Did the Nazis Create Apartheid?

Factual Questions
1

This question is about history, although it involves a movie of historical fiction. I just re-watched “The Power of One”. I always thought the British were to blame for Apartheid, and I though the term “Afrikaaner” (sp?) referred to a Brit born in South Africa.

But, it seems the Afrikaaners were the Germans living in South Africa. And, the whole concept of Apartheid was started by the Germans (Afrikaaners) being in power. The whole inhumane situation seems to echo the thinking of Nazi Germany. Perhaps the Brits were no better prior to the Germans taking control of the country, but did their Nazi thinking lead to the creation of Apartheid (which seems to have started after WWII)?

I was hoping some SDopers might be history buffs. And, didn’t Apartheid finally fall in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s? What’s the recent history of the land? History buffs will eat these Q’s up!

  • Jinx
2

No. Afrikaaners were originally from The Netherlands.

3

I’m not a history buff, but as jayseebee said the Afrikaaners were Dutch. Yes, apartheid did fall apart around that time (Mandela was elected in 1993). He was jailed for several years for a protest in the 1960’s. The president before him gradually relaxed the apartheid laws, but he was still part of the old regime (I’d compare him to Gorbachev in this light).

4

Thanks, jayseebee… Hmm, I’ll have to read-up on the history and repost supplemental questions! - Jinx

5

I don’t know much about SA but I do know that if I’d been in prison for more than a quarter of a century and somebody described it as several years, I’d be a bit distressed. Of course, becoming president at the next election and the whole world loving me would ease the irritation.

6

One problem I’ve always had is understanding WHO are the Dutch? Aren’t they of German descent? There are many instances where the two terms (Dutch and German) are used almost interchangeably; yet, we also think of Dutch, Amsterdam, Holland, and images of windmills and tulips…

Maybe someone can set me straight about the relationship here.

  • Jinx
7

Historically (like really way back) I don’t really know but the Dutch nation came into existence with the Union of Utrecht in 1579. Dutch people are from The Netherlands. German people are from Germany. It gets fun when people (in the UK at least) almost always call The Netherlands Holland. I think Holland is just a province of The Netherlands, albeit the one with all the good stuff in.

8

Check out the flag of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (pro-aparteid). Decide for yourself.

Haj

9

That’s misleading and simplistic, Hajaro. I’m sure the French national socialists and Dtormfront in the States and whatever English supremacist group du jour uses something similar.
Ok. Dutch, the word, is related to Deutsch (now “German”) which originally meant something like ‘of the people’, which I think way back before the consonant shift was Teuscth, as in Teutonic. I think there’s a thread like this somewhere. Country of Germany proper develops in 19th C-- up until then Deutsch is a language. That was closely related to a language spoken in the area that was by the 17th C the United provinces of the Netherlands and the bordering Spanish Hapsburg Netherlands, aka Flanders, aka “Dutch”-speaking Belgium today. Today the Dutch-speakers call their language Nederlands-- over the past few centries the Netherlands Dutch and Flemish Dutch dialects developed a tad in their own directions but are totally mutually understandible (mostly pronounciation and vocabulary variations). The Germans call their language Deutsch, as they do their nationality (nationhood and Pan-Germanism an early 19th century concept-- before that they were Pommeranians and Prussians and Saxons and Bavarians and Holsteiners, etc). Perhaps at the time the Pennsylvania “Dutch” came over the distinctions between the various meanings of Dutch/ Deutsch hadn’t been entirely ironed out.
The white people in SA descend from Dutch and English people-- the word Afrikaans is Dutch and the language is a kind of Dutch that you would expect to differ after a few hundred years of isolation.
Holland is a province in the Netherlands.
I think this is accurate on a general level, and a start. Others welcome to correct and draw sharper distinctions.

