole situation on 'certain newspapers, particularly the Sunday Express', which he accused of inflaming opinions and 'thus engendering the atmosphere' in which the riots took place. Police investigations had shown no sign of neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic movements, he said. Rejecting the Opposition call for an investigation into the causes of the riots, Vorster said that he proposed instead to investigate the newspaper reports. Sworn statements would be taken from the journalists responsible, and they would not be allowed to hide behind the shield of journalistic privilege. The type of journalist who wrote this sort of report did so deliberately to harm South Africa, he maintained. Europe's 'old vendettas' were not wanted in South Africa.
Subsequently a number of journalists, mostly employees of the so-called 'English Press', were grilled by members of the Special Branch, and two were jailed for short periods on refusing to disclose the names of their informants. The outcome of the whole episode was that the anti-Nazis were made to feel the full weight of State pressure, while the Neo-Nazis were exonerated from the outset.
Yet confirmation that anti-Semitic groups with international links exist and work in South Africa was provided shortly afterwards in the report of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to its biennial congress, at Johannesburg in November 1967. In a section headed 'Disturbing Forces at Work', the report said that despite the military defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany, anti-Semitic groups and individuals in various countries have continued to work and meet together. They are known as the Anti-Semitic International.
Such groups also exist in South Africa. They maintain regular or sporadic contact with their counterparts overseas, particularly in the United States and Britain. They interchange propaganda material and the same themes run through their documents and pamphlets.
The report refers to the publication and dissemination of anti-Semitic literature in South Africa itself, and regrets the failure of the Publications Board and the authorities to take more effective action to curb anti-Jewish manifestations in South Africa (Sunday Express, 19 November 1967).
Perhaps more serious than the invasion of South Africa by foreign-born neo-Nazis and their ideologies is the extent to which the indigenous cult of anti-communism has been broadened, with the approval of the highest officials in the government and the Broederbond, into a frontal assault on all liberal ideas, circulating not only within the opposition but among the ranks of the Nationalists themselves. Core of the South African witchhunt is the Inter-Church Anti-Communist Action Committee of the Dutch Reformed Church, whose chairman is Dr J.D. Vorster, actuary of the General Synod of the DRC and a brother of the Prime Minister.
An article in Antikom, the organ of the Action Committee, in 1964 revealed the latent anti-Semitism which is closely linked with anti-communism in the ranks of Afrikaner Nationalism. The article sought to prove that Jews had been behind the international communist movement; that they had organized the Russian Revolution in 1917; and that Lenin, 'nicknamed the bloodthirsty one', had been a Jew. Entitled ' Pleased to meet you, Mr Haim Goldmann', the article alleged that both Lenin's parents had been Jewish; that he had been later adopted by a Jewess of German-Polish origin; that the home language of his childhood had been Yiddish; and that he had married a Jewess. The article raised a storm of protest among Jews in South Africa, and even one Nationalist newspaper was dismayed; but Dr Vorster was unrepentant and used the occasion to lecture the Jewish community on the need 'to take a positive stand to prevent their youth from falling prey to communists'.
The Anti-Communist Action Committee sponsored a 'volkskongres', to combat communism, at Pretoria in April 1964. Members of the organizing committee included Dr Piet Koornhof, the secretary of the Broederbond; Mr J. A. Marais, Nationalist M.P. for Innesdale; Mr G. H. Beetge, an official of the White Building Workers' Union; Mr Ivor Benson, former talks organizer of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and later Ian Smith's chief press censor in Rhodesia; S. E. D. Brown, editor of the extremist right-wing weekly newspaper the S.A. Observer; and various Afrikaner professors and dominees. The purpose of the conference, which was held with the backing of the government, was to combat the spirit of 'liberalism' creeping into the ranks of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Afrikaner intellectuals, and to rally the forces of Nationalist Afrikanerdom behind a reaffirmation of the need for apartheid between the races in South Africa. The conference, addressed by overseas and local 'experts' on communism, asked the government to take steps against the 'liberalistic' press in South Africa, and decided to establish a standing National Council to combat Communism, on the basis of the Christian religion. The cooperation of Churches, the State, State departments, and the cultural and business worlds would be sought. Chairman of the National Council was, once again, Dr J.D. Vorster.
