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FTR#1430 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

NB: Roelof Botha of Sequoia Cap­i­tal is the grand­son of Pik Botha, the For­eign Min­is­ter of South Africa dur­ing its twi­light years.

Intro­duc­tion: Detail­ing a num­ber of con­nec­tions that bind the past, the present and the future, this pro­gram notes a plan to con­struct an orbital mir­ror sys­tem to reflect the sun’s rays, a project that was envi­sioned by the Project Paper­clip Nazi sci­en­tists as a weapon sys­tem that could rule the world.

Turn­ing to “L’Af­faire Epstein,” the pro­gram sets forth the fas­cist pol­i­tics encom­pass­ing Epstein and those around him.

Where­as the pub­lic has heard that the Epstein man­i­fes­ta­tion is “Israel, Israel, Israel,” “Mossad, Mossad, Mossad,” the real­i­ty of the Epstein net­work is Nazi/fascist, and that milieu, in turn, is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with Peter Thiel and a bril­liant Nazi hack­er named Andrew Aueren­heimer aka “Weev.”

A very impor­tant expose by inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Bar­rett Brown con­nects Thiel, Epstein, hedge funds with which they are linked, to high-tech sur­veil­lance devices at the fore­front of MAGA anti-minor­i­ty and anti-immi­grant pro­fil­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

The pro­gram con­cludes with a bril­liant arti­cle recap­ping the pro­found Nazi influ­ence on the Apartheid gov­ern­ment of South Africa. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and oth­er sig­nif­i­cant play­ers on “Team Trump” have back­grounds in Apartheid South Africa.

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: Nico Diederichs and his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Hitler-Goebbels Anti-Com­intern; Diederichs’ key role in help­ing to devel­op the Apartheid atom­ic bomb; Review of Peter Thiel’s father’s work on the Apartheid atom­ic bomb project; The net­work­ing of Aueren­heimer with Thiel pro­tege Jeff Gis­esea; Gisea’s appar­ent role in chan­nel­ing mon­ey to the Dai­ly Stormer; Charles John­son’s net­work­ing with Aueren­heimer; John­son’s involve­ment with the anti-black and anti-immi­grant ide­o­log­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion; Review of Wern­er von Braun’s mem­ber­ship in the SS; Dis­cus­sion of the Nazi-aligned Gray Shirts in South Africa; Dis­cus­sion of the Nazi-aligned Osse­wa Brand­wag; The Nazi align­ment of Broeder­bond mem­bers and even­tu­al heads of the Apartheid South African gov­ern­ment Vorster, Ver­wo­erd, Diederichs and Botha; The Nazi back­ground of Har­ry Swarz, even­tu­al­ly South Africa’s ambas­sador to the U.S.; Review of the Broeder­bond’s cen­tral role in the South African Apartheid gov­ern­ment; Review of Elon Musk’s giv­ing the Nazi Salute; Aueren­heimer’s net­work­ing with Pierre Omid­yar.

For more back­ground on Paper­clip, Von Braun & com­pa­ny, see FTR#1146.

For more back­ground on Thiel, Musk, the Broeder­bond et al, see FTR#‘s 1375, 1377.

1.–Project Paper­clip: Ger­man Sci­en­tists and the Cold War by Clarence Las­by; Atheneum Press [HC]; ISBN 9780689705243; 1971.

. . . . He [Major Robert Staver] had lis­tened earnest­ly as the spe­cial­ists described their future plans. They would con­struct an “out­er” sta­tion, use­ful for astronomers and for the launch­ing of space­ships into the stel­lar regions. They would con­struct a large reflec­tor for focus­ing the sun’s rays onto the earth for pow­er gen­er­at­ing pur­pos­es. The lat­ter could be used as well for anoth­er objec­tive, “which has been described as a ter­ri­ble thing, a weapon which will enable the first coun­try to achieve this under­tak­ing to rule the world. The focus­ing of this reflec­tor upon any liv­ing per­sons would kill them imme­di­ate­ly. Ocean water would be instant­ly turned to steam; a for­est instant­ly kin­dled.” Impressed by the Ger­mans’ advanced think­ing, and recep­tive to their expressed desire to con­tin­ue work in the Unit­ed States, he urged in a rec­om­men­da­tion to the chief ord­nance offi­cer in Paris that as many as one hun­dred of them be evac­u­at­ed with­in thir­ty days. . . .

