Demetrios Tsafendas

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Demetrios Tsafendas even Demitrios Mimikos Tsafandakis and Dimitri Tsafendas ( Greek Δημήτρης Τσαφέντας Dimitris Tsaféndas * 14. January 1918 in Lourenço Marques ; † 7. October 1999 in Krugersdorp ) was a South African Parliament employee who on 6 September 1966 with the apartheid related Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa Hendrik Verwoerd murdered. The course of his life and his motives are still the subject of historical research. After older research had drawn a consistently negative picture of Tsafendas, his career was comprehensively reassessed by political scientist Harris Dousemetzis in 2019 .

Before his assassination attempt on the prime minister, who has ruled since 1958, Tsafendas suffered from three highly repressive state systems - Portugal , the colony of Mozambique and South Africa - which can be seen as the mainspring for his act.

origin

Tsafendas did not know anything about his birth mother, Amelia Williams, until she was 17 years old. Allegedly, Amelia's father was German and her mother a Swazi . Amelia would therefore have been considered a mulatto in the colony of Mozambique . Michaelis Tsafandakis, the father of Tsafendas, born in Crete in 1885 , was a marine engineer and turned to anarchism while studying in Italy . The family embarked for Alexandria - not an unusual trip across the Mediterranean, as they moved within the Ottoman Empire . Michaelis moved from Egypt to South Africa. In Lourenço Marques he began a liaison with Amelia in 1916. The father of Demetrios Tsafendas felt committed to revolutionary ideals, so it was at times his wish to take part in the Spanish Civil War as an interbrigadist .

Wandering years

The preschooler Demetrios grew up with his paternal grandmother in Alexandria, later with his stepmother Marika in southern Africa. The father then sent the 7-year-old boy to a boarding school in Middelburg . When the father during the Great Depression in the terminal put the boy came to a school of the Anglican Mission . Demetrios attended a Portuguese mission school in Mozambique. In 1936 he went back to South Africa illegally, but was deported to Mozambique. The father obtained a residence permit for the son in South Africa. In 1938 he attended college there for three months and worked in the mining industry as a welder. In 1941 he stayed in Cape Town . In his youth he developed contradicting ideological views, on the one hand he professed communism , but was also a member of a parish. During this time he shortened his family name from Tsafandakis to Tsafendas, as he learned that -akis was a diminutive imposed by the Ottomans .

Tsafendas broke immigration laws in Canada on his voyages in service with US cargo fleets in 1942. He was arrested but escaped and fled to the United States, where he was arrested again. He often pretended to be mentally ill during conflicts with the authorities, so he was admitted to a Boston psychopathological hospital and was discharged from it in August 1943. He successfully evaded deportation from the USA several times and, according to biographers who are averse to him , was in the United States until September 27, 1947 - the day of his deportation to Greece - in a number of hospitals. According to another account, he is said to have done proper service in the US Merchant Navy until 1947. Until 1949 he worked in Greece for the Americans as a translator and supported the communists in the Greek civil war . With a refugee passport, he then looked for work in France, Spain and Portugal. This passport was not accepted in Portugal, the local secret police Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado monitored Tsafendas and kept a file on him since he was 20 years old .

As a Mozambican conscientious objector and a sympathizer of the independence movement, Tsafendas sat in a prison there for six months and was expelled to motherland Portugal in 1951. After that he was not allowed to leave Portugal and managed to get by as a street trader until 1953. The next attempt to escape from Portugal brought him one year imprisonment with electroshock treatment. He finally got a Portuguese passport and traveled with it as a textile seller to West Germany, Denmark, Sweden and England. In Great Britain he took part in demonstrations by the anti-apartheid movement. In between he returned to Portugal. Since he often pretended to be insane when it made sense to him, it is plausible that Tsafendas was in an English hospital for a long time. The English deported him to Germany in 1959. Tsafendas has always favored a residence in South Africa. The way there led him across the Balkans and from Piraeus to Alexandria. But the Egyptians deported him to Beirut . Now Tsafendas was able to work as an English teacher in Israel and Turkey. In 1961 he went back to Portugal. On the way he visited relatives in Crete.

