BIG READ: Hitler’s spies on SA shores

In the spring of 1942, when World War 2 was still anybody’s game, three German U-boats cruised in SA waters seeking easy pickings among the merchant ships that often sailed unescorted and out of convoy. SA believed the war was far away, in the deserts of North Africa.

Cape Town, for all its heavy artillery on Robben Island and at Fort Wynyard in Green Point, was so unprepared that Captain Carl Emmermann, commander of U-172, could bring his boat to the surface off Sea Point and allow his crew a night out: come up to the conning tower, one by one, and enjoy the city lights. Cape Town was lit up for an air-raid exercise with searchlights casting beams across the sky. The real danger, meanwhile, lurked below.

What followed was something of a turkey shoot. Between October 7 1942 and October 10, the U-boats sank six ships off Cape Town, including the liner SS Orcades, carrying 700 passengers, 45 of whom drowned, and 2,000 bags of mail bound for Liverpool. Even with defences by then alerted, the U-boats sank another 14 ships and 10 more off the east coast near Durban, including an auxiliary cruiser.

Still it was difficult for the U-boats to find targets. Waging war through a periscope is like watching football through a knothole in a fence; you don’t see the entire field. The U-boats needed the bigger picture: intelligence from ashore. They were in luck; Adolf Hitler’s spies in SA had opened a direct link with Berlin through a home-made radio transmitter. Unfortunately for the U-boats, the spies were operating 1,500km north of Cape Town on a remote farm near Vryburg, hardly an ideal spot from which to observe shipping.

Nevertheless, the spies had informants across the country; the Ossewabrandwag (Oxwagon Sentinel, the OB) was on the side of Germany. Its members were the terrorists of the day, bombing civilian targets, beating up lone soldiers and hoping to overthrow the government. A future apartheid prime minister, BJ Vorster, was among them.

Another problem was that the OB leader, “Kommandant-Generaal” Hans van Rensburg, while happy to collaborate with the spies, was opposed to supplying Berlin with naval intelligence. He claimed he did not want to send SA soldiers to their deaths at sea. He had no objection to them dying on land, which would have kept their blood off his hands. Had the U-boats received good naval intelligence from SA, the turkey shoot might have become a massacre.

“Germany wanted naval intelligence because it would have helped decide where to send the U-boats and possibly sink more shipping,” says Evert Kleynhans, whose book Hitler’s Spies (Jonathan Ball) contains new facts of enemy espionage in SA during the war.

For aficionados, some of this might be old hat. George Visser, a police spy sleuth in the war, and Piet van der Schyff, a post-war academic, have written about it. Neither put it in its broader context or provided the U-boat link. Until now, details of the spies’ activities and those of their collaborators had been either suppressed or deliberately hidden, or just been too hard to find in various archives. It is the signal achievement of Kleynhans’s research that he has uncovered information that was not widely available before.

Along with U-boats and spies, his story is also about a police force that could not be trusted, a suspect national intelligence agency, shadowy groups conspiring against the ruling party, and politicians consorting secretly with a foreign power. It sounds like SA today, yet this all happened when the country was in the midst of a world war.

Kleynhans trawled the MI5 files of the UK’s national archives, penetrated the previously restricted OB archive, and in military archives found fascinating details about the U-boats, such as Emmerman’s night-time surveillance of Cape Town. He has also made a revealing discovery, one that if carried to its logical and legal conclusion would have led to a sensational post-war trial of SA’s wartime traitors.

Kleynhans, a senior lecturer in the faculty of military science at Stellenbosch University, stumbled on the spy story while researching his PhD thesis on submarine warfare in SA waters during World War 2.

“One of my chapters focused on naval intelligence and I tried to figure out, these submarines that came to attack shipping, on what intelligence or information did they rely? Was there enough shipping to be sunk and were the waters viable to sustain operations?” he says.

What he found led him to something bigger than just a chapter in a thesis: a story about Nazi spies and suppression of evidence. “There was a lot of information that had not been used before.”

Hitler’s three main spies in Southern Africa were Hans Rooseboom, Lothar Sittig and Luitpold Werz, Germany’s deputy consul-general in Lourenco Marques (now Maputo). Werz was the spymaster, running operations and agents into SA from neutral territory. Maputo during the war was a haven for spies, among them the English writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who worked for MI6.

The Vryburg group were frustrated, however. They wanted direct radio access to the U-boats, but the German navy was unwilling to give up command and control.

Rooseboom fell out with Van Rensburg over their disagreements on naval intelligence, so Sittig, who had been infiltrated into SA from Mozambique, took charge. He was a resilient figure who dismissed the difficulties of his assignment and warnings about crossing the Komati River, where floods and reptiles were a frequent danger. “More water, less crocodiles; less water, more crocodiles,” he said, probably with a shrug.

Kleynhans credits the OB archivists with the first-person evidence of Sittig’s sang-froid. “If it wasn’t for the work they did in interviewing these people, it would not have been possible to add the colour and the richness to the story.”

Then luck and “an educated guess” also helped Kleynhans take the story further.

Luck took him to a job as archivist at North West University, which held the OB archive. It meant he could read documents, and especially the transcribed interviews that had been kept away from previous researchers.

Between the 1950s and 2000s the archive was rigidly controlled. The OB had bequeathed money to the university to hold its papers and the organisation, or its remnant, wanted only those sympathetic to have access. One academic described the endowment and the collaboration between the OB and the then Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education as the bruidskat (a dowry).

