Oswald Pirow

Oswald Pirow (left) and the former Consul General of the Orange Free State Hendrik Muller in The Hague, 1938

Oswald Pirow (born August 14, 1890 in Aberdeen , Cape Colony , † October 11, 1959 in Pretoria ) was a South African lawyer and right-wing extremist politician. Pirow called himself a National Socialist , represented radical anti-communism , racism and anti-Semitism and spoke out in favor of the establishment of an authoritarian leader state . He was Minister of Justice from 1929 to 1933, Minister of Defense from 1933 to 1939 and Minister of Transport from 1933 to 1938 of South Africa. In 1940 he founded the National Socialist-oriented political group Nuwe Orde ('New Order'). After the end of the Second World War , he sought contact with right-wing extremist groups. From 1958 until his death he served as a prosecutor in the Treason Trial , in which, among other things, Nelson Mandela was charged with high treason.

Life

Career

Pirow was the grandson of a German missionary . His brother Hans Pirow made a career as a state mining engineer and his sister Sylva Moerdyk became an influential politician. Oswald Pirow grew up in the province of Transvaal on that visited secondary schools in Itzehoe and studied in Kiel and London law . He was admitted to the bar in 1913 and practiced in Pretoria . Here he became a partner of the politician Tielman Roos and joined his National Party . Together they worked to end the miners' strike on the Witwatersrand in 1922.

Political career

In 1924 Pirow was elected to the South African parliament for the first time . After winning the parliamentary elections by the Nasionale Party under James Barry Munnick Hertzog in 1929, Pirow was appointed Minister of Justice as successor to Roos. Roos had gone to Europe for treatment for health reasons, and Pirov also took over his party clientele in the Transvaal.

The Hertzog 1929 cabinet:
front row from left to right:
Frederic Creswell , DF Malan, JBM Hertzog , Nicolaas Havenga and PGW Grobler
back row from left to right:
Oswald Pirow , Jan Kemp , A. Fourie , Ernest George Jansen , HW Sampson and CW Malan

Pirov's policies were determined by his radical racism and anti-communism. During the elections in 1929 he had the "white terror" (white terror) organized. When there were various protest campaigns in the same year, especially in Durban , directed against poll taxes by which blacks were to be forced to work for whites, or against the ban on brewing beer - blacks were to be forced to visit the city's beer halls - Pirov responded with terror. In a sensational effort, he flew from Pretoria to Durban, where he personally led a police attack on three black neighborhoods in the early morning hours of November 14th. In this raid, which was officially about collecting taxes, almost 700 police officers, heavily armed with machine guns and tear gas, were used. 8,000 black people were arrested and searched. 500 alleged tax evaders were charged in special courts, sentenced to pay tax or a month in prison if found guilty. This was the first time, as critics noted, tear gas was used in South Africa against peaceful civilians who did not resist.

In 1929 Pirow also presented a law that provided drastic measures against alleged "laziness" of black farm workers. In 1930, with reference to an alleged communist conspiracy, he enforced the second amendment ( Riotous Assemblies Amendment Act, Act No. 19/1930 ) to the Rioutous Assemblies Act of 1912, which gave him, as Minister of Justice, extensive powers at the expense of the rule of law . He used these powers to crack down on black trade unionists and former communists .

In 1933 Pirow was one of the driving forces behind the formation of a coalition between the National Party under Hertzog and the South African Party under Jan Smuts , and the unification of the parties to form the United Party in 1934 . In 1933 he took over the Ministry of Defense in the new cabinet and was also Minister of Transport. In 1934 Pirow presented a five-year plan to expand South African defense. In his role as Minister of Transport, he founded the airline South African Airways (SAA). In keeping with his own claims to power on the continent, he increased South African influence and economic independence from Great Britain. By 1939, the SAA, with its modern Junkers aircraft, ousted rival Imperial Airways from southern Africa.

Pirow, who advocated a strict territorial separation of whites and blacks in Africa, saw areas of settlement for whites in the African highlands of the south and east and wanted to bring them under South African influence. It is necessary for the whites to move closer together due to the threat of communist agitation and Asian influences. Pirow's idea of ​​a “Greater South Africa” envisaged South African influence as far as Kenya and Uganda . He wanted to solve the "race question" through the general implementation of the policy of racial segregation . He justified this with the alleged communist danger from which all whites had to protect themselves, and also thought a communist-inspired attack by blacks was possible. The fact that Pirow sent a flight squadron with tear gas bombs to Northern Rhodesia during the Copperbelt strike in mid-1935 was seen as a practical implementation of these principles. The operation was legitimized by the fact that South Africa had a right to intervene wherever the life and authority of whites were at stake. Overall, Pirow subordinated the development of South African civil aviation to military requirements. According to a thesis that has not yet been verified, he actually feared a military attack by Japan on South Africa and invoked the “black danger” primarily to motivate the South African public to make armaments efforts.