. . . . On June 28 [1945], as if in cel­e­bra­tion of the achieve­ment, Ord­nance Colonel John A. Keck made the first pub­lic dis­clo­sure con­cern­ing the unique “war booty.” At a news con­fer­ence in Paris, he spoke with pride about the cap­ture and inter­ro­ga­tion of twelve hun­dred “top line” sci­en­tists, and told his audi­ence of some of their most fan­tas­tic projects: a ‘sun-gun’ that might har­ness the sun’s rays to demol­ish nations from a plat­form 5,100 miles in the sky . . . .

2.–“F.C.C. Approves Test of Space Mir­ror to Light Night Sky Despite Out­cry” by Hiroko Tabuchi; The New York Times; July 10, 2026.

The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has approved plans by a start-up com­pa­ny to test a satel­lite that would use a 60-foot mir­ror to reflect sun­light back to Earth after dark, as part of a project the com­pa­ny says would pow­er solar farms, pro­vide light for res­cue work­ers and illu­mi­nate city streets.

In a license issued on Thurs­day, the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion gave the green light for Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., to launch its Eärendil‑1 satel­lite into low Earth orbit. The com­pa­ny plans to deploy its test satel­lite this year but has said it even­tu­al­ly wants to send as many as 50,000 big mir­rors into space. . . . 

. . . . Rough­ly the size of a dorm fridge, Reflect Orbital’s first pro­to­type, once in space about 400 miles up, would unfurl a square mir­ror near­ly 60 feet wide. The mir­ror would bounce sun­light to illu­mi­nate a cir­cu­lar patch about three miles wide on the Earth’s sur­face.

Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larg­er satel­lites by the end of 2028, and 5,000 oth­ers by 2030. The largest mir­rors are planned to be near­ly 180 feet wide, reflect­ing as much light as 100 full moons.

The F.C.C. stressed, how­ev­er, that it was approv­ing only “a sin­gle demon­stra­tion satel­lite” that would test a tech­nol­o­gy that could advance Amer­i­can lead­er­ship in out­er space. “Reflect Orbital’s demon­stra­tion satel­lite is an exam­ple of a poten­tial­ly ground­break­ing tech­nol­o­gy,” the com­mis­sion said in its order grant­i­ng the license. . . .

Nazi the­o­reti­cian and Thiel polit­i­cal icon Carl Schmitt
Pho­to Cred­it: wikiedia.org

3.–“The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped Build Peter Thiel’s Online Influ­ence Empire” by Bar­rett Brown; Byline Times; April 14, 2026.

New Epstein-linked rev­e­la­tions show how neo-Nazi oper­a­tive Andrew Auern­heimer became a cru­cial link between Peter Thiel and the online far-right sub­cul­tures wag­ing ‘memet­ic war­fare’ against their ene­mies

Gen­er­al Michael Fly­nn, Trump’s for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty advi­sor, boast­ed to the Young Amer­i­ca Foun­da­tion soon after Trump’s first elec­tion vic­to­ry in 2016, that the President’s cam­paign had been a qua­si-mil­i­tary “insur­gency” run by “dig­i­tal sol­diers”.

That same year the NATO Strate­gic Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Cen­tre of Excellence’s offi­cial jour­nal Strat­Com, pub­lished a paper enti­tled ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memet­ic War­fare’.

Its author was Jeff Giesea, an investor and polit­i­cal oper­a­tive, who had run com­pa­nies on behalf of pro-Trump bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel, co-founder of defence sur­veil­lance giant Palan­tir and busi­ness part­ner of con­vict­ed sex offend­er Jef­frey Epstein.

At the time Giesea defined memet­ic war­fare, a term he coined, as “a sub­set of infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions or psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare tai­lored to social media”.

To illus­trate its appli­ca­tions, he drew on the exper­tise of a co-con­trib­u­tor he described as “an annoy­ing gad­fly or guer­ril­la war­rior, depend­ing on one’s per­spec­tive”: far-right activist and dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tor Charles C. John­son.

The paper pro­posed meth­ods by which to under­mine ISIS: “sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly lure and entrap”  recruiters; sub­vert its mes­sag­ing via “fake ‘sock­pup­pet’ accounts” – online per­sonas man­u­fac­tured to sim­u­late grass­roots sup­port or oppo­si­tion – and “expose and harass peo­ple” with­in its fund­ing net­work, “includ­ing their fam­i­ly mem­bers”.

