He had over three hours to wait. He went into the nearest liquor store and bought wine, gin, whisky, brandy, and beer. He collected his Landrover and drove into the covered parking attached to his hotel. He went back to his room.
It was not yet one o’clock. He telephoned Johan Lombard, but he was out. He telephoned the German Club and asked for him.
‘Just phoned to invite you for lunch.’
‘Excellent, dear boy, why don’t you come and join me with the Krauts?’
‘You said you’d rather not discuss certain subjects at the German Club.’
‘Got you, dear boy, got you,’ Johan said, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t leave my colleagues right now. However I’ve arranged with Professor Jansen for you to pop up to the university anytime. Here’s her number …’
One of the biggest universities in the world is the University of South Africa. It has over one hundred thousand students. It is a massive complex on the hillsides outside Pretoria, set in manicured gardens. But there are few lecture rooms, no playing fields, no dormitory blocks: all the students receive their lectures by correspondence. Most of them are people whose daily responsibilities preclude attendance at an ordinary university, and the majority are non-white.
McQuade was impressed. He had lunch in the big staff dining-room with Professor Jansen. She was a pale, severe, attractive woman in her forties who was quite unsurprised by McQuade’s visit and his questions: she was accustomed to pilgrimages from students. She seemed to assume that McQuade knew nothing as he was a student of the University of London.
‘Historically the Afrikaner and the Germans identify with one another – that is why so many Germans came here, particularly after the last war. I, for example, am almost entirely German by blood, though my family has been here for generations and I regard myself as an Afrikaner. The Afrikaners of the war period identified with the Germans because they were anti-British. Hitler’s victory would have enabled the Afrikaner to get his country back which the British had stolen.’ She pointed with her fork. ‘It all started with the Great Trek.’
McQuade knew most of this but he did not want to interrupt the professor’s flow. She went on: ‘The British captured the Cape from the Dutch at the beginning of the last century. The Dutch resented British rule so they packed up their ox-wagons and trekked out. With great bitterness and suffering. They settled down legally on empty territory and established their little Boer republics. Then they struck gold. What happens? Britain comes along and annexes them. So there followed the Boer War.’ She waved her fork. ‘The might of the great British Empire hurled against these backward little republics. Three years of bitter guerrilla war, scorched earth, British concentration camps. And when the Boers were finally crushed, their republics were forced into a British-dominated Union of South Africa.’ She looked at McQuade. ‘And for the next forty years the pro-British element ruled the roost in South Africa! Politically, culturally, economically. While the Boers, the Afrikaners, were like poor-whites, backward country bumpkins who had been robbed of their country.’ She shook her head at him. ‘So now there was the bitterness of backwardness after the bitterness of being robbed, after the bitterness of the Great Trek.’
McQuade wanted to get back to the German content. He ventured: ‘Meanwhile, in South West Africa …?’
‘Meanwhile in South West Africa-Namibia a similar situation developed. After the First World War, Namibia had been handed to South Africa to administer, making the German residents bitter. So when Hitler went to war against Britain, both the Germans in Namibia and the bitter Afrikaners were rooting for him to win, because that would break the British yoke in southern Africa. And the Ossewabrandwag – which was the military wing of the Afrikaner movement – engaged in all kinds of sabotage. So many were put in concentration camps. And again these bitter-enders were frustrated – because Hitler lost the war. So the Afrikaners were still under the British yoke. But then,’ she held up a finger, ‘then, in the aftermath of war, came the new elections. In Britain, Winston Churchill – who had “won” the war’ – she made quotation marks with her fingers – ‘was defeated, and in South Africa, General Smuts, who had been in Churchill’s Imperial War Cabinet, also lost the election. For the first time in one hundred years the Afrikaner was master in his own country at last! For the first time since the British occupation of the Cape.’ She looked at him with bright eyes. ‘Can’t you imagine the rejoicing? The emotional … orgasm of the Afrikaner people?’
McQuade nodded.
‘And the new Afrikaner government opened its doors to the defeated Germans who had been their spiritual allies against the British. Thousands flocked here.’
‘And many of them were Nazis?’
‘Of course. Germany was full of Nazis who needed a new home.’
‘But Nazi war-criminals?’
‘What do you think? Germany was full of war-criminals who the Allies were determined to prosecute once the gates of Auschwitz and the like were opened, and they saw what had happened. Nazi war-criminals were fleeing Germany like rats, and South Africa – in particular South West Africa – was a very attractive place for them. Namibia was German already, the Afrikaner was pro-German, and they were Aryans. Even the languages were similar, and the customs. The new Afrikaner government welcomed them as reinforcements against the British element.’
‘And they rewarded the government with their political support?’ McQuade asked.
‘Indeed. But now, forty years later, that German connection is an embarrassment to the government, because now the failure of Apartheid has become evident. The government has finally come to realize not only that it is unworkable, it can’t defy world opinion indefinitely, and there must be some form of power-sharing with the blacks. This has resulted in a split amongst the Afrikaners, between the reformists and the hardliners. This,’ she held up a finger, ‘is where the Nazi element comes back to haunt the government. Because the AWB, the ultra-hardliners, not only want to perpetuate Apartheid, they want their own pure-white state, a “volkstaat”, in which there will be no blacks at all. And this volkstaat will be run on Nationalist-Socialist lines, like Hitler’s Germany. Even the AWB flag has a swastika on it, with three arms instead of four, but unmistakably a swastika. And the AWB appeals widely to the old Afrikaner spirit.’