Like Prime Minister Hertzog, Pirow signaled his sympathy for a colonialist commitment on the part of National Socialist Germany because he saw similarities in the racist “native politics”. Pirow defined the South African racial policy as one that followed the development of blacks, but above all denied "the Negro once and for all social and political equality with the European". Germany is a "main carrier [...] of our Western European white civilization", which can only "assert itself through the close cooperation of all" and "today more than ever, where the colored tidal wave is branding" needs the "active support of a strong Germany" . A return of the mandate area South West Africa to Germany was excluded due to South Africa's own power-political interests. Instead, Germany should get colonies in Central and West Africa. From a South African perspective, Germany should not only control the blacks in Central and West Africa, but also stop the feared advance of France and Italy to the south. Pirow marked the South African claim to rule with the areas south of the equator exclusively of French equatorial Africa .

Pirov also asserted his influence in the justice department by playing a leading role in the formulation of the racial laws by which blacks were removed from the general electoral roll.

"Appeasement" in Europe

Reception by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on November 19, 1938. Pirow (left) in conversation with Erhard Milch (right) and Walter Hewel .

Pirov considered communism the greatest danger and fascism the only remedy. As a declared admirer of Benito Mussolini , António de Oliveira Salazar and Francisco Franco , he traveled to Europe several times. In August 1933 he also met Adolf Hitler for the first time , whom he described as a "man of world stature". He hoped that the influence of National Socialism would increase racial awareness among the white population of South Africa .

While the 1933 trip was officially about economic relations between Germany and South Africa, Pirow attached particular importance to a meeting with Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck , whom he wanted to win as an instructor for a black army to be rebuilt. Pirov saw it as a preventive measure against uprisings “by black people with military training in Africa against the white race”. The project did not come to fruition in the end, but Pirow also drew attention to himself in the following years when he repeatedly addressed the colonial question and expressed the hope that Germany would soon become a colonial power in Africa again.

During a visit to London in 1936, Pirow tried in vain to offer himself as an intermediary for Germany after the Rhineland crisis. In 1937, Prime Minister Hertzog and, above all, Pirow gave the German envoy Emil Wiehl the impression that Great Britain was interested in a new guarantee pact over the German western border, but would give the Germans a "free hand in the east". Pirow also informed the German envoy that the military armament of South Africa was “in good progress”, so that in the foreseeable future the focus of power in sub- Saharan Africa would shift from continental Europe to Pretoria . In mid-September 1937, Pirow told Consul Bruno Stiller that he considered the "satisfaction of German colonial claims" to be necessary in the near future, although he ruled out the return of South West Africa and Tanganyika , but wanted Germany to be established on the west coast of Africa and territorial compensation, for example Liberias promised.

A trip to Germany by Pirov in November 1938, during which he initially concluded supply contracts for aircraft and locomotives, caused a particular stir. The trip was also accompanied by rumors that Pirow wanted to discuss the colonial question and give the appeasement policy new impetus. The attitude of the British government was extremely skeptical, not least because other colonial powers such as Portugal , Belgium and France found such discussions to be inappropriate. While Pirow suggested German colonial areas in Togo and Cameroon , which were now administered by French , he showed no willingness on the other hand that South Africa would in turn give territories back. The British government thus took Pirov's trip primarily as an opportunity to gain a better understanding of South African politics.

Farewell to Pirov at the Anhalter Bahnhof on November 27, 1938, accompanied by Wilhelm Canaris (r.) And Ernst Seifert (l.)

Pirow himself reported after the war that Jan Smuts had sent him to Germany to mediate between Germany and Great Britain on the “ Jewish question ”. His detailed account in the right-wing magazine Nation Europa served not least to stylize himself as a peacemaker. Pirov claimed that he had received promises from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to offer Hitler a "free hand" in the East for moderation in the treatment of Jews. Elsewhere he stated that he had proposed to Chamberlain a plan by British Jews to set up a "national home" for the Jews in Madagascar , Tanganyika or British Guiana , for which Hitler should give the German Jews half a billion pounds or half of their property, and the British Jews were to contribute another half a billion. Chamberlain accepted immediately, but all plans became obsolete after the November pogroms . There are doubts about Pirov's presentation and especially his assessment of the chances of an agreement. This representation is not confirmed in the files. On the one hand, there is no reference to the alleged offer of a "free hand in the East" in the recording of Pirov's conversation with Hitler, which Walter Hewel provided. On the other hand, British documents leave no doubt that the British government never considered giving Hitler a “free hand”.