10

(by the phrase “English surpemacist group” I mean 'neo-Nazi white supremacist groups that happen to be in England, of course)

11

Doh, third in a row but I realized we didn’t approach the OP-- the Dutch started the colonies of Transvaal and Free Orange State, um, 1700s? Then around 1900 the English moved in-- Boer War ensues. The country gets independence from England after that war and there is a tense peace with a Afrikaaner-English coalition. A party called the National Party gets a majority in the 40’s and enacts Apartheid in 1948 to control the masses. And then some stuff happens that someone more up on recent history can outline.
The German National Socialists might have been inspiring, but not a direct relationship here.

12

Yeah, yeah. I know. I was just being flip. Clearly there is a difference between Dutch and German as well as Holland and Germany.

It is true, though, that there was a great deal of sympathy for Nazi Germany among the Dutch South Africans in the 1930’s and 40’s, mainly because the Nazis were fighting the British. On the other hand, there were a lot of Jewish refugees who found a home in South Africa during that time too.

Here is an interesting article.

Haj

13

Dutch and German are both Germanic languages. As is English, Swedish, etc.

Germany orignated as a composite nation of Kingdoms/Duchies/Tribes of mostly West Germanic derivation ( a linguistic designation, not the modern political sense ) brought under unified control by the Carolingians. These included such peoples as the Alemanni ( in what is today roughly southwest Germany and parts of Switzerland ), who gave us the German term for Germany - Allemagne. The dominant composite tribe of the Franks ( divided between the those who had emigrated to northen France and been latinized to become the French and those in the original homeland - Franconia ). The Bavarians ( a fusion of those old Roman adversaries, the Marcomanni and Quadi ).The Saxons in Old Saxony, not the be confused with modern Saxony which is located in Eastern Germany in the old March of Meissen, but the territory in northern Germany just south of the Danish pennisula. The Burgundians in Eastern France and parts of Switzerland ( eventually mostly latinized and absorbed into France ), etc.

The Dutch were a branch of the Franks ( speaking the Old West Low Franconian dialect ). The Frisians were an offshoot of the Saxons most likely and like them heathen longer than most West Germanic peoples, in this case until at least 800 C.E. and were similarly absorbed into this empire as a section of the Duchy of Lorraine ( later split into a multiplicity of principalities ). Though Frisian is historically separate from Dutch, the two have synomized to some extent and both are Dutch in the sense of being from what is today the Netherlands. They remained technically Imperial subjects of the Holy Roman Empire, as a variety of statelets, then unified under the Burgundian Valois, thence to the Hapsburgs, until the 16-17th century when a series of extremely long revolts against the Spanish Hapsburgs ( who for reasons too tangled to go into detail at the moment had acquired the low countries when the Hapsburgs split into German and Spanish branches ). From 1648 ( Treaty of Munster-Osnabruck, an adjunct to the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War) the Netherlands was independant. However they had been on a somewhat separate historic trajectory ( gradually increasing ) from the rest of Germany for a few centuries before that.

So long story short - The Dutch are Germanic, but they aren’t German. Deutsch does mean German and it is more than coincidence in the resmblance of the two words. But Dutch and Deutsch aren’t the same in this day and age.

As to apartheid - It was certainly popular with the Afrikaaners ( mostly Dutch in origin, but also originally some Germans and French Hugenots ) and became a cornerstone of Afrikaans nationalism, even being tied up in their church. It began to form in the early 20th century and was codified over time, finally being fully instituted in 1948 after the National Party victory in elections ( South Africa was formed in 1910 in the merger of two Boer/Afrikaans provinces and two British colonies ). There was some relationship between Nazism and the National Party in the 1930’s and 1940’s, but I’m not certain how much ideological impact it had Apartheid as a philosophy. Regardless, though I’d hardly exonerate the local British from blame.

  • Tamerlane
14

Tamerlane makes some valuable additions. What are termed “Afrikaners” is an amalgam of the settlers from Holland who began arriving after 1652, and the French Huguenots, who started coming in the 18th century to escape persecution from the French Catholics. This explains the high proportions of French surnames like du Plessis, du Toit, de Villiers etc in the Afrikaans-speaking community. The language is like a freeze-dried version of Dutch (which BTW the people who speak it both in SA and Europe would have called Hollands) from about 200 years ago. I can read and understand current Dutch publications, but have difficulty having a live conversation because pronunciation has changed so much (another BTW - they speak a much closer version in northern Belgium, called Flemish).