To the edi­tors of the NATO jour­nal, these may have appeared as nov­el strate­gic pre­scrip­tions. In fact, they had already appeared – in a dif­fer­ent con­text entire­ly.

In 2011, hack­ers breached the servers of HBGary Fed­er­al, a pri­vate US intel­li­gence con­trac­tor, and leaked inter­nal doc­u­ments reveal­ing a pro­posed oper­a­tion – devel­oped with involve­ment from Thiel’s data com­pa­ny Palan­tir – to deploy near-iden­ti­cal tac­tics against trade unions, jour­nal­ists and left-wing activists on Amer­i­can soil.

This reporter was among those who cov­ered the breach at the time, and who first drew pub­lic atten­tion to Palantir’s role in it — the begin­ning of more than a decade track­ing the net­work this piece describes.

The pro­pos­al includ­ed fab­ri­cat­ing fake online per­sonas, plant­i­ng false infor­ma­tion, and run­ning coor­di­nat­ed harass­ment cam­paigns to dis­cred­it tar­gets. Palan­tir sus­pend­ed the employ­ees involved and issued an apol­o­gy, but the doc­u­ments had already estab­lished that this tac­ti­cal reper­toire exist­ed, was oper­a­tional, and ran through Thiel’s own firm.

Those tac­tics had been devel­oped and deployed over years by a loose net­work of far-right organ­i­sa­tions – fund­ed, in part, by fig­ures direct­ly con­nect­ed to Thiel.

That infra­struc­ture cen­tred on a clus­ter of white suprema­cist and hard-right online plat­forms – among them the neo-Nazi pub­li­ca­tion Dai­ly Stormer — covert­ly fund­ed, accord­ing to par­tic­i­pants, by Giesea. The same plat­forms served as test­ing grounds for the harass­ment cam­paigns, dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tions and memet­ic tac­tics that Giesea would lat­er present to a NATO-affil­i­at­ed jour­nal as a respectable strate­gic toolk­it.

Con­nect­ing those plat­forms to Thiel’s wider net­work was a sin­gle fig­ure: Andrew Auern­heimer, a hack­er and neo-Nazi provo­ca­teur known online as “Weev”. His ties to Thiel had been rumoured in leaked Epstein cor­re­spon­dence, but had nev­er pre­vi­ous­ly been cor­rob­o­rat­ed. They can now be estab­lished — through Auernheimer’s own pri­vate state­ments and a decade of doc­u­ment­ed net­work activ­i­ty — for the first time.

Auern­heimer was, in effect, a bridge. He moved between the anar­chic image-board sub­cul­tures of the ear­ly inter­net and organ­ised white suprema­cist move­ments. He con­nect­ed the Pay­Pal and Palan­tir milieu around Thiel to the alt-right he helped cre­ate and har­ness. And he linked the first gen­er­a­tion of online harass­ment oper­a­tions to the con­tem­po­rary influ­ence net­works that today increas­ing­ly shape main­stream polit­i­cal dis­course.

We’re not fund­ed by a bil­lion­aire oli­garch or an off­shore hedge-fund. We rely on our read­ers to fund our jour­nal­ism. If you like what we do, please sub­scribe.

Jeff Giesea, Charles John­son 

In Dis­cord serv­er logs – a mes­sag­ing plat­form used wide­ly by gam­ing and polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties – as first report­ed by jour­nal­ist Luke O’Brien in his 2020 inves­ti­ga­tion into Thiel’s devel­op­ment of the alt-right, Auern­heimer described Giesea as “a major investor pro­vid­ing help to racists”. O’ Brien report­ed that an online alias used by Giesea had encour­aged donors to give mon­ey to white nation­al­ist and neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tions.

Giesea ini­tial­ly denied this. When con­front­ed with evi­dence of a $5,000 dona­tion to the white suprema­cist organ­i­sa­tion led by noto­ri­ous neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, he replied: “No com­ment.”

Giesea’s finan­cial sup­port for the neo-Nazi plat­form Dai­ly Stormer along with oth­er asso­ci­at­ed projects run by Auern­heimer and John­son has since been claimed by oth­er par­tic­i­pants in those far-right net­works.

One iden­ti­fied Epstein attor­ney Alan Der­showitz as anoth­er Epstein asso­ciate involved in the Giesea project dur­ing his pro­duc­ing role on Mike Cernovich’s 2016 doc­u­men­tary Silenced: Our War on Free Speech – a film fea­tur­ing Auern­heimer, John­son and Milo Yiannopou­los.