Pirov's initiative was related to the publicly discussed considerations at the time to settle European Jews in Madagascar , which the Germans took up again in 1940 in the so-called Madagascar Plan. Pirow seems to have proposed Madagascar as a “refugee state” to the British side. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop blocked Pirov's proposals at a meeting on November 18, 1938, with no mention of Madagascar as a potential refugee state. Ribbentrop only wanted to discuss questions of colonial politics "in a few years (5-6)". At a meeting with Hitler on November 24, Pirow argued that the offer to settle Jews in the former German colonies would create a new situation in the international discussion of the colonial question. But Hitler, who did not want to solve the "Jewish question" by resettlement overseas, rejected these plans and forbade the high command of the Wehrmacht to plan this. For his part, Pirow had made it clear that Germany was welcome as a partner in the domination of black people in Africa, but not against South African interests on the African continent.

"New order"

During the 1930s, Pirow was considered one of the most influential politicians in South Africa, an important advisor to Prime Minister Hertzog and even his "Crown Prince", but by the end of the 1930s he had already lost considerable influence. Hertzog's government came to an end when parliament rejected Hertzog's course of neutrality on September 4, 1939 , Jan Smuts took over the government and declared war on Germany. Extremist Afrikaans expected a coup d'état by Pirov, but he shrank from it. He suspected a conspiracy behind the September 4th decision.

In 1940 Pirow published the pamphlet Nuwe Orde vir Suid-Afrika ( German  New Order for South Africa ), in which he spread his political ideas. He was convinced that Germany would win the war and wanted to make appropriate preparations. The solution for South Africa lies not in democracy , but in an authoritarian , corporate leader state. After the end of the Second World War , he emphasized that he had orientated himself on the Portuguese " Estado Novo " Salazars, but in fact his model was probably German National Socialism.

Within the "Reunified National Party" ( Herenigde Nasionale Party , HNP) founded by Hertzog with Daniel François Malan in 1940 , Pirow formed his own parliamentary group on September 25, 1940 under the name Nuwe Orde ("New Order"). The Nuwe Orde , however, was less a political movement than a study group, the aim of which was to work out a political program. Within the reunified National Party, this openly National Socialist faction remained a splinter group, especially since Pirow made no ethnic differences between Boer and English whites. Influential exponents of an Afrikaans nationalism like Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd emphasized the independence of the Boer nation. Malan responded by claiming that 80 to 85 percent of Pirov's demands were already included in the manifesto of the Reunified National Party, but that the Afrikaans political tradition was democratic.

Party leader Malan forced the movement to stop propaganda in August 1941. As a result, Pirov and 17 of his supporters in parliament founded Nuwe Orde on August 16. In 1942 the group finally broke with the Reunified National Party. Pirov did not run for parliamentary elections in 1943 and resumed his legal practice. Attempts by Pirov to approach Malan failed. In October 1945 he began to publish the weekly newspaper Die Nuwe Orde . On September 19, 1947, an article in the newspaper resulted in Pirov being fined £ 40 for incitement to violence. After that, his Nuwe Orde finally lost its political relevance.

Contacts with right-wing extremists

Pirow now wrote adventure and children's books, but continued to try to influence apartheid with his political publications . At the same time he began to look for new allies in right-wing extremist circles. In 1948 he met with the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and developed ideas with him to divide Africa into all-white and all-black regions. By December 1947 they had already made plans to found a group called "Enemies of the Soviet Union". Pirow wrote articles for Mosley's magazines Union and The European , some of which were also published in the German magazine Nation Europa . Around 1953, however, Pirow turned to the British right-wing extremist AFX Baron and its intelligence service Nationalist Information Bureau (NATINFORM). During the Treason Trials , Pirow served temporarily as chief prosecutor until his sudden death.

A street in Cape Town that was named after Oswald Pirow was renamed after Christiaan Barnard in 2011 .

