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Germany desired to contact the wartime opposition in South Africa in order to obtain accurate political and military intelligence. The arrival of Hans Rooseboom in South Africa in 1940 provided the Ossewabrandwag (Oxwagon Sentinel), a quasi-cultural and anti-war movement, with the means through which to initiate two-way communication with Germany. The so-called Rooseboom secret service became the first German intelligence network to operate in South Africa during the early war years. This article investigates the nature and operation of the so-called Rooseboom secret service from 1941 to 1942 against the backdrop of the larger intelligence war waged in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German ancient historian, Theodor Mommsen, was widely admired in 19th-century British society. It came as shock then when Mommsen trenchantly condemned the British declaration of war against the Boer Republics in 1899. The force of this critique was underscored when the Swedish Nobel Prize committee awarded Mommsen the award for literature in 1902 much to the surprise of many, including Mommsen himself. Mommsen's high-profile attack on the war was in part based on his sympathy for what he called the ‘little German republics’ in South Africa and his views coincided with the intensely nationalistic fervour in both England and Germany at the time of the ‘scramble for Africa’ that ultimately led to the outbreak of World War I. However, Mommsen's views were shared by British Liberals, one of whom, the Australian-born Gilbert Murray, who later played a vital role in the foundation of the League of Nations, and who was a critic of South African labour practices, happened to be a Classicist. The views of these men contrast with those of the later National Socialists in Germany, who admired and later emulated the ruthless tactics of Cecil John Rhodes and his associates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the Boer War around the turn of the 20th century, Britain's worker movement was allegedly rife with antisemitism. This article attempts to draw conclusions from British attitudes towards Jews and Africans and apply them to the German worker movement. The author explores tensions between the workers' movement in Britain and growing industrialization as a factor for social polarization of workers against the Jews. Capitalism, and particularly finance capital, was thought to be the motivation for Jews to subjugate the Boers, with whom British workers strongly identified.

In Belgium, France and the Netherlands, state-induced punishments were inflicted on collaborators with the German occupation. In this article, Boer collaboration with the British is explored by recounting the careers of three high-profile officers of the Winburg commando, Commandants Harry Theunissen, Fanie Vilonel and Gerrie van der Merwe. There were hundreds of ordinary men and women in the district who also collaborated, but after the war there was no Boer state to bring them to book and the Dutch Reformed Church, as the only coherent social structure to survive the war was, unsurprisingly, more inclined to reconciliation than to retribution. Within post-war Afrikaner society there were furthermore social and political pressures for not settling accounts with those who had been disloyal. Consequently, collaborators were speedily reintegrated into society and the mythology of a united and heroic struggle against British imperialism could be sustained. Today the individualistic and pragmatic way in which Boers responded to occupation helps us to see the past and therefore also the present and the future in a different light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the historical accounts of South Africa published in Polish at the time of the Second Anglo-Boer War. That period was marked by the most intense European interest for South Africa. The Polish response to the Anglo-Boer conflict was no less animated, with its own specific social-historical background. Between 1795-1918, as a result of the partitions of Poland by three powerful neighbours: Russia, Prussia (later Germany) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the country was missing from the map of Europe. It was in the Russian occupation zone in Warsaw that the support for the fighting Boers was most clearly visible. In the German and the Habsburgian sectors, the publicity of the conflict was much more balanced. A hypothetical defeat of the English posed a threat of further strengthening the political status of Germany, which would be likely to exert an adverse effect on the fate of Poland. In all three partition zones, however, the context of the attempts at the liberation of the small Boer Republics and their uprising against the British Empire was compared to the subjugation of Poland. The comparisons were conducted in a subtle and careful manner, particularly in the Russian and German zones where the preventive censorship was the strictest. Since any direct call for the preservation of the national identity would have been too dangerous, writers imposed their own restrictions on their texts, evading interference on the side of an official censor. In this way, the Anglo-Boer War became a perfect ersatz for the expression of the idea of liberation. Polish writers applied a specific code of communication, the Aesopian language, in order to depict similarities between Poles and Boers. Lev Loseff defined this specific strategy as "a special literary system, one whose structure allows interaction between author and reader at the same time that it conceals inadmissible content from the censor". The Aesopian style of writings on the Polish-South African connection will be illustrated here on the basis of two books on South Africa published shortly after the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War and intended to make Polish readers familiar with the history of the Boer Republics and the background of the British-Boer conflict. The first book, Transvaal and the Boers (1899), was an adaptation based on a publication of a German philologist and specialist in the field of African languages, August Seidel, and originally printed in 1898. The introduction to this volume, which constitutes the basis for the analysis in this paper, was written by Julian Ochorowicz. The second book under scrutiny here -- The Boers and Kruger: An outline of the history of Transvaal (1900), written by Zugmunt Słupski, was a response to the Polish version of the aforementioned publication by Seidel. … [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nazi propaganda film Ohm Krüger (Uncle Krüger, 1941) utilized former South African statesman Paul Kruger and his role in the Boer War to promote a virulently anti-British message. By analyzing the international career of Ohm Krüger, this article reassesses the propaganda value traditionally ascribed to the film in an attempt to encourage further research on the exportation of Third-Reich cinema. The parallels between the British invasion and occupation of Boer land, as represented in the film, and the Nazis' invasion and occupation of European countries were so striking that Ohm Krüger was exported almost exclusively to nations allied with Germany while being withheld from occupied territories. The one notable exception was France, which had a long tradition of anti-British sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]