Giesea denied the claims by par­tic­i­pants in these neo-Nazi net­works, telling Byline Times: “I have nev­er sup­port­ed Weev or the Dai­ly Stormer. I have always found the Dai­ly Stormer and its orbit vile and rep­re­hen­si­ble.”

How­ev­er, he con­firmed that he had engaged with Aurn­heimer. He said that this was lim­it­ed to a sin­gle occa­sion: “My only inter­ac­tion with Weev was a sin­gle, brief exchange while con­duct­ing research for a NATO paper on memet­ic war­fare. At the time, I bare­ly knew who he was, only that he was a noto­ri­ous inter­net troll. I asked how he would approach trolling ISIS. That was the full extent of it. There was no fund­ing, no rela­tion­ship, and no align­ment of any kind.”

A for­mer Israeli Prime Min­is­ter and intel­li­gence chief described Peter Thiel and Jef­frey Epstein as “own­ers” of a ven­ture fund. The founder of Palan­tir, now embed­ded in Britain’s most crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture with the help of Peter Man­del­son, has denied the claim – but emails reveal how Thiel cul­ti­vat­ed Epstein as a busi­ness part­ner.

Andrew Auern­heimer: For­ma­tion and Func­tion

Like John­son, Weev served as an oper­a­tional con­nec­tor, mov­ing between over­lap­ping worlds that were, in oth­er con­texts, kept sep­a­rate – the anar­chic image-board sub­cul­tures of the ear­ly inter­net, white suprema­cist organ­is­ing, the invest­ment and intel­li­gence net­works around Thiel, and the broad­er influ­ence ecosys­tems that shaped the 2016 polit­i­cal cycle and its after­math.

Auernheimer’s ele­va­tion was made pos­si­ble by such things as 4chan, the image-board plat­form that served as an incu­ba­tor of memes, organ­ised harass­ment cam­paigns known as “raids”, and nov­el forms of infor­ma­tion war­fare.

He was also a pro­lif­ic edi­tor of Ency­clo­pe­dia Dra­mat­i­ca, a wiki that cat­a­logued 4chan-era inter­net cul­ture and its devel­op­ing reper­toire of tac­tics.

Auern­heimer gained ear­ly noto­ri­ety for using an Ama­zon exploit to flag LGBT mate­ri­als as inap­pro­pri­ate in what he char­ac­terised as a strike against “the hypoc­ra­cy [sic] of the gay com­mu­ni­ty” – and for found­ing trolling col­lec­tives from which he recruit­ed oper­a­tives for more con­se­quen­tial ven­tures.

After being indict­ed by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice (DOJ) for exploit­ing a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in AT&T’s sys­tems to extract exposed data of more than 100,000 cus­tomers, which he shared with the out­let Gawk­er, he became a tem­porar­i­ly use­ful ersatz hero of civ­il lib­er­ties cam­paign­ers.

The Thiel and Epstein Con­nec­tions

As with much else involv­ing Thiel’s net­work, Aurenheimer’s role was ini­tial­ly con­cealed until ref­er­enced in leaked cor­re­spon­dence.

On 17 Novem­ber 2014, the tech­nol­o­gist Vin­cen­zo Ioz­zo emailed the financier Jef­frey Epstein, alert­ing him that a nov­el hedge fund strat­e­gy he and Epstein had been devel­op­ing was already being exe­cut­ed by Auern­heimer, report­ed­ly fund­ed by Thiel:

“I’ve heard rumors that Thiel (who I believe you know) was bankrolling this dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev to do sim­i­lar things.”

Auern­heimer had effec­tive­ly con­firmed his rela­tion­ship with Thiel six months ear­li­er in what he believed to be a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion.

“I have run a hedge fund, I am start­ing anoth­er one, and it is not near­ly as reg­u­lat­ed,” Weev stat­ed, hav­ing sep­a­rate­ly ref­er­enced “a meet­ing with Peter Thiel’s right hand this week”.

In the same exchange, he spoke warm­ly of the eBay founder Pierre Omid­yar, who played a cen­tral role in PayPal’s cre­ation along­side Thiel: “I’ve met Pierre, I like Pierre, and he’s a friend of a close friend.”

