26 Facts About Stefanus Gie

Stefanus Francois Naude Gie was a South African historian, politician, and diplomat.

Stefanus Gie's parents were Coenraad Johannes Carolus Gie and Martha Naude.

Stefanus Gie was educated at the Worcester Boys High School and at the Victoria College in Stellenbosch.

Stefanus Gie married Johanna Jordaan and had three sons, namely Coenraad, Johan, and Gert.

Stefanus Gie served as both a director and an actor with the Letterkundige en Toneel Vereniging company.

Stefanus Gie become one of the principal promoters of "scientific-objective history", which became the dominant model for history writing in Afrikaans in South Africa until the end of apartheid in 1994.

Stefanus Gie saw history as a social science where historians would work just like scientists in discovering the underlining social forces in their society to offer up "scientific" explanations for historical developments in a purely "objective" and neutral manner.

For Stefanus Gie, anthropology was the scientific study of "illiterate and barbarian masses" vs history which for him was the scientific study of the pasts of "civilized nations".

Stefanus Gie wrote that to own the land required working the land, and as such he argued that the indigenous Khoekhoe nomadic pastoralists whom he called by the very disparaging name "Hottentots" had no right to any land ownership because of their nomadic lifestyle together with what he called their "politics of robbery".

Stefanus Gie wrote that van Riebeeck was the "founder of our South Africa, the South Africa of the white man".

About his involvement in the Broederbond, Stefanus Gie wrote: "It was especially their work, their upholding of the white man's honor [emphasis in the original], their courage, patience, and sense of freedom which gave us a South Africa where we can be happy, free and prosperous".

Stefanus Gie was a Germanophile who very much enjoyed his positing in Berlin, the city where he was awarded his PhD.

Stefanus Gie attributed to the Jews vast and sinister powers to manipulate world politics and economies, and in his reading of events Germany was forever the victim of the Jews.

Hertzog worked as his own foreign minister, and all of Stefanus Gie's dispatches went straight to him.

On 22 October 1935, Stefanus Gie wrote to the Secretary of External Affairs, Helgard Bodenstein, that the South African Legation in Berlin was being overwhelmed with German Jews seeking to immigrate to South Africa.

Stefanus Gie had an extremely negative view of the German Jews who were lining up in front of the legation on every weekday, writing to Bodenstein that he thought that most of them were Communists, and even those who were not he doubted would fit in very well into South Africa.

Stefanus Gie was in frequent contact with Eric Louw, the South African minister-plenipotentiary in Paris, who shared his antisemitism.

In 1936, Stefanus Gie took part in the celebrations of the 450th anniversary of Heidelberg university, representing both South Africa as the minister to Germany and representing Stellenbosch University as a noted alumni and former professor.

Stefanus Gie stated if the Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes was willing to accept the "Karlsbad programme" put forward by the Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein on 24 April 1938 calling for a wide-ranging autonomy for the Sudetenland, the crisis would be settled.

Stefanus Gie felt that Hitler was only reacting to the system by the Treaty of Versailles, but warned it was quite possible that he would order an invasion of Czechoslovakia at any given moment.

Stefanus Gie warned of dangerous forces at work in both Britain and Germany, one of them being "the Hitler of Godesburg and his Sportspalast speech".

However, Stefanus Gie wrote with the Munich Agreement ending the Sudetenland crisis there was nothing at present that would justify a war for the next "two years at least".

Stefanus Gie stated that he believed that Adolf Hitler did not intend to start a war, but that German public opinion might push him into a rash move, especially if the Poles continued to refuse to allow Danzig to rejoin Germany.

The British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax who had just read a briefing on the history of Danzig wrote after reading a dispatch from Stefanus Gie passed on to him by te Water that Stefanus Gie "should learn some history".

Stefanus Gie was one of the relatively few diplomats in Berlin with whom the British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson associated with during the Danzig crisis.

Davignon, Attolico and Stefanus Gie were all supporters of the line that the Free City of Danzig should be allowed to "go home to the Reich", which was Henderson's long-standing belief.