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Hitler's Spies

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
280 Seiten
Englisch
Jonathan Ballerschienen am16.04.2021
The story of the intelligence war in South Africa during the Second World War is one of suspense, drama and dogged persistence. In 1939, when the Union of South Africa entered the war on Britain's side, the German government secretly reached out to the political opposition, and to the leadership of the anti-war movement, the Ossewabrandwag. The Nazis' aim was to spread sedition in South Africa and to undermine the Allied war effort. The critical strategic importance of the sea route round the Cape of Good Hope meant that the Germans were also after naval intelligence. Soon U-boat packs were sent to operate in South African waters, to deadly effect. With the help of the Ossewabrandwag, a network of German spies was established to gather important political and military intelligence and relay it back to the Reich. Agents would use a variety of channels to send coded messages to Axis diplomats in neighbouring Mozambique. Meanwhile, police detectives and MI5 agents hunted in vain for illegal wireless transmitters. Hitler's Spies presents an unrivalled account of the German intelligence networks that operated in wartime South Africa. It also details the hunt in post-war Europe for witnesses to help the government bring charges of high treason against key Ossewabrandwag members.

DR EVERT KLEYNHANS is a senior lecturer in the Department of Military History at the Faculty of Military Science of Stellenbosch University.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextThe story of the intelligence war in South Africa during the Second World War is one of suspense, drama and dogged persistence. In 1939, when the Union of South Africa entered the war on Britain's side, the German government secretly reached out to the political opposition, and to the leadership of the anti-war movement, the Ossewabrandwag. The Nazis' aim was to spread sedition in South Africa and to undermine the Allied war effort. The critical strategic importance of the sea route round the Cape of Good Hope meant that the Germans were also after naval intelligence. Soon U-boat packs were sent to operate in South African waters, to deadly effect. With the help of the Ossewabrandwag, a network of German spies was established to gather important political and military intelligence and relay it back to the Reich. Agents would use a variety of channels to send coded messages to Axis diplomats in neighbouring Mozambique. Meanwhile, police detectives and MI5 agents hunted in vain for illegal wireless transmitters. Hitler's Spies presents an unrivalled account of the German intelligence networks that operated in wartime South Africa. It also details the hunt in post-war Europe for witnesses to help the government bring charges of high treason against key Ossewabrandwag members.

DR EVERT KLEYNHANS is a senior lecturer in the Department of Military History at the Faculty of Military Science of Stellenbosch University.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781776190218
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2021
Erscheinungsdatum16.04.2021
Seiten280 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1962 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.11926471
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe


Introduction

The vast majority of academic and popular histories on the South African participation in the Second World War have traditionally focused on the military operations of the Union Defence Force (UDF) during the campaigns in East Africa, North Africa, Madagascar and Italy. Single battles during the war, such as the defeats at Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk, or the gallant defence at the first battle of El Alamein, have received the bulk of attention.

More recently, there has been a drive by historians to study the South African participation in the war from a more general war-and-society approach. A new crop of local historians have begun to challenge the status quo, consciously moving away from the traditional drum and trumpet approach. Historians such as Ian van der Waag, Karen Horn1 and David Katz,2 to name a few, have started to reconsider the South African participation in the war from different perspectives. These new military histories have helped to rekindle popular interest in the war. Unfortunately, despite this renewed interest, the quantity and quality of Second World War histories produced in South Africa lags drastically behind current international trends. This holds true for both popular and academic works.3

My own interest in the South African home front during the war was sparked while working as a historian at the Department of Defence Archives in Pretoria. As a young lieutenant in the enquiries section, I often had free rein to investigate the dusty corners of the military archives. As the late Jeff Grey put it so aptly, I stood humbly in the antechambers of Clio.4 Fresh out of the honours programme in military history offered by the Faculty of Military Science of Stellenbosch University, and with a healthy appetite to acquire new knowledge, I used every available opportunity to draw files on whatever stirred my curiosity.

One day in 2012, a file titled U-boat matters - Operation Order Eisbär caught my eye. The document in question detailed the first sustained German U-boat operation launched along the South African coast towards the end of 1942. Adjacent to this file, there were three archival boxes full of material documenting a unique and overlooked aspect of the naval war in South African waters. After a further trawl of the archives, I discovered a wealth of substantiating material, ranging from personal accounts to war diaries, logbooks and operational orders - some even in the original German.

