Benjamin Pogrund joins the debate over the Jewish community and its role in apartheid
A HAUNTING memory as a child in Cape Town is of my father weeping when news reached him in the 1940s about the murder of our relatives in Lithuania. They were among the more than 260 000 Jews wiped out in that country by Germany’s Nazis and their local followers.
I never knew the uncles and aunts and cousins who had stayed when my parents emigrated to South Africa in the 1920s. All that remains of them is a faded photograph.
Most of South Africa’s Jews originated from Lithuania and suffered the same loss as my father. The Holocaust in Europe, in which 6-million Jews perished, was seared into the consciousness of Jews here.
This should surely have driven them into total opposition to racism in South Africa. Many did respond in this way and hence the vital and honourable role of many Jews in fighting apartheid.
But as Claudia Braude described in “Yutar and `holy disbelief'” in last week’s Mail & Guardian, others followed the road of collaboration after the National Party took power in 1948 and embarked on apartheid. Their behaviour contradicted their heritage all the more because there was recent experience of Nationalist support for Nazi Germany.
The extent of the anti-Semitism in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s is difficult to comprehend in the liberated atmosphere of the new South Africa. But in the lifetime of many living today, it was a potent factor.
There’s a contemporaneous view of what it was like, written in 1944 in a booklet called South African Jewry by Edgar Bernstein, a noted Jewish journalist.
He spoke of the worldwide aspirations of the Nazis after they had seized power in Germany in 1933: “They envisaged the annexation of South Africa in a vast German world empire no less than they envisaged the incorporation of other lands.
“So, as soon as the Nazi machine was effectively in operation in Germany, racial divisions in South Africa were seized upon as fertile ground for National Socialist propaganda. Germany sent out leaflets which played upon the racial differences of the South African population … As documents seized by the police subsequently revealed, a propaganda network to spread the Nazi virus in South Africa was built up, chiefly through the German consulates.”
“Enormous energy” was put into making Jews appear as “the universal bogey which the Nazis have everywhere tried to depict them – the quintessence of capitalism and Bolshevism; the voice of wealth and labour’s agitation; Christ and anti-Christ – all the contradictions Nazi ingenuity could devise.
“For South Africa, these allegations were given a special local colouring; the cunning propaganda talked of `British Jewish imperialism’, thus linking the Jews with that aspect of South African history which had caused most bitterness in the past.
“A specialised propaganda was built around the false allegation that Jews were anti- Afrikaans.”
This agitation “helped the Nazi followers and dupes” in South Africa, said Bernstein: “Comparisons favourable to Germany were made, the suggestion was propounded that the Nazi system be introduced here.”
Anti-Semitism also crept into the National Party which had emerged during the 1930s as the Herenigde Nasionale Party (Purified Nationalist Party) led by Dr DF Malan, a former dominee and ex-editor of Die Burger (Malan became the first apartheid prime minister after the 1948 election).
“In the parliamentary election of 1938 anti-Semitism was made a political issue for the first time in South Africa, and swayed many votes in a number of constituencies. A Nationalist newspaper, Die Transvaler, was started in Johannesburg and began consistently to attack the South African Jewish community,” Bernstein wrote.
Die Transvaler’s editor was Dr HF Verwoerd, later prime minister and architect of the Bantustan policy.
His newspaper set out the National Party’s standpoint in these words: “No Jew can become a member of the Herenigde Nasionale Party and thus try to exercise influence on the policy of the state; all illegal and undesirable Jewish immigrants … must be repatriated; all further Jewish immigration must be immediately stopped; no further naturalisation of Jews must take place …”
However, not all Afrikaners were antagonistic, said Bernstein. Former prime minister JBM Hertzog was “scrupulously fair” towards Jews while Jan Smuts and JH Hofmeyr denounced anti-Semitism.
When a majority in Parliament sided with Smuts and voted in 1939 to take South Africa into World War II against Nazi Germany, the Nationalists launched a new propaganda campaign, Bernstein noted. “They raised the cry that the British and the Jews had dragged the country into war against the wishes of the Afrikaner population.”
Malan at first was certain the Allies would be defeated. As the tide of war changed he and the Nationalists adopted what they called “an attitude of strict neutrality”. But, said Bernstein, in practice this “neutrality” went together with such criticism of the Allies and such lack of criticism of the Nazi side that “it was almost indistinguishable from the pro-Nazi line which the party had formerly pursued”.
Four years after Bernstein wrote this the Nationalists, against all expectations, were voted into office by an electorate consisting mainly of whites. Again I have a memory as a young boy of the tremor of fear that their victory sent through the adult Jews around me: the Nazi-lovers were in power and what dire fate now awaited South Africa’s Jews?
However, despite the threats and pro-Nazi stance, once the Nationalists were in government they never took any overt hostile action against the Jewish community. It seems that the Nationalists decided they had to hold the white minority together and realised they needed the Jewish community.
And on the Jewish side, the fear instilled by the Nationalists was a reminder of past insecurity and pogroms and drove some to put their morality aside and to seek safety through silence and, later, connivance.