The sex-trafficker’s fin­ger­prints are all over the ear­ly rise of the alt-right and the far-right con­spir­a­cy move­ments that would fol­low, new doc­u­ments reveal

In Novem­ber 2011, Boris Nikolic – a biotech investor lat­er named as a trustee in Epstein’s will – wrote to Epstein link­ing to a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle on 4chan’s polit­i­cal influ­ence, not­ing: “The poten­tial for manip­u­la­tion is huge.”

The email fol­lowed Epstein’s first meet­ing with Chris Poole, 4chan’s founder. Days lat­er, 4chan launched its /pol/ board – a “Polit­i­cal­ly Incor­rect” forum that would become a cen­tral organ­is­ing space for online far-right rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion.

The /pol/ board sub­se­quent­ly served as a pri­ma­ry incu­ba­tor for Gamer­Gate, the 2014 online harass­ment cam­paign direct­ed pri­mar­i­ly at women in the games indus­try. Auern­heimer and Yiannopou­los were both instru­men­tal­ly involved in dri­ving ele­ments of that cam­paign.

Auern­heimer came from the same 4chan ecosys­tem that had giv­en rise to Anony­mous, but from an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly oppo­site direc­tion: he played no part in its broad­ly left­ist anti-author­i­tar­i­an cam­paigns.

Soon after he was released from prison – his chest now adorned with a mas­sive swasti­ka tat­too – in 2014.

Gamer­Gate and the con­stituen­cy it mobilised lat­er migrat­ed to 8chan, the image-board found­ed by Auernheimer’s asso­ciate Fred­er­ick Bren­nan, who also con­tributed to Dai­ly Stormer. 8chan went on to func­tion as a cen­tral dis­sem­i­na­tion space for QAnon as it con­tin­ued to embed itself in main­stream Repub­li­can pol­i­tics.

By 2016, Auern­heimer was writ­ing to an asso­ciate that he was “work­ing on facial recog­ni­tion, specif­i­cal­ly about black peo­ple”. In 2017, Charles John­son announced on Face­book that he was “build­ing algo­rithms to ID all the ille­gal immi­grants for the depor­ta­tion squads”.

Clearview AI – the facial recog­ni­tion com­pa­ny that sub­se­quent­ly expand­ed the capa­bil­i­ties of Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) – launched in 2018, seed-fund­ed by Thiel, oper­at­ing under Johnson’s Giesea-fund­ed soft­ware frame­work WeSearchr, and rep­re­sent­ed in legal mat­ters by Aurenheimer’s long­time lawyer, Tor Eke­land.

John­son, Auern­heimer, Giesea, Yiannopou­los, Der­showitz and Thiel did not respond to requests for com­ment.

Eke­land object­ed to the alle­ga­tion that Auern­heimer used an “exploit” on AT&T, telling Byline Times: “All that hap­pened was his alleged co-con­spir­a­tor Daniel Spitler wrote a script to access non pass­word pro­tect­ed, pub­licly fac­ing infor­ma­tion – email address­es, on an unse­cured serv­er.”

The web of ties between Epstein, Moscow and Sil­i­con Val­ley leads back to Steve Ban­non and Nigel Farage

The Scale of the Net­work

In 2016, Jef­frey Epstein wrote to Peter Thiel sum­maris­ing what he saw as the polit­i­cal oppor­tu­ni­ty opened by the Brex­it vote: “return to trib­al­ism. counter to glob­al­i­sa­tion. amaz­ing new alliances.” This, he con­clud­ed, was “just the begin­ning.”

What the doc­u­ment­ed record shows across a decade is a con­sis­tent pat­tern.

Tac­tics devel­oped in far-right cor­ners of inter­net cul­ture – harass­ment cam­paigns, dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tions, sock­pup­pet net­works, memet­ic influ­ence cam­paigns – were pro­gres­sive­ly absorbed into elite polit­i­cal and strate­gic dis­course, some­times through the same oper­a­tors who first deployed them.

Far from an anom­aly, the NATO Strat­Com paper Giesea co-authored with John­son was a cul­mi­na­tion of this activ­i­ty.

As Gen­er­al Flynn’s son, Michael Fly­nn Jr., boast­ed last year: “The pub­lic has no idea how mas­sive our Dig­i­tal Army is.”

This arti­cle was updat­ed on 16 April 2026 to incor­po­rate a com­ment from Jeff Giesea and to clar­i­fy that the alle­ga­tions of his finan­cial sup­port for the neo-Nazi plat­form Dai­ly Stormer and rela­tion­ship with Weev came from var­i­ous par­tic­i­pants in online far-right net­works.

