General James Barry Munnik Hertzog (3 April 1866 – 21 November 1942), better known as Barry Hertzog or J. B. M. Hertzog, was a South African general and politician. He was a Boer commander during the Second Boer War who served as the third prime minister of the Union of South Africa from 1924 to 1939. Hertzog advocated for the development of Afrikaner culture and was determined to prevent Afrikaners from being excessively influenced by British culture. He founded the National Party in 1914.
In 1941, Hertzog, who had resigned after South Africa — against his efforts — entered World War II on the side of the Allies, issued a statement in which he openly praised Nazism and said it needed to be adapted to South African needs under a fascist dictatorship.
Hertzog first studied law at Victoria College in Stellenbosch, Cape Colony. In 1889, he went to the Netherlands to read law at the University of Amsterdam, where he prepared a dissertation, on the strength of which he received his doctorate in law on 12 November 1892.
Hertzog had a law practice in Pretoria from 1892 until 1895, when he was appointed to the Orange Free State High Court. During the Boer War of 1899–1902, he rose to the rank of general, becoming the assistant chief commandant of the military forces (Commando units) of the Orange Free State. Despite some military reverses, he gained renown as a resourceful leader of the Boer commandos who chose to continue fighting, the so-called "bitter-enders". Eventually, convinced of the futility of further bloodshed, he signed the Treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902.
Constitutionally, Hertzog was a republican, believing strongly in promoting the independence of the Union of South Africa from the British Empire. His government approved the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and replaced Dutch as the second official language with Afrikaans in 1925, as well as instating a new national flag in 1928. His government approved women's suffrage for white women in 1930, thus strengthening the dominance of the white minority. Property and education requirements for whites were abandoned in the same year, with those for non-whites being severely tightened, and, in 1936, blacks were completely taken off the common voters' roll. Separately elected Native Representatives were instead instated, a policy repeated in the attempts of the later Apartheid regime to disenfranchise all non-whites during the 1950s. Through the system of gradual disenfranchisement spanning half a century, the South African electorate was not made up entirely of whites until the 1970 general election.
With South Africa then at peace, Hertzog entered politics as the chief organiser of the Orangia Unie Party. In 1907, the Orange River Colony gained self-government and Hertzog joined the cabinet as Attorney-General and Director of Education. His insistence that Dutch as well as English be taught in the schools aroused bitter opposition. He was appointed national Minister of Justice in the newly formed Union of South Africa, and continued in office until 1912. His marked antagonism to the British authorities and Premier Botha led to a ministerial crisis. In 1913, Hertzog led the secession of the Old Boer and anti-British section from the South African Party.
At the outbreak of the Maritz Rebellion in 1914, Hertzog adopted a neutral stance towards the conflict. In the years following the war, he headed the opposition to the government of General Smuts.
In the general election of 1924, Hertzog's National Party defeated the South African Party of Jan Smuts and formed a coalition government with the South African Labour Party, which became known as the Pact Government. In 1934, the National Party and the South African Party merged to form the United Party, with Hertzog as Prime Minister and leader of the new party.
Hertzog's second term as prime minister saw the establishment (in 1930) of the South African Iron and Steel Industrial Corp which helped to stimulate economic progress,
In foreign policy, Hertzog favoured a policy of distance from the British Empire and, as a lifelong Germanophile, was sympathetic towards revising the international system set up by the Treaty of Versailles in favour of lessening the burdens imposed on Germany. Hertzog's cabinet in the 1930s was divided between a pro-British group led by the Anglophile Smuts, and a pro-German group led by Oswald Pirow, the openly pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic minister of defence, with Hertzog occupying a middle position. Hertzog had an autocratic style of leadership, expecting the cabinet to approve his decisions rather than to discuss them and, as a consequence, the cabinet only met intermittently.
From 1934 onward, South Africa was dominated by an informal "inner cabinet" consisting of Hertzog, Smuts, Pirow, the Finance minister N.C. Havenga, and Native Affairs minister P. G. W. Grobler. Generally, the "inner cabinet" would meet in private and whatever decision they reached in their meetings would be presented to the cabinet to endorse with no discussion. Though Hertzog was not as pro-German as the faction led by Pirow, he tended to see Nazi Germany as a "normal state" and as a potential ally, unlike the Soviet Union, which Hertzog saw as a threat to the West.
Alongside that, Hertzog saw France as the main threat to peace in Europe, viewing the Treaty of Versailles as an unjust and vindictive peace treaty, and he argued the French were the principal trouble-makers in Europe by seeking to uphold the Versailles Treaty. Hertzog argued that, if Adolf Hitler had a belligerent foreign policy, it was only because the Treaty of Versailles was intolerably harsh towards Germany, and, if the international system was revised to take account of Germany's "legitimate" complaints against Versailles, then Hitler would become a moderate and reasonable statesman. When Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936, Hertzog informed the British government that there was no possibility of South Africa taking part if Britain decided to go to war over the issue, and, in the ensuing crisis, South African diplomats took a very pro-German position, arguing that Germany was justified in violating the Treaty of Versailles by remilitarizing the Rhineland.
Hertzog's principal adviser on foreign affairs was his external affairs state secretary, H.D.J. Bodenstein, an anti-British Afrikaner nationalist and a republican, who was seen as the eminence grise of South African politics. No other man had the same degree of influence on Hertzog as Bodenstein. Sir William Henry Clark, the British High Commissioner to South Africa, had a long-standing feud with Bodenstein, whom he accused of being an Anglophobe, writing in his reports to London that Bodenstein always presented the British position in the worst possible light to Hertzog, and noting with anxiety that Bodenstein's best friend was Emile Wiehle, the German consul in Cape Town. The Germanophile South African minister in Berlin, Stefanus Gie, largely embraced Nazi values as his own, and, in reports to Pretoria, portrayed Germany as the victim of Jewish plots, arguing that the Nazis' discriminatory policies towards German Jews were only defensive measures. Though Hertzog did not share the anti-Semitism of Gie, the latter's dispatches portraying the Third Reich in a favourable light were used to support the prime minister's foreign policy preferences.
In a statement of foreign policy principles for South Africa drawn up by Pirow for the cabinet in March 1938, the first principle was combating Communism, and the second was having Germany serve as the "bulwark against Bolshevism". In a message to Charles te Water, the South African High Commissioner in London in early 1938, Hertzog told him to tell the British that South Africa expected "immediacy, impartiality and sincerity" in resolving the disputes of Europe. Just what was meant by that was explained by Hertzog in a letter to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in March 1938, which stated that South Africa would not fight in any "unjust" wars, and that, if Britain choose to go to war over the events in Czechoslovakia, then South Africa would remain neutral. On 22 March 1938, Hertzog sent Te Water a telegram stating that South Africa would not under any circumstances go to war with Germany in defence of Czechoslovakia, and stating that he regarded Eastern Europe as being rightfully in Germany's sphere of influence.