Mulholland needs to brush up on history

STEPHEN Mulholland was, of course, quite right in portraying Michael Sutcliffe as an ANC sycophant who is now getting a well-deserved comeuppance (“Sutcliffe gets a lesson in history”, August 4).

But it is a pity he gets his history so badly wrong.

He writes: “It should be remembered that the National Party was pro-Nazi. Through its sinister and brutal Ossewabrandwag, it sabotaged the country’s war effort against the Nazis.”

This is not quite right. The National Party was a white supremacist party (as was the ruling United Party of Jan Smuts) that believed in electoral politics for whites.

The Nazis did not believe in electoral politics of any kind.

As Hendrik Verwoerd, editor of Die Transvaler, wrote in 1941, for Afrikaners “it would not be possible to accept the National Socialist system of Germany, which is founded on the principle of dictatorship”.

Nor is Mulholland closer to history when it comes to the Ossewabrandwag, which was indeed pro-Nazi but also anti-electoral politics and bitterly hostile to the National Party.

One of the main themes of Afrikaner politics during World War 2 was, in fact, the conflict between the Ossewabrandwag and the Nationalists, which, of course, resulted in the triumph of the latter.

These may seem pedantic differences, but, as any conscientious historian would insist, the devil lies in the detail.

— Henry Kenney, Ferndale