South African Collectors’ Society

Hugh Amoore recently gave an inspirational Zoom presentation to the South African Collectors’ Society on the subject of ‘Internment in South Africa’ during WW1′. Those who did not see it missed something special. It will be very difficult improve on what we saw.

The next issue of The Springbok will include a full report on Hugh’s Zoom display. Rather than duplicate that here I have chosen to combine the material which Hugh supplied to us with additional items from SACS members in order to underline the events of 1914 that helped shape ‘White South African’ politics for much of the 20th Century.

If you have material that can illustrate political developments in SA and internationally before and during WW1, as well as the events that led to the internment of Enemy Aliens and the outburst of riotous public disorder known as ‘Germanophobia’ that so convulsed patriotic ‘British South Africa’, please send it to me so that I can include it here.

Postage Rates of the Period
Between 1910 to 1919, the period that included WW1 and internment, the postage rate in the Union of South Africa and also SWA once conquered, remained much without change.

The domestic mail rate on a standard sealed letter was a 1d up to a ½ ounce or a part thereof, a postcard a ½d. Overseas letters to Britain and the Empire were a 1d per ½ ounce and 2½d to foreign destinations (like Germany or the USA). A registered letter was 4d plus the relevant cost of postage. Importantly, mail from servicemen, POWs and Internees firing WW1 was free of charge except in the case of the Registration of mail.

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Victory in the SAW (South African War 1899 – 1902 ) saw Britain achieve its long-held imperial goal for southern Africa, the unification of its British colonies of the Cape and Natal with the ‘Boer’ republics of the OFS (Orange Free State) and ZAR (South African Republic aka ‘Transvaal). This led to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.

The defeated Boers made it clear that there could be no negotiations with Britain if Black South Africans were given political rights. For its part Britain felt that Black South Africans were yet not ready to run a rapidly industrialising country whose mineral wealth its Empire had fought an expensive war to acquire. When the negotiating parties finally agreed the form of the Union of South Africa, the Act of Union introduced the concept of ‘White South Africa’. Black South Africans were excluded from the political life of the country.

Among the Europeans the largest group was the emerging Afrikaner race. It was divided into two broad groups, either unreconciled nationalists who wanted the restoration of republican rule and those prepared to forgive-and-forget and join the English-speaking community in supporting Britain, the King and the Empire. The first Prime Minister of the Union was the ex-commander of ZAR (Transvaal) ‘Boer’ forces, General Louis Botha. He believed South Africa’s interests would be best served by allegiance to Britain and the Empire. With the outbreak of WW1 in Europe his loyalty to the Imperial cause created a bitter schism within Afrikanerdom that would last for much of the 20th Century.

The start of WW1 in August 1914 forced a decision on the Afrikaner people as to which one of the warring European powers they would support. The ‘methods of barbarism’ (Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal MP) that Britain employed to defeat the ‘Boers’ remained a fresh and bitter memory for many Afrikaners. Many favoured neutrality while Nationalists saw in a German victory the chance to restore their lost republics. Botha saw the chance to to expand the Union’s territory under the Empire’s umbrella and seize GSWA (German South West Africa) for the landless second son’s of SA farmers.

Many White South Africans resented Germany’s occupation of SWA in 1884. They believed that SWA was and should have been part of colonial South Africa, specifically the Cape. Germany’s occupation of the territory was generally not welcomed. Its brutal suppression of the Herereo and Nama rebellions shocked some South Africans, including Manie Maritz, the future leader of the 1914 Rebellion. Within GSWA both British and Afrikaners, most especially those of mixed race, suffered from German notions of racial superiority. Annoyoing as it was, the German presence represented little threat initially.

Before the SAW Germany had sold arms to the ‘Boers’. During the conflict it had offered sympathy but no military support. Many ‘Boers’ believed Germany had let them down. The reality was that in 1900 Germany was unprepared for war with Britain but by 1914 this had changed. Germany had become a European powerhouse capable of delivering an industrial, commercial, maritime and naval challenge to Britain, the Ruler of the Waves. The jingoistic, pro-Empire British in SA, surrounded as they were by ‘Boers’ and Blacks, were dependent on the Royal Navy for their ties to kith, kin and the distant Empire. They now developed a greater fear of Germany than the Boers had a love of it.