“The OB ran it for a while and the old boys’ network was quite strong for a long time. They would control who had access,” says Kleynhans. “A lot of these documents were under embargo; that was the excuse. But if you can’t read Afrikaans you wouldn’t know anyway. And if [the archive] don’t give you the finding aids, you will never know that the documents even exist.” But Kleynhans qualified on all counts.

“Those documents cast a different perspective on how the British academics had been portraying the intelligence war in Southern Africa. They couldn’t speak die taal and they were blocked from accessing these documents. They wrote their side of the story using mainly MI5 documents. But it only tells you one side of it. If you didn’t use the [Potch] transcripts you couldn’t tell the agents’ side of the story.”

The “educated guess” came in his discovery, after a relentless hunt, of the most important document of his research: the Barrett report. Lawrence Barrett and Rudolph Rein were legal men who were sent to Europe after the war to collect evidence and interview witnesses for a possible treason trial.

Barrett’s report is a searing indictment of Van Rensburg, his accomplices and the Nazi spies. If it had been produced in court it would have embarrassed the new apartheid government and even implicated its first prime minister, DF Malan.

“Dr Van Rensburg has committed treason of a most heinous and flagitious nature,” Barrett wrote. Along with the indictment, Barrett had also assembled a list of witnesses, among them the German spymaster himself, Werz, then working as a ski instructor, who was apparently willing to give evidence.

But Jan Smuts, prime minister at the time, procrastinated. He was afraid of creating martyrs of the Afrikaners who had opposed the war and he was worried about how a trial might influence the upcoming election of 1948. Barrett’s charge sheet was kept secret and limited to only six copies.

Those documents cast a different perspective on how the British academics had been portraying the intelligence war in Southern Africa. 

—  Evert Kleynhans

When Smuts lost the election, the National Party had little interest in pursuing justice. In the months following, all six copies of the Barrett report vanished. No-one seemed to have it.

Malan, in his autobiography, says he gave his copy to the National Archive but Kleynhans did not get response from that institution. A Business Day inquiry received a similar brush-off.

The apartheid Nats were determined to secure every copy. The new minister of justice, CR Swart, accused his predecessor, Harry Lawrence, of holding on to a secret state document, so Lawrence handed over his copy. Years later, after he had retired as state president, Swart filed the copy from Lawrence with his personal papers at the University of the Free State  and that was where Kleynhans found it.

“The cheeky bugger,” says Kleynhans. “He pointed fingers at others who had kept their copies, but then he did so himself. But fortunately he did, and it’s still there in his private collection.”

The Barrett report was there all right but without its appendices containing the messages Hitler’s spies had sent from Vryburg to Berlin. The messages had been picked up by the Royal Navy’s interception stations in SA and deciphered at Britain’s Bletchley Park where the German Enigma code was broken. The missing appendices would help understand how effective Hitler’s spies had been. Kleynhans believes they will show how “ineffectual” the spies were. Their only real achievement, he says, was building the radio link with Berlin.

“The amount of time and effort was ridiculous,” he says. “Germany wanted naval intelligence because it would help decide where to send the U-boats and possibly sink more shipping.” Instead it got mostly Van Rensburg’s speeches, political intelligence, which had some propaganda value, and trivial information such as the monthly consumption of potatoes in SA military camps.

One significant piece of intelligence, stolen from the desk of Smuts, about the Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942, did get through to Berlin, but only after the landings had taken place.

Effective or ineffective, there was evidence to convict Van Rensburg and the spies. The OB leader, in anticipation of conviction and a potential life sentence, prepared an elaborate defence. He also had a vital card to play to stay out of jail: Malan. Van Rensburg knew about two unreported approaches by German agents to Malan, and he threatened to raise these if he were charged.

Once in power, hiding the Barrett report was a short step by Malan’s Nationalists in preventing a trial. Hiding evidence will not surprise anyone today. The apartheid government was not above burning books, then incinerating and shredding incriminating documents when its end was in sight. Burying six copies of a charge sheet, along with its appendices, would have been easy.

In the end there was no trial of SA’s wartime traitors. Those who had already been incarcerated, like the Nazi fanatic Robey Leibbrandt, were released and even Hitler’s spies were allowed to live in SA into old age.

There would be a treason trial, however. Eight years after coming to power, the apartheid government arraigned 156 people. Among those charged was no Van Rensburg, Sittig or Rooseboom, only Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu, Luthuli and others. All were found not guilty, but unlike Hitler’s spies and OB traitors, they were not allowed to carry on peaceably with their lives. They would be hounded, many into exile, and laws would become severe enough to jail some for life, like Nelson Mandela and his fellow Rivonia trialists.

From 1956 to 1961, the apartheid government tried in vain to convict leading figures from the Congress of the People who had gathered at Kliptown in Soweto to unveil the Freedom Charter. The accused, many of whom were kept in detention, are also household names in SA today, even long after their demise: Lillian Ngoyi, ZK Matthews (grandfather of Naledi Pandor), Ben Turok, Gert Sibande, Alex La Guma, Rusty Bernstein and Moses Kotane among them.

The state pursued the case with a vigour, even when evidence of treason was shown, in the acquittal of all the accused, to be flimsy. It was a vigour that had been lacking in any post-war treason trial, where the evidence of guilt might have been circumstantial but was strong, especially if Hitler’s spymaster in Southern Africa was to be a witness.