More to the point of the thread, there was a strong movement within the National Party in the '30s and early '40s that saw a natural association developing with Nazi Germany. John Vorster, who later became Prime Minister (and as minister of “Justice” came to epitomise the evils of Apartheid), was jailed by the government of Jan Smuts for pro-Nazi activity. The sense of commonality comes about from a combination of anti-British feeling (the Afrikaners hate the Brits, with very good reason), and a similar approach to issues of race, although apartheid as a formal system didn’t emerge until the '60s with the advent of Hendrik Verwoerd as PM.

In answer to the question of the thread - the Nazis had nothing to do with the system that came to be known as Apartheid. The latter was an outgrowth of British racism, the standard Imperial doctrine of “divide and rule”, distortion of Protestant Christianity’s message, economic policy and many other factors.

15

Simple history of SA: (sorry for any mistakes, its off the top of my head)

Early 1800’s – U.K. captures Cape Town and the Cape Colony, ostensibly because its owners, the Dutch, are under control of Napoleon (Batavian Republic) and so it’s fair game. After Napoleon is defeated, the British keep the Cape anyway. They bring their progressive ways to the Dutch colonists, who, being essentially gun toting rednecks, hate them passionately.

1830’s or so – Because of british harassmanet the Boers, Dutch colonists, begin to leave the Cape colony, into the interior, and they found two states, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. They settle into areas that have been mostly cleared of natives by Shaka’s regiments, who has unified the Zulu recently and swept the highveld area clean as a buffer zone for protectiion. Despite a few encounters (Blood River), the natives and settlers don’t bother each other two much, as they are equally afraid of each other (N.B. just because these two states originally claimed a lot of land, does not mean they actually settled all of it.

Later… Diamonds discovered at Kimberley, in the Orange Free State. the British snatch it up. In the 1880’s, lots and lots of Gold is found on the Rand. the British decide they want this too, the Afrkaaners get pissed and decide to fight. Boer War starts in 1899. The Boer Commandos, guerrilla type forces, begin to whip the British right and left. The British are bleeding to death, and rather than face imperial humilition, they do what they wish they had done to us in 1776. They round up all the the Boer women and Children and put them into death camps. 25,000 women and children die here, and finally the Boer commandos surrender in 1902 the war is over, and the Afrikaaners truly begin to hate the British with a passion. The English gobble up the Free State and the Transvaal, which along with their Natal and Cape provinces, comprise the whole of SA. This includes all the Africans. The British had no problem establishing rule over them.

1910 – Union of South Africa established includes Afrikaaners, English settlers, and Africans. since the Africans have been minding their own business, they have no truck with the white rule. Since they can’t be assimilated into the new country, (they are tribal, most have had no contact with whites, nor can they speak a white language, they are ignored. It is believed that blacks and whites have irreconcilable differences that can never be worked out, and thus cannot form part of the same polity. Apartheid starts here.

Apartheid (“apartness”) means exactly that. Separate developement for whites and blacks. As such, apartheid is a Political phenomenon, not an economic, or racist one. After 1948, the apartheid policies start adding purely racist laws as well, that don’t have much to do with the political goals of separate development, but much to do with the fact that South Africans, Afrikaaner or English, are basically racist motherfu**ers. This is the differnece between Petty and GRand Apartheid.

I believe the primary motivation for apartheid was always political, even though it changed character. In the 70’s and '80s Southern Africa turned into a real bad. bad neighborhood. Marxist revolutions in Angola and Mozambique, Cuban troops in the area, Soviet money and spies… all scared the hell out of south Africans. The ANC, being an aknowledged Marxist organization, was more of a threat as a potentially Communist or Revolutionary entity than as an racially integrating threat. This was the time that SA developed nukes. They were so scared, with good cause, that no amount of international pressure was going to get them to give up apartheid if that meant turning SA into Mozambique. To me, there is no coincidence that Mandela was released from prison just 6 months after the berlin wall fell. So, you see, Apartheid was primarily a political phenomenon, even though its character changed over time. IMHO.

