Johann von Leers: In Defense of Dr. Malan’s Apartheid [Der Weg 1951-02]
An original translation of "In wessen Auftrage? „Life“ hetzt gegen Dr. Malan"
Title: In Defense of Dr. Malan’s Apartheid [de: In wessen Auftrage? „Life“ hetzt gegen Dr. Malan]
Author(s): Johann Jakob von Leers as “A. Euler”
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 5, Issue 02 (February 1951)
Page(s): 123-125
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
This article appears in “Der Weg”, a German-language magazine founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the years immediately following the destruction of the Third Reich. See the links above for more information on the magazine and its contents.
From Dieter Vollmer’s autobiography:
“[Von Leers’] contributions to our editorial team were beyond price. He penned his pieces under various pseudonyms, most often as Euler, the owl being his personal emblem. The two years I had the privilege of working side by side with him, drawing from this ever-flowing wellspring of wisdom, were a gift.”
I attempted to identify the original article and provide the images that Dr. von Leers references, especially the hilarious comparison of a secondary wife of a Tembu chief to Eleanor Roosevelt. However, while Life magazines are well archived and available, the “International Edition” is not. If anyone has knowledge of or access to the May 1950 issue of Life International Edition, please let me know, and the back-translated quotes can be corrected.
Source Documents:
[LINK] Der Weg 1951 German Scans
In Defense of Dr. Malan’s Apartheid
In Whose Pay? Life Magazine Incites Against Dr. Malan
Johann Jakob von Leers as “A. Euler”
The North American magazine Life, in its International Edition of October 9, 1950, publishes an article under the deceptive title South Africa and Its Problems: In a Black Country, White Rule and Human Freedom Collide, adorned with—admittedly splendid—photographs by Mrs. Margaret Bourke-White. Yet nearly every sentence and caption in this piece serves as a vicious incitement against the South African Union and the racial policies of Prime Minister Dr. Malan.
For instance, it declares:
“In South Africa, a land smaller than the eleven states of the American South,”
(a menacing nod to the Southern states of the USA, compelled by the armed struggle of the American Civil War of 1861–65 to grant Negroes the same civil rights as Whites!)
“2.5 million Whites now dictate the lives and fates of 8 million African natives (blacks), one million coloreds (mixed-race individuals), and a quarter-million Asians. In a brazen eruption of racial arrogance and nationalism, South Africa’s advocates of White supremacy have devised a new doctrine of racial segregation dubbed 'Apartheid.' By law, they have begun transplanting other races of the Union into 'group settlement areas,' evocative of national ghettos.”
Ominously, it asserts:
“The Whites seized the land, the blacks till it,”
adding the claim:
“Most of the land, 88%, has fallen into White hands. On their mere 12%, South Africa’s natives can produce barely half the food needed for subsistence.”
This veiled threat hints at a black agrarian uprising.
Not once does it acknowledge that the bulk of South Africa’s natives, the Bantu peoples, are themselves recent arrivals, pressing into the land from the northeast around the same time Whites landed from the sea. Nor does it mention that the cities, farms, mines, and the entirety of South Africa’s cultural achievements are the creation of Whites. Instead, Life assails Malan as the “high priest of Apartheid,” accusing:
“Social contact and marriage between them are forbidden, so each race may preserve its 'blood purity.'“
As though it were a crime for a people to wish their blood untainted by wholly alien races! Here speaks a perilous trend toward universal mixing and the debasement of the White race, cloaked as “humanitarian.” In a muzzled Germany, discussion of the race question can be stifled, the truth nailed to the cross—but it is absurd to brand White South Africans, who daily witness racial differences, as criminals for drawing logical conclusions. A glance at the natives showcased in this article—presented with impeccable selection—promises little good from blending these utterly distinct peoples with the White man. The impartial eye instantly justifies Dr. Malan, even if the pictured secondary wife of a Tembu chief bears a striking likeness to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.
The article strives especially to prove the natives’ social exploitation, yet it invites comparisons all too readily. Beneath a photograph of a miners’ barrack at the Robinson Shaft, it notes that forty men are crammed into one room, inevitably fostering homosexuality.