McQuade said, ‘But are the AWB really Nazis?’
‘No doubt about it. An examination of their manifesto makes that obvious. The “Herrenvolk” idea appears repeatedly, as does anti-semitism. They openly reject the parliamentary system of democracy as obsolete, calling it the “British–Jewish” parliamentary system, and demand an authoritarian system, with no opposition political parties. They want a centralized one-party political body with dictatorial powers. Where, in their own words, “community interests always take precedence over individual interests”. And of course, they’ve got the same rampant racist superiority as the Nazis – the blood and soil rhetoric, the socialist and militaristic emphasis, their swastika and eagle emblem, the red-black-white colours of the Nazis, the warped religious admixture, and the leadership cult – and their leader, Eugene Terreblanche, is almost as charismatic as Hitler was, with the same powers of rhetoric. He rants and raves very effectively and drives his audiences wild. He’s studied Hitler’s speech-making style, and even gives Hitler’s sloppy salute, and goes about surrounded by bodyguards.’ She snorted. ‘The laugh is that for all his racism, if he has his way South Africa will become just another tin-pot one-party African state, because he’s the typical African dictator.’
‘And could he get his way?’
The professor snorted again. ‘The AWB is not to be taken lightly. They are not simply a “lunatic fringe”, as people like to call them. They have a very big following indeed. Their appeal is that they claim to be the true torch-bearers of the original Afrikaner nationalism – they say the Botha government has deserted the true cause, gone soft on Apartheid, intends to share power with the blacks, the beginning of the end, et cetera. Their appeal is their directness, their return to the values of the old republics. This appeals very much to the Afrikaner with his dour Calvinistic values who expects his political leaders to be straight and rigid. Now the AWB has put its weight behind the Conservative Party, the hard-liner members of parliament who split away from the government a few years ago. And as a result the Conservative Party is now the official opposition.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘So in reality the AWB is the official opposition! That’s how seriously we have to take them.’ She paused. ‘Now we’re in the sobering situation where the Nationalist Party, which has ruled this country with its iron rod of Apartheid for forty years, is now the moderate, centre party defending themselves against the right. And,’ she ended emphatically, ‘they have every reason to be worried, because at the next election the Conservative Party and AWB could win.’
McQuade was thinking of Hitler’s Grand Design, his blueprint for Africa. ‘And these Nazis who came here after the war – they support the AWB? And the Conservative Party?’
The professor glanced at her watch. ‘Most of those Germans just wanted to forget and start a new life. Indeed most of them were innocent of any wrong-doing. But the true Nazis?’ She shook her head. ‘They were the Master Race, remember. They were going to change the world into a paradise for Aryans. For this ideal they sacrificed all norms of morality, countenanced all brutality, rationalized genocide. Dehumanized themselves by deifying themselves.’ She shook her head again. ‘People like that don’t think they were wrong, particularly in an environment like South Africa. They kept a low profile, sure, but many were active in their own groups, keeping the spirit of Hitler alive. Now they’ve grouped themselves behind the AWB, as a front for their own political ambitions.’
McQuade’s mind was trying to race through what Wiesenthal had told him about Odessa and the Strasbourg Conference for the recreation of the Third Reich: ‘And what are those ambitions? Are they different from the AWB’s?’
‘I am an historian, not a political journalist.’ The professor smiled. ‘My expertise stops here. But having said that, do you know the story of Robey Leibbrandt, the South African Olympic boxer who Hitler sent to assassinate General Smuts during the war?’
McQuade nodded earnestly.
‘If Robey Leibbrandt had succeeded in assassinating General Smuts, and mounting a coup,’ Professor Jansen continued, ‘Hitler would have cut off Australia, New Zealand, the whole Far East, and dominated both the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic all the way to South America, which was pro-Nazi anyway. He’d have won the war. That would have left only America to worry about.’ She looked at him professorially, as if she were addressing a tutorial. ‘Can you imagine how different the world would be today if he had succeeded, and Africa in particular?’ She frowned. ‘Autobahns from Cape Town to Cairo. Efficient railway lines streaking across the continent carrying raw materials. The natural resources of this magnificent continent scientifically exploited and redeveloped, instead of raped.’ She waved a hand: ‘The forests preserved and replanted, instead of hacked down mindlessly for firewood. The land refertilized, instead of turning into dust bowls. The wildlife conserved instead of butchered into extinction …’
McQuade waited, desperate to hear professorial evidence that his submarine was loaded with Odessa loot to recreate the Third Reich. He said earnestly: ‘But the Nazis who came here after the war, who are now grouping behind the AWB – are you saying that they are doing so as part of a scheme to implement Hitler’s old blueprint for Africa?’ He waved his hand. ‘To create the Fourth Reich, in South Africa?’
Professor Jansen smiled. Then shook her head.
‘I am simply an academic, whose job it is to understand history. I’m not going to stick my neck out on a ragbag of newspaper facts.’ She glanced at her watch again. ‘For that you must look to Johan Lombard, the purveyor of current events …’