47 Facts About Eric Louw

Eric Hendrik Louw was a South African diplomat and politician.

Eric Louw served as the Minister of Finance from 1954 to 1956, and as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1955 to 1963.

Eric Louw was born in Jacobsdal in the Orange Free State on 21 November 1890 to a Boer family.

Eric Louw obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at the then Victoria College, Stellenbosch.

Eric Louw went on to qualify as an advocate at Rhodes University College; Grahamstown, where he practised.

In Beaufort West, Louw was a member of the chamber of commence.

Eric Louw became active in protesting against Jewish immigration to South Africa, depicting the East European Jewish immigrants as scheming and dishonest merchants who were driving the Afrikaner families into poverty.

Eric Louw's resignation was a great relief not only to himself, but to the British officials who were glad to see him gone.

Eric Louw was replaced as high commissioner by Charles te Water, a diplomat of similar views, but considerably more suave and sophisticated than Eric Louw as well more patient as te Water was willing to wait for the right time to proclaim South Africa a republic.

Eric Louw was in close contact with Stefanus Gie, the very pro-Nazi South African minister-plenipotentiary in Berlin, who shared his antisemitism.

The memo is more commonly known as the "te Water Memorandum" as te Water was the best known South African diplomat in the world at the time, but in fact Eric Louw wrote most of the memo.

Bohle wrote with disgust that Eric Louw had written to Hertzog asking to be reappointed to his post as "minister in Paris" in case he lost the election.

Eric Louw was a member of the fascist Ossewabrandwag, serving on the Ossewabrandwag's provincial committee for the Cape province.

In 1945, when a Johannesburg Jewish group stated it was willing to pay the costs to send a delegation of South African MPs to inspect the newly liberated concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, Eric Louw was vehemently opposed to such a tour.

Eric Louw suggested that the newsreels and photographs of starving concentration camp survivors were "fake" propaganda designed to discredit Nazi Germany, making such a tour unnecessary in his viewpoint.

Eric Louw argued that the money offered by the Jewish group be better spent republishing Emily Hobhouse's 1927 book War Without Glamour, which he argued documented the horror of the concentration camps that the British created during the Second Boer War to hold Boer civilians, which he argued was the "real" genocide.

In early 1948, Eric Louw wrote a pamphlet for the National Party entitled Die Kommunistiese Gevaar in Afrikaans and The Communist Danger in English for the coming elections of that year.

Eric Louw wrote that Smuts was content to "let things develop" instead of banning the South African Communist Party as he wanted.

Eric Louw accused Smuts of being a "comrade" of Stalin, quoting extensively from remarks that Smuts had made during World War Two praising Stalin.

Eric Louw ended his pamphlet with the call for all South African whites, whatever they be Afrikaners or Anglos, to vote for the National Party.

Eric Louw was best known as South Africa's representative at the UN, Commonwealth and other overseas conferences.

Previously, South African prime ministers had acted as their own foreign ministers, and Eric Louw was the first South African foreign minister in his own right.

Eric Louw attached an especial importance to relations with the United States.

Eric Louw was very concerned by criticism of South Africa within the United States and one of his first acts was to increase the budget for the foreign ministry's information service, which was responsible for South Africa's image abroad.

Eric Louw hired six Madison Avenue advertising agencies to run ad campaigns depicting South Africa as a benevolent society whose apartheid system worked for the mutual benefit of both blacks and whites.

Eric Louw hired the Films of the Nation Inc, a maker of short educational films to make a series of documentaries that portrayed South Africa as a happy nation.

Noboth Mokgatle, a black South African anti-apartheid activist described Eric Louw as having a "fascist frame of mind" as he was one of the leaders of the extreme right-wing National Party committed to upholding white supremacy in South Africa.

Mokgate recalled that Eric Louw was utterly against black South Africans being recruited into the South African Army, ostensibly because Eric Louw claimed that blacks were uncapable of being soldiers, but in reality because he did not want black men to have access to guns.

Eric Louw paid a visit to the Belgian Congo and at the airport in Leopoldville was greeted by an all-black honor guard of the Force Publique.

Eric Louw's anti-Semitism made his elevation to the cabinet a matter of much concern to the South African Jewish community who unsuccessfully lobbied to have Eric Louw kept out of the cabinet.

At the 1957 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference, Eric Louw met Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the first of the British colonies in black Africa to become independent.

In 1958, Nkrumah tried to establish diplomatic relations between Accra and Pretoria, only to be rebuffed by Eric Louw who did not want a black high commissioner in Pretoria who would be formally his equal at diplomatic functions.

Eric Louw had a major impact on Canadian relations when he met with the Prime Minister of Canada John Diefenbaker at the 1957 and 1958 Commonwealth conferences.

Diefenbaker had asked Eric Louw to give some voting privileges to coloured people.

Eric Louw refused as he maintained that Canada did not even allow their Native population the right to vote.

Eric Louw was only partially correct; since 1876, non-status Canadian Indians who lived off the reservations had been allowed to vote and hold office, but status Indians who lived on the reservations were disfranchised.

At the 1961 session of the United Nations, Eric Louw represented South Africa when he became involved in stormy debates with the Indian delegation who objected to the treatment of the Indo-South African population under apartheid.

Eric Louw had a reputation as a "hard man", and his speeches at the UN were noted for their virulent tone as he aggressively defended apartheid.

Eric Louw's speeches before the UN General Assembly claiming that the United Nations did not have the right to discuss apartheid ended in defeat with the 45 nations voting for the Indian motion to discuss apartheid; 8 nations abstained from the vote; and only Australia, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Luxembourg voted with South Africa in maintaining that apartheid was an internal South African matter.

In October 1961, while at the United Nations, Eric Louw was involved in a violent debate on the floor of the UN General Assembly with the delegations from a number of black African nations about the merits of apartheid.

Time magazine reported that Eric Louw's speech on the UN floor was "a provocative whitewash of his country's apartheid policy".

Eric Louw's thesis was summed by Time as: "South Africa's rigidly repressed blacks are actually enjoying blissful freedom and enlightened education".

Eric Louw mocked the African states for their poverty, noting that the total promised contribution of black African states towards the UN's budget was 2.

Cooper's motion censuring Eric Louw stated that he had given a speech that was "offensive, fictitious and erroneous" on the floor of the UN General Assembly.

Simha Pratt, the Israeli ambassador to Pretoria, reported "I saw before me panicky people, gripped by fear and without a backbone" as dozens upon dozens of South African Jews arrived at his office to tell him that Israel's vote at the UN had made life very difficult for them and that Israel must not criticise apartheid as Eric Louw was an anti-Semite who always looking for any chance to lash out at the Jewish community.

Eric Louw was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Pretoria in 1962.

Eric Louw was similarly honoured by the University of the Orange Free State in 1963.