4.–“Nazi influ­ence in the form­ing of Afrikan­er Nation­al­ism in South Africa” by Craig Divis; Feb­ru­ary 22, 2015.

While there are cer­tain­ly a num­ber of impor­tant his­tor­i­cal com­par­isons between Nazi Ger­many and apartheid South Africa (of which I will explore in a future post), it is also inter­est­ing to exam­ine the influ­ence that Nazi Ger­many had with the rise of Afrikan­er Nation­al­ism in South Africa.  To under­stand the pil­lars of apartheid ide­ol­o­gy and Afrikan­er Nation­al­ism, what influ­enced the think­ing of the men who would lead one of the most oppres­sive regimes of the 20th cen­tu­ry, one must look to the links of these men to Nazi Ger­many in the 1930s and ’40s.

The desire for an inde­pen­dent Afrikan­er nation start­ed long before Hitler was even born, and their views of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty stemmed from their arrival in Cape Town in the 17th cen­tu­ry, but the Nazis pro­vid­ed the Afrikan­er nation­al­ists with a cer­tain mod­el in fas­cism that great­ly intrigued and influ­enced many lead­ing Afrikan­er offi­cials.

With the ascent of the Nazi Par­ty in Ger­many in 1933, many Afrikan­er nation­al­ists saw a par­al­lel in what they want­ed to achieve in South Africa. But it was not just a one-way rela­tion­ship, as Nazi Ger­many also saw South Africa as a key poten­tial ally.

Dur­ing the 1930s, a num­ber of Afrikan­er nation­al­ists went to Europe to study abroad. Hans van Rens­burg, the future Osse­wa Brand­wag leader, “was an open admir­er of Hitler dur­ing his stu­dent days in Ger­many. As head of the Ger­man-Afrikaans Cul­tur­al Union, he was received in Berlin by Her­mann Gor­ing, Joseph Goebbels, and Hitler him­self,” accord­ing to Sasha Polakow-Suran­sky in The Unspo­ken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Rela­tion­ship with Apartheid South Africa. Piet Mey­er, who would lat­er become head of the Broeder­bond and even­tu­al­ly head of the SABC, led a 1934 Afrikan­er Nation­al Stu­dent Union trip to Europe dur­ing which he went ski­ing with Rudolf Hess.  Dr. Nico Diederichs, even­tu­al mem­ber of par­lia­ment, Min­is­ter of Finance, and state pres­i­dent, also stud­ied abroad in Ger­many dur­ing this time, and accord­ing to Ivor Wilkins and Hans Stry­dom in The Super-Afrikan­ers, even took part in the Nazi’s Anti-Kom­intern train­ing school.

In addi­tion to meet­ing top Nazi lead­ers, the Afrikan­er stu­dents also took in ideas from Euro­pean philoso­phers of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry while absorb­ing the new­er fas­cist ideas ema­nat­ing from Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties. Accord­ing to Sasha Polakow-Suran­sky, “The young stu­dents car­ried these con­cepts back to South Africa in the 1930s, where they proved par­tic­u­lar­ly attrac­tive to the men of the Broeder­bond, as did anti-Semi­tism.”

Polakow-Suran­sky con­tin­ued: “Although racism towards blacks was an inte­gral part of Afrikan­er Nation­al­ist thought, explic­it hos­til­i­ty toward Jews had nev­er been part of the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist world­view. Expo­sure to fas­cist ideas in Europe dur­ing the 1930s changed that. Nazism pro­vid­ed the Broeder­bond with pre­cise­ly the sort of scape­goat it need­ed to ral­ly poor, unem­ployed Afrikan­ers, who resent­ed the bal­loon­ing Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion…”

“The Broeder­bond began to argue that Jews were the group that ‘stands in the way of the Afrikaner’s eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty,’” Polakow-Suran­sky points out.

As Jews fled Nazi Ger­many, the Broederbond’s lead­ers active­ly protest­ed the influx of refugees. In Octo­ber 1936, when a ship car­ry­ing Ger­man Jew­ish refugees arrived in Cape Town’s har­bor, Hen­drik Ver­wo­erd, the future prime min­is­ter, joined the Nazi-aligned Greyshirt move­ment in protest at the docks.