Fonts

• The Union of South Africa. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1936.
• Nuwe orde vir Suid-Afrika… . Christelike Republikeinse Suid-Afrikaanse Nasionaal-Sosialistiese Studykring, Pretoria 1940.
• with Charl Wynand Markelbach Du Toit: Nuwe orde vir Suid-Afrika. Uiteengesit in 'n samespraak tussen ǹ karo-boer en sy predikant. Nuwe Orde-Studienkring, Pretoria 1941.
• The Pirow plan. Hayne and Gibson, Johannesburg 194-?
• The witman se weg na selfbehoud. Nuwe Staat-Uitgewers- en Publisiteitsmaatskappy, Pretoria 1945?
• Piet Potlood. Afrikaanse Pers, Johannesburg 1948.
• Mlungo Mungoma (The blank waarsêer). L. & S. Boek- en kunssentrum, Johannesburg 1949.
• Shangani. L. & S. Boek- en kunssentrum, Johannesburg 1950.
• Sikororo. Afrikaanse Pers-Boekhandel, Johannesburg 1952.
• Piet Potlood. Afrikaanse Pers, Johannesburg 1953.
• Shanghai. A true story from the time of the Zulu Wars in South Africa. Authorized translation from English by Erica L. Rothe. With a foreword by Heinz Nordhoff, 31 pen drawings by Hilda and Anna Stevenson-Hamilton and an overview map. A. Müller, Rüschlikon-Zurich 1956.
• James Barry Munnik Hertzog. Howard Timmins, Cape Town 1958?
• Shanghai's adventurous escape. A true story from the time of the Zulu Wars in South Africa. Sauerländer / Weiss / Publishing house for youth and people, Aarau / Berlin / Munich / Vienna 1964.

literature

• Albrecht Hagemann: South Africa and the "Third Reich". Racial affinity and power political rivalry. Campus, Frankfurt ;, New York 1989, ISBN 3593341859 .
• Christoph Marx: Under the sign of the ox wagon. The radical Afrikaaner nationalism in South Africa and the history of the Ossewabrandwag. Christoph Marx. Lit, Münster 1998, ISBN 3-8258-3907-9 .
• RL McCormack: Man with a Mission. Oswald Pirow and South African Airways, 1933-1939. In: The Journal of African History 20 (1979), pp. 543-557.
• T. Dunbar Moodie: The rise of Afrikanerdom. Power, apartheid, and the Afrikaner civil religion. University of California Press, Berkeley 1975, ISBN 0520039432 .

Web links

• Newspaper article about Oswald Pirow in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marx, Zeichen , p. 453.
2. ^ TRH Davenport: South Africa. A Modern History. 4th edition. Macmillan, Basingstoke 1991, ISBN 033355034X , p. 273.
3. ↑ Harold Jack Simons, Ray Esther Simons: Class and Color in South Africa 1850-1950. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1969, p. 420.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Marx, Zeichen , p. 244.
5. ↑ 1912. Riotous Assemblies Act . at www.nelsonmandela.org
6. ^ RL McCormack: Man with a Mission. Oswald Pirow and South African Airways, 1933-1939. In: The Journal of African History 20 (1979), pp. 543-557.
7. ^ Marx, Zeichen , p. 243.
8. ^ ^{A b} Martin Eberhardt: Between National Socialism and Apartheid. The German population group in South West Africa 1915–1965. Lit, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3825802256 , pp. 333f.
9. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 173.
10. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 181.
11. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 174.
12. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 177.
13. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 183.
14. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 175.
15. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , pp. 177f.
16. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , pp. 176f.
17. ↑ Hagemann, South Africa , pp. 184-190.
18. ↑ Julian Campbell Doherty: The Dominions and British Foreign Policy from Munich to the outbreak of war in 1939 . In: VfZ 20 (1972), pp. 212-215.
19. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , 199f.
20. ↑ ^{a b c} Magnus Brechtken: "Madagascar for the Jews". Anti-Semitic Idea and Political Practice 1885–1945. Oldenbourg, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-486-56384-X , pp. 199-202.
21. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 201.
22. ↑ Julian Campbell Doherty: The Dominions and British Foreign Policy from Munich to the outbreak of war in 1939 . In: VfZ 20 (1972), p. 215.
23. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 201.
24. ↑ Klaus Hildebrand: From empire to world empire. Hitler, NSDAP and the colonial question, 1919–1945. Fink, Munich 1969, ISBN 9783770503384 , pp. 589f, 598f.
25. ↑ Hagemann, South Africa , pp. 202f.
26. ^ Marx, Zeichen , p. 367.
27. ^ Marx, Zeichen , pp. 444f.
28. ^ Hagemann, South Africa , p. 313.
29. ^ Marx, Zeichen , p. 453.
30. ^ Moodie, Rise , pp. 210f.
31. ^ Newell M. Stultz: Afrikaner politics in South Africa, 1934-1948. Univ. of California Pr, Berkeley / Calif. u. a. 1974, ISBN 0520024524 , p. 99.
32. ^ Graham Macklin: Very Deeply Dyed in Black. Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism after 1945 . New York 2007, pp. 83-85.
33. ↑ Name changes 'in honor of the past' ( memento of the original from December 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.