Portugal gave Tsafendas amnesty in 1962. He was allowed to return to Mozambique in October 1963. In November he was allowed to visit South Africa by bribing an official; the money was paid for by his family. He went to Pretoria and in 1964 visited his sister in Rhodesia . He then returned to Mozambique via Malawi . From March 1965, Tsafendas had worked in Durban, among other things, as a court interpreter. From August 1965 he lived in Cape Town- Bellville- South and changed his job as well as his place of residence several times until the end of July 1966. Most recently he lived in Rondebosch . On August 1, 1966, Tsafendas was temporarily employed by Parliament as a messenger . On September 6, 1966, Tsafendas approached the prime minister during a parliamentary session, pulled out a hidden knife and stabbed his victim about four times in the torso. Verwoerd died. The assassin went to jail. The crime was followed by threats of revenge and violence against South Africans of Greek origin.

captivity

Tsafendas was taken to Robben Island on October 26, 1966, and then transferred to the high-security section of Pretoria Main Prison on November 14. The prisoner reported under torture that he had a devil worm in his body. This would speak to him. According to Harris Dousemetzis, in consultation with then Justice Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster , the impression was to be avoided that the South African state was no match for its political opponents, because a week after the attack, Tsafendas had initially told the police that he had committed the crime because he was disgusted by the prime minister's racial policies: “I was firmly convinced that the disappearance of the South African prime minister would bring about a change in politics.” And further: “It was my own idea to kill him ... It was me no matter what happened to me afterwards. I was so outraged by the racial policy that I carried out my plan to kill the prime minister. ” A Greek priest who had visited Tsafendas in prison told Dousemetzis that the prisoner had hoped that the prison would soon end after he suspected it would end Apartheid to be pardoned by a successor government.

According to another source, the perpetrator stated that Verwoerd preferred blacks to whites. As a schizophrenic , he was not accused of murder. The judge Andries Beyers stated in 1966: "I can speak no more about a man who lacks any potential for rational thinking as I can about a dog or a dead object." Tsafendas stayed however imprisoned until his death. Witnesses reported that he was subjected to constant humiliation (beatings; guards' urine and saliva in the food) by prison staff. In 1994, the first freely and universally elected government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela transferred him to a psychiatric clinic, where he held to the correctness of his deed until the end. He died of pneumonia and was buried according to the Greek Orthodox rite.

literature

Web links

Adaptations

Movie
  • 1999 Film (48 min documentary) by Liza Key: The furiosus (about: Der Rasende ) (English)
Spoken theater
  • 1985 Matthew Krouse, Robert Colman: Famous Dead Man (about: Famous Dead Man )
  • 2001 Anton Krueger: Living in Strange Lands (about: Life in foreign countries )
  • 2003 Antony Sher : ID (based on Henk van Woerden's book cited above)
  • Ian Hadfield: Conversations with a Tapeworm (discussions with a tapeworm)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, S. 23, 7 ZVO
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab Nikos Konstandaras; translated by Niels Kadritzke: The forgotten tyrant murderer . In: Barbara Bauer, Dorothee D'Aprile (Ed.): Le Monde diplomatique . No. 06/25 . TAZ / WOZ , July 2019, ISSN  1434-2561 , p. 11 .
  3. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, S. 29, 14 ZVO
  4. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, S. 29, 14 ZVO
  5. ↑ eng. Mining industry of South Africa
  6. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, S. 30
  7. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, S. 31, center
  8. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, p. 31, below
  9. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, p. 32, above
  10. ↑ eng. Rondebosch
  11. ↑ eng. Houses of Parliament, Cape Town
  12. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, p. 32, below
  13. ↑ eng. Pretoria Central Prison
  14. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, S. 107 and S. 110
  15. ↑ Zuleiga Adams, S. 130
  16. ^ Georges Lory: Afrique australe - L'Afrique du Sud, ses voisins, leur mutation . In: Henry Dougier (ed.): Série monde . No. 45 . Éditions Autrement, April 1990, ISSN  0336-5816 , p. 257 .
  17. ↑ Photo by Zuleiga Adams at uct.academia.edu
  18. ↑ The furiosus (English)
  19. ↑ A Question of Madness (about: A question of madness ) in the IMDb (English)
  20. ↑ Matthew Krouse (English)
  21. ↑ Famous Dead Man (English)
  22. ↑ eng. Anton Robert Krueger
  23. ↑ Living in Strange Lands (English)
  24. ↑ Living in Strange Lands (English)
  25. ↑ ID (English)
  26. ↑ Conversations with a Tapeworm (English)
personal data
SURNAME Tsafendas, Demetrios
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tsafendas, Dimitri; Tsafandakis, Demitrios Mimikos (full Greek name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African assassin
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Lourenço Marques
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1999
Place of death Krugersdorp