By Eric Louw
This tough South African nationalist gives his views. Detailed and closely argued. At a time when there were white South African statesmen of backbone, Eric Louw introduced a bill into Parliament restricting further Jewish immigration. Louw did so at the height of the war-mongering against Germany, and despite the condemnation called down upon him, his fellow Afrikaners maintained their high regard for him. Louw, a diplomat, was later to hold the ministries of economics and of foreign affairs, including Minister of External Affairs in the 1948 Nationalist Cabinet. He had been South Africa’s representative to the League of Nations in Geneva.
Louw spoke at a time when tens of thousands of Jews were leaving Hitler’s Germany, and many were seeking entry into South Africa where they had always enjoyed great influence. Many old Jewish families had settled down as part of the Afrikaner nation. Others however had adopted an antipathy for the Afrikaner both as monopolists such as Beit, Barnato and Oppenheimer, or as leaders of the Communist party. In later years this animosity was particularly manifested against the apartheid policy, because these Jewish capitalists and communists saw apartheid and Afrikaner nationalism as impediments to their plans for an integrated economic state.