Dur­ing World War II, South Africa allied itself with Britain and the Allies against Nazi Ger­many. Part­ly due to the Afrikan­er mem­o­ries of British bru­tal­i­ty in the Anglo-Boer War forty years ear­li­er, some Afrikan­ers refused to sup­port­ed and aid the British, and there­fore chose to sup­port Ger­many. Afrikan­er cul­ture, includ­ing ances­tral and lin­guis­tic lin­eage, were close­ly aligned with Ger­many, and Ger­many had actu­al­ly sup­port­ed the Afrikan­ers in the Anglo-Boer War. But it was more than just sid­ing with Ger­many due to his­tor­i­cal con­nec­tions, many Afrikan­er Nation­al­ists open­ly sup­port­ed Hitler’s ide­olo­gies and world­view.

It was hoped that with a Ger­man vic­to­ry South Africa would free itself from the British yoke that still pow­er­ful­ly lin­gered in their minds from the Anglo-Boer War, and at least achieve an inde­pen­dent Afrikan­er repub­lic, exclud­ing the British and the Jews. Through a pow­er­ful broad­cast­ing sta­tion in Ger­many – Radio Zeesen – pro-Ger­man pro­pa­gan­da in Afrikaans was pour­ing into South Africa over the radio, led by Erik Holm, an Afrikan­er who was liv­ing in Ger­many at the time.

BJ Schoe­man, a South African MP, summed up the feel­ings of Afrikan­er nation­al­ists at the time when he said the fol­low­ing at a Nation­al Par­ty Con­gress: “The whole future of Afrikan­er­dom is depen­dent upon a Ger­man vic­to­ry…”

As South Africans forces fought the Nazis in North Africa and Europe dur­ing the 1940s, extrem­ist fac­tions in South Africa were grow­ing more pop­u­lar. Accord­ing to Sasha Polakow-Suran­sky, “Louis Weichardt, an unre­pen­tant anti-Semi­te, led the Chris­t­ian Nation­al Social­ist group known as the Greyshirts; Oswald Pirow, a for­mer defense min­is­ter, endorsed Nazi prin­ci­ples and launched a New Order move­ment; and Hitler admir­er Hans van Rens­burg led the most pop­u­lar of these splin­ter move­ments: the Osse­wa Brand­wag [OB].”

Accord­ing to Lindie Koorts, in DF Malan and the Rise of Afrikan­er Nation­al­ism, Weichardt’s Greyshirts were an anti-Semit­ic orga­ni­za­tion which took its inspi­ra­tion from Hitler’s Brown Shirts (aka. the SA). “The Greyshirts were noth­ing more than a South African copy of Hitler’s Nation­al Social­ist Par­ty – which was evi­dent from its use of the swasti­ka and its form of greet­ing, which was the same as that in Ger­many,” accord­ing to Koorts.

But it was the OB that had the most influ­ence. The future prime min­is­ter, BJ Vorster, as well as his intel­li­gence chief, Hen­drik van den Bergh, even served as gen­er­als in van Rensburg’s Osse­wa Brand­wag (OB – Ox-wag­on Sen­tinels). PW Botha, also a future Prime Min­is­ter and Pres­i­dent of South Africa, was also a mem­ber of the OB.

The OB had been estab­lished in 1939 by Afrikan­ers par­tic­i­pat­ing in the cen­te­nary com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Great Trek. They aimed at incul­cat­ing a “love for father­land” and at insti­tut­ing, by armed force if nec­es­sary, an Afrikan­er-con­trolled repub­lic in South Africa. By 1940, dur­ing World War II, while the South African army could only muster 137,000 vol­un­teers, “the Osse­wa Brand­wag claimed twice that num­ber, and at one stage, had close to 400,000 mem­bers,” accord­ing to David Har­ri­son in The White Tribe of Africa.

Vorster, who led South Africa from 1966–1979, was unapolo­getic and proud­ly com­pared his nation to Nazi Ger­many. He declared in 1942, “We stand for Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism which is an ally of Nation­al Social­ism… In Italy it is called Fas­cism, in Ger­many Nation­al Social­ism and in South Africa Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism.”

Vorster’s broth­er, Rev. Koot Vorster, a Dutch Reformed Church min­is­ter, was also an OB mem­ber. He summed up the feel­ings of the pro-Hitler group dur­ing an address to a stu­dent group on Sep­tem­ber 15, 1940:

“Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ shows the way to great­ness – the path of South Africa. Hitler gave the Ger­mans a call­ing. He gave them a fanati­cism which caus­es them to stand back for no one. We must fol­low this exam­ple because only by such holy fanati­cism can the Afrikan­er nation achieve its call­ing.”

