Fritz Rothschild

Fritz arrived in South Africa on the Stuttgart, the last ship that South Africa let in from Germany before immigration quotas started.

Found on the internet May 2011:

[excerpted]

Yet Dr Malan's professed esteem for the Jews did not extend to the point where he wished to add to their number in South Africa. It was Dr Malan who, as Minister of the Interior, introduced the Immigration Quota Act which came into force on 1 May 1930. This placed a strict quota on immigrants of any race or creed born in countries other than those specified in the Act, and the specified did not include the countries of southern and eastern Europe from which most Jewish immigrants came. It was officially denied that the law was directed against Jewish immigrants, but a sharp drop in Jewish immigration resulted and Dr Malan years later admitted that this had in fact been its object.

Introducing the Quota Bill in Parliament, Dr Malan said that it was based on three principles: (1) the desire of every nation to maintain its basic racial composition; (2) the doctrine of assimilability; and (3) South Africa's desire to maintain its own type of civilization. The civilization of eastern and southern Europe was, to a large extent, different from that of Western Europe to which South Africa claimed to belong. He maintained that the new law, although not directed against the Jews, was in the interests of the South African Jewish community, because the steady flow of Jewish immigrants had created 'a nervousness among all sections of the population'.

The beginning of Nazi persecution led to an influx of Jewish refugees from Germany, which was not one of the restricted countries. In 1933, 624 immigrants came from Germany, of whom 204 were Jews. In 1934, the corresponding figures were 1,026 (452); in 1935, 996 (410); in 1936, 3,648 (2,549). Agitation by organizations like the Greyshirts reached unprecedented heights.

At first the Nationalist Party reacted unfavourably to the protests. Die Burger on 27 October 1933 said:

   We are definitely of the opinion that such a racial struggle is absolutely undesirable and that all national leaders and all newspapers with a sense of responsibility must issue a serious warning against it.... There is not one single misdeed of which a Jew has been guilty that is not also to be found in wider circles. You cannot attribute any misdeed to the Jews as a group.... In our view a racial struggle of this sort would be harmful to the country and unjust to it's Jewish citizens.

Even a year later, in October 1934, Die Burger could declare in an editorial: ' We believe that this party, generally known as the Greyshirts, under the cloak of an anti-Jewish movement, strives for a dangerous form of government in South Africa. The Greyshirts have as their aim to set up a dictator in South Africa.' It was not very long, however, before the Nationalist Party itself succumbed to the virus and took the lead in anti-Jewish agitation. The government began to waver, and it was announced that new restrictions under the immigration laws would be introduced on 1 November 1936. To beat the ban, a boat was chartered, the S.S. Stuttgart, to bring 600 Jewish refugees from Germany to South Africa. The ship became the object of disgusting and degrading propaganda amongst the Nationalists and their allies in the various 'shirt' organizations.

The Stuttgart eventually arrived in Cape Town on 27 October, beating the ban by a few days. The night before it docked, the Greyshirts held a protest rally in Cape Town, reported to be the largest meeting they had ever held there, and afterwards the more militant amongst them braved the rain to stage a demonstration in the area of the docks, A similar Greyshirt meeting in Paarl was attended by 1,000 people.

Not to be outdone, the Paarl branch of the Nationalist Party held a protest meeting against Jewish immigration on the night of 4 November, a few days after the Stuttgart had arrived. It was addressed by, amongst others, Dr T.E. Donges, later Minister of Finance, who said: 'The Jew is an insoluble element in every national life.' Dr H.F. Verwoerd, then a professor at Stellenbosch University, later Prime Minister, declared that the protest movement had been conceived at Stellenbosch long before the Stuttgart had even been chartered. In traditional style, he attacked the English Press for misrepresenting the situation and maintained that such immigration menaced the English-speaking South Africans far more than the Afrikaans-speaking. The meeting passed a resolution calling for an end to Jewish immigration on the grounds that the Jews were an unassimilable element.