Well—this barrack appears far superior to many in the ghastly North American internment camps of Schwarzenborn and Darmstadt in Germany, where not primitive, largely illiterate blacks, but White Germans—educated men, mayors, senior officers, scholars—were confined together for years, a full year without the slightest written contact with their families, and left to starve. In those barracks, not forty but a hundred men were packed together, as in the infamous “Totenbaracke (Death Barrack) 27” at Schwarzenborn. Had animals been so caged, animal welfare societies would have stormed the gates. There, homosexuality did not spread, but hunger edema and death by exhaustion did; among the victims was Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, son of our last Kaiser, who succumbed shortly after release from Darmstadt. The Roosevelt rag Life ought to tread lightly when decrying overcrowded barracks—especially since those black miners are well-fed and, after six months, return to secure families at contract’s end, while hundreds of thousands of Germans in North American camps knew their families had been stripped of all possessions and cast into destitution—a fate the enemy-appointed “Minister President of Greater Hesse,” Prof. Geiler, publicly boasted of in the depths of moral rot at New Year 1946.
Then Life cunningly shows a three-year-old black girl behind the barbed wire of a grim makeshift settlement near Johannesburg—but how many German children languished behind American wire after 1945 because their mothers held minor posts in the Women’s League and were thus jailed in hunger camps by North American brutes? As a “mercy,” they could bring their infants along, for their homes had been looted by communists and other treacherous scum under the “Stars and Stripes.” Children behind barbed wire—a perilous theme for a Roosevelt outlet, which in the same issue flaunts pages of the accursed Roosevelts.
“These Are the Things Critics Condemn Most”—under this banner, Life assaults the South African Union, depicting how black grape-pickers at the Cape receive a portion of wine for their labor. So long as this wine isn’t unfairly docked from their wages, it’s utterly unobjectionable; such customs prevail in wine regions worldwide. Next, it portrays public mass wrestling matches—long practiced by many black peoples in their kraals—claiming that black domestics,
“suffering from lack of recreation… [are permitted these bouts to] vent their animal instincts.”
In truth, the wrestlers look cheerful; it’s a simple folk sport. Beneath an image of a queue, it reads:
“The pass system demands that nearly all natives carry one or more passes at all times. This line waits outside the Johannesburg pass office to renew them.”
True, bureaucratic demands for passes and papers burden people everywhere and should be eased—but why this should be uniquely oppressive in South Africa is unclear. In Germany’s American zone, where passes bore the “classification” of treacherous denazification courts, where loyal Germans still report to police endlessly for staying true to their homeland and leader, branded fifth-class citizens in their own land, the yoke is far heavier.
“Police harassment keeps natives in constant fear and uncertainty. This is a house search in Johannesburg against native moonshiners,”
reads a caption under police raiding a “black” (in both senses) brewery in a cellar, one officer pouring out a canister of dubious brew. Well—every nation’s police justly target moonshiners to safeguard public health; bad liquor can blind or kill. What’s reprehensible here escapes comprehension. Beneath convicts led to work, it states:
“The farm prison system supplies cheap labor to many farmers in the 'Veld.' Groups of farmers build and maintain cooperative prisons, receiving convicts permanently while the state gets only a fraction of normal wages. The prisoners are well-fed but unpaid.”
Plainly put—South Africa employs its black convicts in agriculture. So what? After their sentences, they may receive land, retrained for rural life. If Mrs. Bourke-White seeks to uplift convicts or the innocent, let her inspect America’s “chain gangs,” where prisoners toil in shackles, or the plight of innocent German POWs in Toos near Lille, or the misery of Germany’s martyrs in Spandau, Landsberg, Werl, and Esterwege. She might find worse than South Africa.
The piece closes:
“In South Africa, there are educated and intelligent blacks with no voice, for they lack voting rights and have only symbolic representation.”
