National socialism, the National Party and the radical Right in South Africa, 1934-1948

Abstract

Abstract taken from Dissertation Abstracts International, vol 48, n0 12, June 1988, p. 3178-A:

Apart from newspapers, the principal sources for this study are the records of Afrikaner nationalists active in the thirties and forties, Nazi records, Jewish materials relating to anti-Semitism and wartime South African Government intelligence records. No previous work in this area has made use of all four types of sources

Although no attempt is made to assess mainstream Afrikaner nationalism on the basis of some general theory of Fascism or some minimum "Fascist standard, " the study concludes that the National Party gradually accommodated itself in several important respects to the ideology of the radical Right in complex and often subtle ways. The Nationalists never adopted National Socialism or Fascism as such. Nevertheless, many of the premises underlying these political systems were adapted to the needs of Afrikaner nationalists during the years leading up to their 1948 victory and were combined with indigenous authoritarian models drawn from the old Boer republics to form a new type of authoritarian nationalism, one which substantially affected the nature of post-1948 Nationalist rule