Apartheid had nothing to do with Nazism. South AFrica fought in the Second World War, and Afrikaaner Jan Smuts was made Field Marshal of the British Army. Those who fooled around with Nazi support were thrown inthe slammer, just like they were in Britain and elsewhere. I don’ t beleive that there were more Nazi subversive types in SA than in anyother european contry involved in that war – but that is a whole 'nother topic. The Republic of SA never engaged in ubermenschen type discourse to my knowlege (yes, I have asked.)

The flag issue is silly. Pissed Palestinians and bitter Russians wave Nazi flags. That does not mean that they had much in common with Himmler and co. The AWB, i believe, is just using that to get attention.

And the RSA seems to still be a one party state…
“meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”

Don’t send me any hate mail, please.

16

Not to minimize the horror of the camps, but the usual nomenclature is concentration camp, with death camp generally reserved for places like Auschwitz and Treblinka that were built by the Nazis for the express purpose of exterminating people. (The Nazi camp at Dachau, for example, is generally called a concentration camp, rather than a death camp–the tens of thousands who died there are contrasted against the hundreds of thousands who died in the extermination camps.)

The term “concentration camp” was first used by British members of the opposition party in parliament, Liberals C.P Scott and John Ellis, in March, 1901. The original camps were, indeed, refugee camps (made necessary by the burning of farmsteads initiated by General Roberts). When Kitchener took over the war effort, he changed the policy from one of burning selected farmsteads to one of a scorched earth policy of all farms and habitations in disputed areas, where the people on the land were then compelled to enter the camps.

The British reckoning of the death toll in the South African camps was about 20,000 whites and 12,000 others out of 154,000 detainees, mostly due to epidemics of typhoid and measles exacerbated by the close confinement and poor hygiene of the camps.

17

gonzalo de cordoba
Welcome to SD.

Nothing wrong with what you have posted here, so any hate mail you get comes from uninformed cranks and can be junked.

Although I would perhaps argue that there was a very strong element of economics in both British and Afrikaner black/white separation policies - the gold mines needed hundreds of thousands of cheap labourers … uneducated, willing to live in appalling dormitories on simple food and work 70 hour weeks in dangerous, unhealthy environments. Without these, SA could not have produced 30 million ounces a year of gold that could sell at the then fixed price of $25 per ounce (which was a fundamental platform in the central banking philosophy of all the western nations). Without the new gold, no fixed price. This is obviously a very simplistic analysis, but true nevertheless.

One more thing, I’m not sure that what you say about the ANC “being an aknowledged Marxist organization” is strictly true. The anti-separation movements became Marxists because they got zero support from the colonialist/imperialist western democracies, but got lots of help from Russia and China, mostly so that the freedom movements would cause the west so much trouble. The ANC came to be dominated by marxists because they were the ones able to produce the goods (money, arms, safe havens, training bases etc), not for dogmatic reasons, at least in the beginning.

18

What do you calll segregation?

19

Welcome to the boards gonzalo de cordoba. Good post, but just a couple of little caveats…

I suspect the Zulu would beg to differ, given Isandhlwana and all…

One could argue ( and I probably would ) that such a philosophical stance is inherently racist.

I’d agree - The ANC’s relationship with Marxism seems to have been complex. Initially there appears to have been some friction between the early ANC and the CPSA and Nelson Mandela opposed an alliance between the two in the 1940’s. After 1953 the ANC and CPSA under Joe Slovo began to merge ( but never did so totally - being more two overlapping organizations ), but not without a lot of internal tension ( including a split in 1959 between anti-Communist ANC and those more amenable to the alliance ). There were plenty of high-ranking Marxists like Chris Hani and Joe Slovo in the ANC leadership, but I’m not sure the ANC as a whole could have been said to be explicitly Marxist.

But certain Marxist-friendly ;).

  • Tamerlane
20

Were the drafters of the Apartheid policy influenced at all by the racial laws in the US? That could be one influence.