The Land God Made in Anger. John Davis Gordon

van Niekerk part of his name was his mother’s maiden name, which ostensibly made him half-Afrikaner (though not half-Hairy-back), but her mother was born Kessel, of pure German immigrant stock before she married grandfather van Niekerk, making McQuade in fact one-quarter German. Yet he’d had no idea of this awful recent history, and bet that most people of his generation had equally little idea. Yet, shocking though it all was, he would have put it down to the unenlightenment of the times, had it not been for what he had seen on the Schmidt ranch – after all, had not the British, at the same time, conducted a scorched earth policy in the Boer War to starve the Afrikaners into submission, burning homesteads and crops and driving Afrikaner women and children into concentration camps where twenty-six thousand of them died of disease and malnutrition? Did not the Australians drive the Aborigines out of their traditional homelands? Were there not verified reports of hunting them down for sport? Had not the New Zealanders waged bloody war against the Maoris? Had not the Americans butchered Red Indian resistance? Was it not the American settlers who had introduced the barbaric practice of scalping so that they could claim a bounty for every Indian they killed? There was, however, that threatening telephone call echoing in his mind during that unreal fogbound night, the vivid image of the swastikas at the Schmidt ranch, and there were the photographs of the Third Reich he had seen in the library that afternoon, and it was not so easy to relegate the brutality of German colonial policy to history: there was a pattern of behaviour, a national susceptibility towards aggression and domination. It was because of the coincidence of all these circumstances that he read on, despite his tiredness, and learned things that changed the course of this story; about Hitler’s grand plan for Africa, which Roger Wentland had mentioned.

      It was spelled out in the book published by the Daily Telegraph, Germany’s African Claims, in Britain and Germany in Africa, published by Yale University, and in Hitler Over Africa, by Benjamin Bennett. Nor was Hitler’s grand blueprint for Africa a new one: it was as old as the original Scramble for Africa, as old as the Boer War when German agents were planted in South Africa to stir up the Afrikaners against Great Britain. The extermination campaign that General von Trotha waged against the Herero in 1904 was part of it, for the troops that were brought out from Germany for that war were to be used against South Africa after the Herero were crushed. And after Germany lost the First World War, Hitler resurrected the grand plan for Africa: one of the first things he demanded in his sabre-rattling speeches was the return to Germany of her former colonies to provide Lebensraum.

      But Hitler’s grand plan embraced much more than that: not only would his warships based in South West Africa and Tanganyika have dominated the Indian Ocean, Suez and the Cape sea route, thus strangling the British Empire; by controlling Suez, the Persian Gulf and its oil would have come under German control and then the whole Far East would have fallen under German domination, even Japan, for they were all dependent on Persian Gulf oil – and the whole of Europe would have been held to ransom for oil; Europe would have ground to a shattered halt under one blitzkrieg. But not only that: German bombers from Tanganyika and South West Africa would be in easy reach of the South African goldfields, and South Africa would fall to Germany, and then the Rhodesias and the Congo with their copper mines would fall, until finally the whole of Africa would be one vast German colony, with a massive army of black soldiers, and the whole vast treasure-house would be Germany’s, with its vast reservoir of black slave labour, with autobahns and railways connecting it all. Truly it would have become the Reich To Last A Thousand Years.

      That was Hitler’s grand plan for Africa, and for the world; and it all depended on his getting back South West Africa, now called Namibia, this desert land where McQuade sat reading. And there was open talk here about the ‘Aryanization of South Africa’, racial purification, the confiscation of Afrikaner farms and Jewish property; and all the time the talk about Der Tag, which would be soon because ‘what our Führer demands our Führer gets.’ But the Führer did not get his colonies given back. War broke out and the South African government rounded up almost every German male in Namibia and shipped them off to concentration camps to prevent them fighting for the Führer. Then Hitler launched a gun-powder plot in South Africa. It was called Operation Weissdorn and the key man was a South African called Robey Leibbrandt.

      McQuade knew of Robey Leibbrandt as a legendary character, once South Africa’s boxing champion, who became a Nazi spy during the war. To McQuade he was some kind of nutcase, almost as distant as Guy Fawkes: he had no idea how important Operation Weissdorn had been, or how close it came to changing the outcome of the war.

      The extraordinary true story was told in a book called For Volk and Führer, by Hans Strydom, formerly President of the Southern African Society of Journalists. So, a big wheel. An authority. McQuade read the book through the eerie, unreal small hours, his tired mind racing, the possible significance of it in terms of today dawning on him, pieces of a jigsaw materializing out of the foggy night into his yellow pool of lamplight; as a plan Operation Weissdorn could be as valid today.

      Robey Leibbrandt represented South Africa in the Olympic Games held in Germany in 1936. His family had suffered during the Boer War and he was fanatically anti-British, a detail known to the Nazis. Even before he set foot in Germany it had been decided to recruit him as the key man for the grand plan. In Germany he was fêted by the Nazi press, and became a cult-hero with his dazzling boxing in the preliminary fights. He was introduced to Hitler, who flattered him. He broke his hand but nonetheless courageously insisted on fighting in the finals, and only missed the gold medal because of his hand. Invited to return to Germany for ‘further education’, he became a fanatical Nazi. When war broke out he remained in Germany and was trained in sabotage and espionage. He was now invited to spearhead Operation Weissdorn, asked to return to South Africa and gain control of the Ossewa Brandwag, the faction of Afrikaners bitterly opposed to the British and to South Africa’s involvement in the war, and to set up a large guerrilla infrastructure. Then he was to assassinate General Smuts, the pro-British prime minister of South Africa, seize control of the country, and order the South African troops fighting in North Africa to return home. Rommel would then have vanquished the British under Montgomery, and Germany would have dominated the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. With the Cape sea route in Nazi hands, the British empire would have been strangled. If Operation Weissdorn had succeeded, Hitler would have won the war, and achieved the grand plan of establishing the Third Reich in Africa. From there the Persian gulf was his, and from there the world …

      The rising sun did not penetrate the dense fog; the morning was opaque and chilly and cars drove with their headlights on. McQuade stared out his window at the hanging mist, astonished that he did not know how close his country had come to changing the world: Operation Weissdorn failed only because of the expert, hair-raising work of one dedicated Afrikaner policeman, called Jan Taljaart, who infiltrated the organization.

      McQuade sat there, wide-awake tired, trying to see whether all this could reasonably have anything to do with that submarine.

      Then he picked up the telephone and dialled the son of Dr Wessels, the man who, in 1945, was the only dentist for many miles around.

9

      Mr Wessels’ charming wife had coffee ready. She had a slight German accent. ‘Of course I can tell you something about the old days of Swakopmund, and about my father-in-law, but I do not understand why you need to look at his old records of his patients. I agree, dental records are not so … delicate as medical records – teeth are only teeth, but nonetheless …’ She trailed off.

      McQuade took a breath. ‘Mrs Wessels, I was not entirely frank with your husband when I telephoned him this morning.’ He sighed. ‘I really am writing a book. But I’ve come to do so in a roundabout way … I am trying to trace my father.’

      ‘Your father?’

      He nodded. ‘My surname is McQuade. But that is my mother’s maiden name. You see, I am illegitimate.’

      Mrs Wessels looked embarrassed. ‘I see …’

      McQuade held up a palm. ‘I’m quite used to the notion. But … naturally, I have an intense curiosity about