The 1911 Union Census had registered 1,116,806 Whites and 4,697,152 Black South Africans. Of the White South Africans, 12,798 were born in Germany or Austria while 181,972 were born in Brtain. After Britain entered the First World War on 4th August 1914 there was mixed support for war in SA. Many Afrikaners within Botha’s power base wanted to remain neutral while most British South Africans were for loyally rushing to rally around the flag. Unfortunately for the German and Austrian men living in SA any choice they had in taking or not taking sides was soon removed by government edict.

In Germany all men were subject to compulsory military service. Those who migrated to SA remained German military reservists. Two days after Britain entered the war, Earl Buxton, the British Governor-General in the Union, was shown local newspaper advertisements which advised German and Austrian reservists living in SA to report for military duty in Europe. The next day, 7th August, Botha’s government ordered all German officers and reservists between the ages of 18 and 56 to be arrested. Austrian reservists were initially exempted but on 13th August the same rules were applied to them.

Also on 7th August Britain requested that the Union of SA perform an ‘urgent imperial’ service’ to capture the harbours of GSWA and destroy the long-distance wireless transmitters based there. Botha agreed to invade the German colony but faced opposition from his ‘Boer’ allies in government and the unreconciled republicans who now saw war in Europe as a God-given opportunity to reclaim their lost republic. By demanding and winning a Parliamentary declaration of war on Germany on 14th September and occupying Luderitzbucht on the 18th Botha bought matters to a head. He would spend the next three months suppressing a Repulican Revolt.

The tensions created by the war in Europe and Germany’s early victories drove many proudl but insecure British South Africans to become antagonistic towards the country’s small German community, one which had enjoyed integration within the Dutch / Boer / Afrikaner language group since the earliest years of European settlement at the Cape. Generally, the great majority of Afrikaners would remain nonpartisan, distancing themselves from the jingoism that increasingly convulsed British South Africans.

Exaggerated and sensationalist British and Belgian press reports detailing the so-called German ‘Rape of Belgium’ were repeated in South African newspapers. The strength of anti-German feeling that developed can be seen in the two images below. The first, drawn in 1914, is presumably a response to the ‘Rape of Belgium’ while the second from 1915 probably results from the sinking of the Lusitania. Both images are taken from the contemporary scrapbook of Johannesburg schoolboy, George Jacobie of West Cliff Drive, Park View.

Pro-Empire South Africans responded to the perceived German aggression and atrocities in a variety of ways. Many eagerly signed up to fight, like the volunteer Prince Alfred’s Guard regiment from the Eastern Cape, an area with an established German community and a hotbed of anti-German sentiment. So eager were the Prince Alfred’s Guard to serve in GSWA that they mutinied in Cape Town when left behind with orders to defend the docks, a vital supply route for the invasion. Their punishment was to not serve at all.

In an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the ‘Boer’ people for his and Botha’s Imperial cause, Smuts claimed that they shared the same blood as the Belgians and the French. He stated that the cause at stake was the freedom of their European kin. The caused the UDF (Union Defence Force) Commandant-General Christiaan Beyers to respond to Smuts, his superior, saying that “it is said that the war is being waged against the ‘barbarism’ of the Germans. We have forgiven but not forgotten all the barbarities committed in our own country during the war,” He would align with Maritz’s Republican Rebellion.

Germanophobia would reach its peak when RMS Lusitania, a British-registered ocean liner, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Ireland on 7th May 1915 with the loss of almost 1,200 lives. This was followed by widespread public outrage across ‘British SA’. Germans were attacked and German-owned businesses set alight, some £750,000 worth of damages being inflicted on German-owned properties in Johannesburg alone.

It would be wrong to imply that there was no sympathy within British South Africa for the plight of individual Germans. Postcards written in English to POWs can be found expressing sentiments of personal sadness at the unfairness of their internment.

Within a week of the declaration of war in Europe, most German and Austrian men at large in SA were interned. By 11th September many had been assembled at Milner Park (Agricultural Showgrounds). By October they were to be found at Roberts Heights (Army Camp); Beaconsfield, Kimberley, (Wesselton mine); Tempe, Bloemfontein, OFS and Fort Napier, Pietermaritzburg, Natal, (both army camps of the Imperial Garrison recently departed to fight in France ). The Roberts Heights internees would be transferred to Fort Napier which became the main internment camp for German civilian / reservists in SA.

Among the Milner Park internees was a Mr Lodemann, a photographer who was able to keep his camera for the duration of his internment. Thanks to him we now have a record of the daily life of the prisoners at Milner Park, Roberts Heights and Fort Napier. The photo below shows the internee’s latrines at Milner Park Agricultural Showground. The primitive conditions in these ad hoc POW camps placed pressure on the authorities to move the internees to somewhere more suitable, secure and salubrious.