This Council in its turn convened an International Symposium on Communism at Pretoria in September 1966. Foreign guests on this occasion included Professor S. Possony, director of the Hoover Institute of Peace, War and Revolution at Stanford University in the United States; Madame Suzanne Labin, described as a French 'expert' on communism; and Major Edgar Bundy, executive secretary of the right-wing Church League of America, who denounced the World Council of Churches as a 'Communist front', warned that several Churches in South Africa - including the Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, Moravian, and Lutheran - were 'infiltrated by Communism', and urged their congregants to 'walk out' of them.
Opening the conference, Dr Vorster declared that the biggest enemy they had to face were the 'anti-anti-Communists' and the 'liberals', whom he described as a 'fifth column' and 'the roadmakers of the Red course of action'.
But perhaps the centrepiece of the conference was the address delivered by the Deputy Commissioner of Police and head of the Security Branch, Major-General H. J. van den Bergh. The communists had called a temporary halt to the use of violence in South Africa and transferred the emphasis to moral or spiritual sabotage, he said. 'We have experienced a considerable amount of political activity by certain student organizations, newspaper reporters, churchmen and other intellectuals. We can assume that at least some of this can be attributed to subtle influencing and persuasion by secret members of the Communist Party....'
General van den Bergh told the congress that he had often been asked why so many of 'our Jewish friends' were listed as communists, and why so many had been arrested for sabotage. In his opinion, the reason why Jews 'tend to be involved' was because 'Communism was the highest form of capitalism' (Rand Daily Mail, 30 September 1966, and Die Transvaler, 30 September 1966).
A few months later Dr Vorster, paying a return visit to America, told an Anti-Communist symposium sponsored by the Church League of America: 'Your President Kennedy and our Dr Verwoerd were both killed by communists.' In what was described as a 'fire-and-brimstone attack on the West's alleged indifference to the communist menace', Dr Vorster blamed the United Nations, ' apostate liberalism, misguided humanists, yellow and weak-livered souls, black-hearted traitors and morally rotten creatures', for consciously and unconsciously aiding communism and trying to destroy conservatism (Sunday Times, 19 March 1967).
Nor are Dr Vorster's fury and scorn reserved only for communists, liberals and other non-Afrikaans or un-South African elements. The greatest fear of the Nationalist conservatives is that White supremacy is being undermined by the agents of liberalism working in the ranks of their own people. At an Afrikaner Church conference held at Pretoria in June 1967, Dr Vorster was among a number of speakers who launched a virulent tirade against the so-called ' Sestigers ', the new Afrikaans literary school of the sixties, calling them purveyors of 'sewage literature', 'pestilence germs', and 'neo-barbarism'.
There was a time, said Dr Vorster, when children could read anything published in Afrikaans. ' We see the corruption today in the blasphemy, dirty language and unmentionable obscenities which are offered in much of the so-called literature of the Sestigers.' He warned these writers that they would no longer be allowed to continue unhindered with their undermining work. (For those unacquainted with the work of the Sestigers, it may perhaps suffice to mention as a typical representative the name of Etienne Leroux, whose novel Seven Days at the Silbersteins was singled out by Graham Greene as the most interesting book he had read during 1967, 'a superb comic fantasia'.) (Star, 9 June 1967, and Observer, 10 December 1967).
Later in 1967, Dr P. J. Meyer, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, issued a statement to the press announcing that a series of symposia on liberalism would be held at Johannesburg in October 1967 under the auspices of the National Council for Combating Communism. According to a report in Die Transvaaler on 19 July 1967, well-known scientists would discuss various aspects of liberalism at the symposia, which would be extended to various centres in South Africa and would be followed by a national congress on the Afrikaner's future in a separate cultural and linguistic society. Mr G. H. Beetge, secretary of the Council, was quoted by Die Transvaler as saying that the council supported the holding of the symposia because it regarded liberalism as the 'twin brother' of communism.
In this sphere of politics, South Africa has not unnaturally replaced Nazi Germany as the fountain-head of inspiration for the world's racist organizations. If the great struggle today is regarded as being, not between Jew and Gentile, but between Black and White, then it is understandable that, in the eyes of fascists the world over, the South African Prime Minister should be seen to have assumed the tattered mantle once worn by Hitler.
Contents | Chapter 5