In Harrison’s The White Tribe of Africa, Kowie Marais, an OB mem­ber, recalls the admi­ra­tion he and his friends held for Hitler: “We thought he might reju­ve­nate west­ern civilization…against the com­mu­nist-social­ist trends that were creep­ing in from the east. We thought it was the dawn of a new era.”

Har­ry Schwarz, who arrived in South Africa from Nazi Ger­many in 1934 and who even­tu­al­ly became South Africa’s ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States, said, “If you read some of the stuff that some­body like Eric Louw [OB mem­ber and future For­eign Min­is­ter] said in Par­lia­ment, you can’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between that and what the Nazis said in Ger­many.”

Lindie Koorts points out that OB chief Hans van Rens­burg “was an ardent admir­er of Nation­al Social­ism – and of Hitler espe­cial­ly.” And accord­ing to Sasha Polakow-Suran­sky, in 1940, van Rens­burg for­mal­ly offered to pro­vide the Third Reich with 170,000 OB mem­bers to help over­throw the South African gov­ern­ment if Ger­many pro­vid­ed them arms. The coup nev­er mate­ri­al­ized, but by 1942 the Stor­m­jaers (Stormtroop­ers), the mil­i­tary wing of the OB, had start­ed a cam­paign of vio­lence, which includ­ed blow­ing up pylons, pow­er lines, post offices, shops and banks, as well as beat­ing up Jews and South African sol­diers.

As a result of their pro-Nazi activ­i­ties, Vorster and Van den Bergh were declared ene­mies of the state and in 1942 were detained in a gov­ern­ment intern­ment camp dur­ing the war, a fate that over 700 OB mem­bers shared dur­ing the war.

The Ger­mans had even hatched their own plans for a putsch in South Africa. In 1934, Hitler sent Graf von Dur­ck­heim Mont­martin, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Nazi Ger­many, to South Africa with the offi­cial inten­tion of attend­ing a con­fer­ence on edu­ca­tion, but it was lat­er revealed that Hitler had sent Mont­martin with the pur­pose of deter­min­ing what sup­port South Africa might pro­vide to Ger­many in the new world order that Hitler envi­sioned. Mont­martin met secret­ly with top Broeder­bond lead­ers dur­ing his trip to dis­cuss how the Broeder­bond might be of ser­vice to this end.

Lat­er, in 1941, a for­mer South African Olympic box­er and Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er, Robey Leib­brandt, was trans­port­ed on a Ger­man yacht to a remote area off the Atlantic coast and dis­patched to assas­si­nate Prime Min­is­ter Smuts and stage a coup.

Leibbrandt’s plan was foiled, yet even after his cap­ture, Afrikan­er nation­al­ists con­tin­ued to enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sup­port the Nazi war effort. How­ev­er, this waned as the war turned and Ger­many was even­tu­al­ly defeat­ed.

In South Africa, to get elect­ed, DF Malan knew that he need­ed every white vote he could get, and thus he slow­ly began to dis­tance him­self from the anti-Semi­tism of the OB and began broad­en­ing his vision of the Nation­al Par­ty to include all whites. But not all Afrikan­er Nation­al­ists sup­port­ed this move, and many, includ­ing Vorster, Van den Bergh, Mey­er, and Ver­wo­erd, went on to lead the apartheid gov­ern­ment over the next forty years of its exis­tence.

The influ­ence of Nazism remained as it had pro­vid­ed a foun­da­tion upon which many of the Nation­al Par­ty lead­ers built their polit­i­cal beliefs and poli­cies. Even when Nazism col­lapsed, the seed of its ide­ol­o­gy remained buried in the ide­ol­o­gy of the Nation­al Par­ty.

While the Nation­al Party’s vic­to­ry in 1948 did sig­nal some clear dis­tinc­tions from Hitler’s Nation­al Social­ism — most notably the fact that South Africa’s Jews were grant­ed priv­i­leges of white­ness under apartheid, left unaf­fect­ed by the apartheid leg­is­la­tion that for­mal­ized the sep­a­ra­tion of races — apartheid as state pol­i­cy from 1948 onwards con­tin­ued to resem­ble Nazism in its laws, views of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty, and repres­sion of dis­sent.