Add this: “In West Germany, there are educated and intelligent Germans with no voice, stripped of voting rights—active and passive—by denazification, with no one permitted to speak for them.” Nor are they alone; in Italy, hundreds of thousands of ex-fascists lost voting rights under unjust laws from combined North American and communist pressure. Yet since South Africa is “White man’s land,” and Whites lack voting rights in the native protectorates of Bechuanaland, Swaziland, and Basutoland, it’s again unclear what so inflames Mrs. Bourke-White. She adds:
“And there are Whites, Afrikaners and English, who abhor the government’s (Dr. Malan’s) policy on moral grounds and dread its potential to spawn a black counter-nationalism, erupting into a horrific race war.”
Well—South Africa has endured such savage race wars under Zulu kings like Dingaan and Cetewayo. Precisely to avert fresh racial clashes, Dr. Malan’s “Apartheid policy” seeks to shrink friction zones. That this is an infinitely thorny task, with no perfect solution, is plain—but it demands the utmost expertise and care.
We harbor no ill will toward blacks. We’ll never forget our gratitude to the brave, loyal Askari of the First World War. We’ve noted how much more humane and decent North American black troops were in Germany in 1945 compared to many White units, how often black soldiers recoiled at the “third degree”—torture in German—of CIC posts, less enthralled than many Whites by those vengeful New Americans before whom others groveled. We’re no foes of blacks—quite the contrary. We wish this unique racial group (not one “black” race, but several akin) full share in human culture someday. We’re simply not naive enough to deem mixing with our race desirable or to think a wholly primitive black majority should co-govern a White state for principle’s sake.
Behind the attacks on Dr. Malan, we’ve long spied forces preaching universal race-mixing while craving universal dominion. Names like Mr. Kahn, communist agitators doubling as native advocates in South Africa, strike us as unmistakable. They strike at Malan, aiming for that independent, proud, creative Nordic European spirit unfit for a planned world government—lest it ask who’d helm it.
And they twist South Africa’s truth. Hurling largely baseless charges, they hide the essential. Sadly, Mrs. Bourke-White does too. In reality, the South African Union faces 8 million Bantu beside 2.5 million Whites only because their forebears didn’t, as in the USA or Australia, slaughter the colored peoples. Moreover, the Union outdoes Britain’s African colonies and dominions under London’s Labour government for its natives. South Africa spends £2.1s.6d per native on education, health, and welfare—compare Southern Rhodesia’s 3s.9d, Northern Rhodesia’s 3s.10d, Basutoland’s 6s.7d, Bechuanaland’s 7s.3d, Swaziland’s 6s.7d, Nyasaland’s mere 8d, Kenya’s 7d, Tanganyika’s 3s.0d, Uganda’s 4s.1d, Gold Coast’s 6s.11d, and Nigeria’s 2s.7d. South Africa invests over two pounds where well-run Nigeria spends two shillings and twopence. Far from fleeing “oppression,” blacks flock to the Union for good wages and food—over 100,000 yearly from Portuguese East Africa, multitudes from British protectorates. Tellingly, no British High Commissioners there decry “their” blacks’ treatment. Only Mrs. Bourke-White complains! She writes:
“The native must earn the White man’s money to pay the White man’s taxes, levied at age 18.”
In truth, male natives (women and children tax-free) owe £1 yearly, totaling £1,829,000—but £2,850,000 remain unpaid over five years, collected leniently. Natives enjoy free schooling and books—costing the state £6 million, triple their taxes. Whites foot the bill! The Dutch Reformed Church, maligned as black-hating Afrikaners’ creed, matches that sum for black education. Employed natives get free healthcare and welfare. In seventy years, their population has quadrupled—not typical of an oppressed people. Contrast Germany’s birth decline under Russian and North American oppression since 1945. If anywhere in Africa earnestly labors to uplift natives—who arrived alongside Whites—it’s the South African Union, but not at the culture-bearing White element’s expense.
In the USA, one black stands among ten Whites; in the Union, one White faces 4.5 blacks. Were America’s ratio the same, it’d grasp the Union’s plight—save for the Roosevelt clique, which handed Central Europe and China to Bolshevism, tasked to undermine South Africa’s last White bastion, a homeland forged.
We aim to prove we’ve pierced her guise and know her course. Dr. Malan likely does too.