Eric Hendrik Louw (21 November 1890 – 24 June 1968) was a South African diplomat and politician. He served as the Minister of Finance from 1954 to 1956, and as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1955 to 1963.
Early life He was born in Jacobsdal in the Orange Free State on 21 November 1890 to a Boer family. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at the then Victoria College, Stellenbosch. He went on to qualify as an advocate at Rhodes University College; Grahamstown, where he also practised. In 1915, when his father died at Beaufort West, he took over the business interests. In Beaufort West, Louw was a member of the chamber of commence.
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. Like many other Afrikaner nationalists at the time, he saw die volk ("the people" as the Afrikaners liked to call Afrikanerdom) as under threat from a number of perceived enemies. Throughout his life, opposition to Jewish immigration was the leitmotiv of his career. A very short man who appeared to have a Napoleon complex, Louw was intensely ambitious and saw himself as a future prime minister. His picture of die volk as under threat from the Jewish immigrants was at least in part a gambit to build a following to allow him to be prime minister.
Politician and diplomat In 1924 he was elected to the House of Assembly as MP for Beaufort West, and the following year became South Africa's first Trade Commissioner in the United States and Canada. In 1929 he became High Commissioner in London and a year later South Africa's first envoy to the United States. Louw, a republican Afrikaner nationalist, had stormy relations with the British during his time as high commissioner, accounting for his short term as he was appointed high commissioner in March 1929 and had resigned by November 1929, stating it was simply impossible for him to work with British officials. Louw's resignation was a great relief not only to himself, but also to the British officials who were glad to see him gone. Louw was replaced as high commissioner by Charles te Water, a diplomat of similar views, but considerably more suave and sophisticated than Louw as well more patient as te Water was willing to wait for the right time to proclaim South Africa a republic.
After he had represented his country in Italy, France and Portugal and had been South Africa's first representative to the League of Nations, he returned to South Africa for political reasons. During his time in Paris, despite his belief in white supremacy, Louw was cordial enough when speaking to black French people at various balls and parties, apparently out of a desire not to create an incident which would cause unfavorable coverage of South Africa in the French press. Like all the other South African diplomats in Europe, Louw objected very strongly to the recruitment of black Africans into the French Army. Most of Louw's time in Paris was spent lobbying fruitlessly against the French concept of la force noire ("the black force"), arguing that the French Army should not be arming Africans. As the South African minister-plenipotentiary in Paris, Louw advocated very strongly against accepting Jewish refugees into South Africa. Louw was in close contact with Stefanus Gie, the very pro-Nazi South African minister-plenipotentiary in Berlin, who shared his antisemitism.
In January 1936, Louw submitted to the South African prime minister General J. B. M. Hertzog a "Memorandum on European Emigration To South Africa" that was co-signed by himself; Gie; te Water; Wilhelm Heymans, the minister-plenipotentiary in Rome; and Hermann van Broekhuizen, the minister-plenipotentiary in The Hague. 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 Louw wrote most of the memo. The memo warned that South Africa was on the verge of receiving a massive number of European Jews, which the document stated were of "...a type in question that does not inspire confidence. Can South Africa without detriment and even danger to its national interests continue to allow its commerce and related vocations to be fed by recruits of this type from overseas?" The memo ended with the warning that continuing Jewish immigration would affect "the future racial, social and economic structures of White South Africa", and advised ending Jewish immigration at once.
In 1938 he was again elected Member of Parliament for Beaufort West for the Purified National Party. Hermann Bohle, the father of Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, the chief of the Overseas Office of the NSDAP, wrote after meeting Louw in an evaluation for the Auswärtiges Amt that he was "the so-called Streicher of South Africa", the leader of the militantly anti-Semitic wing of the Purified National Party. Bohle wrote with disgust that Louw had written to Hertzog asking to be reappointed to his post as "minister in Paris" in case he lost the election. Bohle concluded his evaluation with a clear distaste for Louw: "This lack of character is typically South African, hence in Germany, one should have little faith in all South Africans, and only allow oneself to be guided by absolute facts". In a 1939 speech in Parliament, Louw stated about the Danzig crisis: "I am convinced that if it were possible to remove Jewish influence and pressure from the press and from the news agencies, the international outlook would be considerably brighter than it is today."
During the Second World War, Louw, like most of his party, was pro-Nazi. He was also a member of the fascist Ossewabrandwag (OB), serving on the Ossewabrandwag'''s provincial committee for the Cape province. In a 1940 speech in Beaufort West, Louw stated: "The establishment of the OB will contribute especially to the co-ordination of Afrikanerdom's fighting forces. The Afrikaner struggle is being fought on three fronts - the political front, the economic front and the language and cultural front. All three of these fronts are part of the struggle which it has been waging for a century against powers and influences from without... There must, however, be co-ordination or co-operation between the forces of struggle against all three fronts. The OB offers the means for such co-operation". In another speech in 1940, Louw called for South Africa to become a republic, saying: "Without a doubt radical changes will take part in the political as well as the economic and social spheres. New world conditions have brought to light defects in the democratic system and a certain measure of rot has set in" (emphasis in the original).
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, Louw was vehemently opposed to such a tour. 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. Louw also 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, 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. In the pamphlet, Louw warned that "white Christian civilization" in South Africa was in mortal peril from the South African Communist Party. Louw wrote that Communists were atheists who believed in racial equality and "miscegenation", as he called interracial sex, and argued that a Communist government would be the end of "white Christian civilization". Louw lambasted the South African prime minister Jan Smuts as being blind to the "Communist danger" as he accused Smuts of ignoring the fact that South African blacks were joining the Communist Party. Louw wrote that Smuts was content to "let things develop" instead of banning the South African Communist Party as he wanted. Louw accused Smuts of being a "comrade" of Stalin, quoting extensively from remarks that Smuts had made during World War II praising Stalin. Louw ended his pamphlet with the call for all South African whites, whatever they be Afrikaners or Anglos, to vote for the National Party.
Minister
When the National Party won the general election in 1948, he was an obvious choice for the cabinet, firstly as Minister of Economic Affairs, then, from 1955, as Minister of Finance and from 1957 as Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was best known as South Africa's representative at the UN, Commonwealth and other overseas conferences. Between 1948 and 1962 he represented South Africa at the UN on eight occasions. Previously, South African prime ministers had acted as their own foreign ministers, and Louw was the first South African foreign minister in his own right. Through Louw could be charming when he wanted to be, he was well known as a combative man with an explosive temper who was widely disliked within the South African diplomatic corps. Louw was told by the prime minister J. G. Strijdom to "breathe fire and enthusiasm" into the foreign ministry, which he proceeded to do. The historians' James Barber and John Barratt wrote: "For the first time, there was a foreign minister and a forceful one, responsible for foreign affairs, who was backed by an expanding department staffed by able men".
Louw attached an especial importance to relations with the United States. By the time he became foreign minister, American investment was growing at the expense of British investment as the principal source of foreign capital, which was welcomed by the Afrikaner nationalists as a way to reduce British influence in South Africa. 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. Louw also 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. Louw also 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. To apply pressure on Capitol Hill, Louw hired the lobbying firms of Dow, Lohnes & Albertson and Krock-Erwin Associates to lobby both houses of the United States Congress for South Africa.