For many Afrikaners interment raised the spectre of the Refugee Camps of the SAW (aka ‘Concentration Camps’) in which over 40,000 Blacks and Whites had died. The deaths of ‘Boer’ Women and children had been so profound that the Mayor of Stellenbosch, Paul Cluver, felt compelled to write to the Minister of Defence (later Prime Minister) Jan Smuts in September 1914. He warned that“Afrikaner internees and their children have been bitter enemies of everything British ever since” (the SAW). Cluver warned that if Germans now died in Union captivity like the Boer women and children had done in British concentration camps the Union government “would be blamed for many years to come”.

Such public outcry and the need for a proper place of imprisononment saw the internees moved from Milner Park to Roberts Heights. As their numbers grew it was decided to transfer the internees to Fort Napier outside Pietermaritzburg, Natal which had been vacated by the Imperial Garrison when it departed for France. The cover below shows that there were already internees at Fort Napier before the bulk arived from Roberts Heights. Some 2,000 internees were transferred to Fort Napier by 25th October 1914. For all but a fortunate few who won release or parole, it was to be their home until July 1919.

The cover below shows the use of a rectangular trilingual ‘PRISONER OF WAR’ cachet and a one line ‘PASSED BY CENSOR’ mark at ROBERTS HEIGHTS on ’19 OCT 14′. This was posted just a few days before internees were moved to Fort Napier from Roberts Heights.

The cover below was posted from FORT NAPIER on ’12 NOV 15′. Its ‘PASSED BY CENSOR’ mark is shorter but the cachet is the same as the one used at Roberts Heights, suggesting that it accompanied the internees from Roberts Heights to Fort Napier.

Over time, civilian internees were transferred to Fort Napier while some military POWs were sent to the now conquered SWA. The cover, below, suggests that Robert Schurig was transferred from Fort Napier, Pietermaritzburg, Natal to Kimberley, Cape. He would eventually be sent to Ludertizbucht, SWA, where he was paroled. Schurig’s journey from Fort Napier via Kimberley to SWA is not unique. At least one German reservist POW (wounded at the Battle of Sam Kubis and captured recuperating in hospital in Windhoek) was transported via Cape Town to Kimberley where he was held in the Wesselton Mine, Beaconsfield. He was subsequently returned to SWA and paroled.

Robert Schurig had a business in Luderitzbucht. He was probably unluckily on business in the Union or travelling through it when he was arrested and detained in Fort Napier. Later, as a paroled resident of Luderitzbucht, Schurig was the recipient of many letters from the German POW Camp at Aus. These date from at least as early as 11th Octoberr 1916.

Another of the fortunates to be released from Fort Napier was Gustav Wiener, below, who took comfort at the Imperial Hotel, Aliwal North.

It appears that the Messrs Werndle Bros attempted to continue to run their business while confined to Fort Napier. This was in contravention of South Africa’s ‘Trading with the Enemy’ legislation. Mr F. K. Werndle, POW 401 (410 above) received the following Official OHMS postcard from Defence Headquarters, Pretoria.

During their incarceration in Fort Napier many of the internees wrote letters to their families and friends in Germany. These were sent free of charge except when the item was sent Registered mail. This required the internee to pay the cost of registration, as in the 4d Registered Letter to Berlin, Germany below. There is a wide range of internee mail from the camps to varying destinations, including Germany and Switzerland, both the Red Cross in Geneva and the International Peace Bureau in Berne. All mail was subject to censorship and the application of censor postmarks and sealing tape.

The following wonderful watercolors painted by Friedrich Butzbach, an internee at Fort Napier, show the daily life in the camp. (Images Copyright Hugh Amoore.)

The Milner Park latrine photographer, Mr Lodemann, continued to take photographs throughout his internment. Many of these became camp-produced pictorial postcards that record the daily life and routine of the Fort Napier internees who did their best to keep their spirits up, even holding dances and plays where men dressed as women. Lodeman took the photo of Emil Neubert as saucy minx giving the come hither look, below.

Adding a further human element to this misery was a postcard sent by a young woman to Mr Lodemann at the start the of his interment. She expressing her sadness at his incarceration. He kept this postcard with him until released with other prisoners in August / September 1919 after the formal German surrender at Treaty of Versailles which was officially signed on 28th June 1919.