SHOWDOWN COMING

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 19883, 9 March 1939, Page 4

SHOWDOWN COMING

NAZIS IN AFRICA UNDERGROUND ACTIVITIES If the German Nazis in South-West Africa continue to defy warnings and insist on their subversive underground activities General J. B. M. Hertzog, South African Prime Minister, will take drastic action before long. “And General Hertzog deals very effectively with trouble once he starts,” said Mr. A, Copeland, of Benoni, near Johannesburg, South Africa, who made this prediction in an interview in New Plymouth. Mr. * Copeland, who is a New Zealander, is revisiting his native land after an absence of 27 years. He is intimately connected with the South African gold-mining industry.

“The Nazis are working underground in South-West Africa,” he said. They were trying to create a false atmosphere of intolerance and persecution and then ask Germany to come and assist them. “The same old story,” he added.

“The country is of very little value. The land is poor and would not carry much of a population* There are a few minerals, such as diamonds, but t no one wants those to-day; the market for diamonds is very small—Russia, once the chief market, does not want any at all and the American market ij down to zero. They have an artificial value as prices are kept high by a price control board.” Worse Off Than Before “Many of the Africaans—you must not call them Africanders—are antiBritish, and I don’t blame them for < that,” he said. Africaans dissatisfied with British rule had left British territory and gone into German territory but had found themselves worse off under German rule. Mr. Copeland referred to Dr. Malan, leader of the Opposition. “He is not a doctor of medicine, but a doctor of divinity and an unpleasanter man would be hard to find.” He was whipping some of the Africaans into an absurd state of Nationalistic fury.

“They are trying to make Africaans the official language, but it never was a language,” he said. “It’s just something that has been invented and all the time new words are being invented and added.

“And now they have started antiSemitism. There were several antiJewish disturbances before I left and, in the ship coming here a wireless message said there had been antiJewish riots in Johannesburg.” Mr. Copeland explained that there were about 300,000 Jews in South Africa. The South African population * was extremely mixedi The total white population was about 2,000,000 and there were about 6,000,000 natives and then there was a huge Indian population introduced to work the sugar plantations. Besides that was the big “Cape” population of a mixture of colours and races hopeless to try to classify.

"Politics are the curse of the Union,” he declared.