I realised then and there that I wanted to learn more about this understudied episode of South African military history. There was indeed a story to be told. This chance discovery set in motion a series of events that spanned nearly seven years, the culmination of which was the successful completion of my doctoral dissertation at Stellenbosch University in 2018.5

From the outset it was apparent that both professional and amateur historians had paid scant attention to the South African home front during the war. Moreover, the naval war in South African waters, and especially the interrelated aspects of maritime insecurity, naval strategy, antisubmarine warfare and the broader intelligence war in the region, had been largely cast aside. In this regard, the works of Neil Orpen and Kalfie Martin,6 Jennifer Crwys-Williams7 and Bill Nasson8 immediately come to mind.

As I embarked on my research, I took heed of the forewarning by the renowned British historian Jeremy Black, who cautions that the uniqueness of naval history requires it to be studied in the context of the conflict on land and in the air. Despite Black s warning, histories focusing on the naval war off the southern African coast have generally fallen into the trap of reducing naval history to a mere tactical and operational study of the conflict at sea.

This isolationist approach is particularly evident in South Africa, with the vast majority of the available histories addressing the naval war on an operational level only.9 What is needed is a detailed appreciation of the home front during the war, especially the key role the pro-Afrikaner cultural movement the Ossewabrandwag played in support of the German war effort and in opposition to South African involvement in the war.

It also requires an investigation into the intelligence war waged in the country, since the German government actively reached out to the Ossewabrandwag and established a spy network in collaboration with them. I wanted to establish whether there was a link: did naval intelligence gathered in southern Africa and transmitted to Germany in any way influence the naval war? Also, what level of threat did the spy network present to national security?

My appointment as institutional archivist at North-West University in Potchefstroom, in July 2015, opened up several new research avenues concerning the broader naval war. As part of my new posting, I also became the de facto archivist of the Ossewabrandwag Archive. This underappreciated, and largely unknown, archival collection contains key source material detailing the nature and operation of the German intelligence networks in southern Africa during the war. The archive documents the links between Johannes Frederick Janse van Rensburg, commonly known as Hans van Rensburg, Ossewabrandwag leader, his inner circle and Germany throughout the war.

I had stumbled upon a proverbial treasure trove of information, which had been largely withheld from historians after the National Party s electoral victory in 1948. More importantly, the documents in the Ossewabrandwag Archive offered a counterpoint to the vast trove of MI5 case files preserved at the National Archives of the United Kingdom in Kew, London. Despite their decidedly one-sided approach, British historians had used these very files to write up the first accounts detailing the intelligence war in southern Africa. I was in the fortunate position where I could combine both sets of primary documents, as well as the available secondary sources, in an attempt to get closer to the illusory historical truth .

Jeremy Black champions the re-examination of historical events, particularly when the military historian can reconcile a variety of primary and secondary sources on a specific subject. He argues that such a reassessment allows the military historian the unique opportunity to reinterpret previous historical accounts, probe largely untapped primary archival sources, and provide a fresh analysis of key moments in military history. Such an opportunity presented itself with this book.10

Black, citing Rory Muir s Salamanca 1812, highlights the unique undertaking thus created. Muir states:

[W]hile the sources are plentiful, they do not always fit neatly together; indeed, they are riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies, gaps and uncertainty ⦠Normally the historian deals privately with these problems ⦠This method is inescapable in addressing a large, sweeping subject if the narrative is not to lose its momentum and the reader to miss the thread of the argument. However, it can also mislead the reader by suggesting that our understanding is far more securely based than is the case.11

Methodology, historiography and archival sources

The American historians Stephen Morillo and Michael Pavkovic argue for a broad definition of military history. To them the essence of military history encompasses:

not just the history of war and wars, but any historical study in which military personnel of all sorts, warfare, military institutions, and their various intersections with politics, economics, society, nature and culture form the focus or topic of the work. One obvious implication of such a broad definition is that many works of military history could also be classified variously as political, economic, institutional, intellectual, social or cultural history. Indeed the best history, military and otherwise, necessarily crosses many of these abstract academic boundaries in order to present as rich and rounded a view of the past as possible.12

The renowned British historian Sir Michael Howard, in support of this broad definition, cautions that the study of military history requires both depth and breadth, as well as context: depth, to move beyond the imposed historical patterns of apparent orderliness in a concerted effort to try and understand what war was really like; breadth, to understand the sequence of historical events as well as the existence of continuity and discontinuity in the past; and context, to appreciate the myriad of social, political and economic factors that influence the military in general.13

Generally speaking, the study of military history is not well respected within the broader academic community of historians. This is especially true in South Africa. The root of this disregard lies in the very subject matter of military history - war. But despite this general academic disdain, military history remains ever-popular with the reading public.14

In South Africa three approaches to military history can be discerned: popular, professional and academic. The popular approach to military history by far dominates the available historiography on the bookshelves. The...

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