The Whites' Last Stand

barely a dozen neo Nazis. The tiny group marched the mile and a half from the park to the Capital Reflecting Pool, safely escorted by hundreds of police officers from the DC Metropolitan Police, US Park Police, and the US Capitol Police. Dozens of officers on bicycles and on horseback flanked the little march, keeping counter protesters at bay. A fax of Capitol Police in riot gear marched alongside them,

far outnumbering the actual marchers. When they reached their destination, they were escorted into a little pen surrounded by barricades, with the Capitol building in the background, surrounded by angry counter protesters and curious tourists. ARAN Nations member Ryan Mullins tried to address the crowd with a megaphone, but he was almost completely drowned out by chance of Nazi scum. If he did manage to give a speech about the plight of the white South African farmer, he'd saw most

certain no one actually heard it. But just behind him the rally goers were holding a banner that read stop White Genocide in South Africa, and standing between the two nearly identical bald men dressed all in black holding either end of that banner was an old woman.

I keep saying this, but it's always true. I really thought this was going to be a two parter, starting with those rallies in twenty twelve, talking about the model resurgence of the white genocide conspiracy theory rhetoric couched in this concern for the largely imaginary murders of South African farmers, and then just a brief retrospective on the woman behind those rallies. I could not possibly have predicted that there would be so much international intrigue buried in her past.

I certainly didn't expect to spend the last month translating fifty year old white supremacist newspapers from Afrikaans, or pouring over thirty year old memos in Croatian tapped out on typewriters by dead war criminals. I had no idea that a German neo Nazi blew up a United Nations office in Namibia, or that a South African accomplice still coaches rugby in Cambridgeshire, evading an international arrest warrant. How could

I have known? But now we do. History is a strange and messy thing, and I suppose it's only fair to give you a brief recap here at the top before we start approaching the end. You might need a reminder of where we've been. The first episode in this series was about an event that took place in February of twenty twelve, a dozen or so rallies across the

country that all took place on the same day. Only the one in Sacramento was attended by more than a handful of people, and it was the only one that made it into the newspaper because counter protesters from the nearby Occupy encampment showed up to heckle the neo Nazis and ended up getting into a bit of a scuffle with the police. In that episode, I talked a bit about what the event claimed to be doing, raising awareness about white genocide and South Africa, which, if you don't

remember the episode, is not a real thing. It is not happening at all, but it is a conspiracy theory of some importance to white supremacists around the world, and it was something of a fringe idea, but unfortunately now the President of the United States has gotten a hold of it and decided that white South Africans qualify for refugee resettlement in the United States. In the second episode, the one I really thought was going to be the end of the story, I only managed to get through

a single incident. The first time Monica Huggot's name showed up in the historical record alongside a bombing. In nineteen eighty she was a member of a small African or nationalist terrorist cell calling itself the VIT Commando or the White Commandos. After a brief bombing campaign targeting anti apartheid

activists and academics, they were all arrested. Most of the members of the Vit Commando turned out to be Italian fascists, and Monica Huggot's charges were dropped after she testified against them. In her testimony, she claimed to be a member of the American Ku Klux Klan. She wasn't even in the next chapter of her own story. I lost track of her for most of the nineteen eighties, but one of the men who would be connected to her later on,

had a very strange past of his own. In the third episode of the series, we followed German neo Nazi Horsed Cleans and his South African accomplices. They carried out an attack on a UN office in Namibia in nineteen eighty nine, killing a security guard and later murdering a police officer In their escape from custody, The men involved in the attack fled back to South Africa, joining a

new africaner Neo Nazi organization called the Order Borafolk. After another series of bombings and arrests, they all somehow ended up no longer in jail. That group, the Order Borafolk, also pulled off a high profile heist of a massive cache of weapons from a South African Air Force base. Remember I asked you to keep those guns in the back of your mind. One of them shows up again in this story. And by this point we're up to the early nineteen nineties and it's clear to everyone who

is paying attention that the apartheid regime is unsustainable. Multi party negotiations had begun. The African National Congress and the ruling National Party were slowly working their way through the process of coming to an agreement about how the nation would move forward. And as you might expect, most of the characters in this story weren't ready to give up the fight. And that's where our international network of mercenaries

comes in, the subject of last week's episode. In the summer of nineteen ninety three, at an international fascist rally in Belgium, leaders of European Neo Nazi groups met to discuss an mercenaries to South Africa to cause chaos. A date had been set for the election. They only had a few months left to either overthrow the government and cancel that election, or convince enough white South Africans to

secede and form their own white ethno state. And in that episode last week I got a little lost sifting through old documents from the Bosnian War, trying to nail down exactly how our German mercenaries got from one conflict to another, so that brings us all back up to

speed more or less. I spent most of last week's episodes sifting through the distant past, looking at the history of the clan in South Africa, then looking at distant places tracing the paths of those mercenaries but there is some context at the heart of this story that we need to sketch out before we move on, because, like I said, the end of a part time it wasn't a single moment. There were years of political negotiations before

that election. In April of nineteen ninety four, the election of Nelson Mandela marked the official end, but it had been all but over for months, and the end had been in sight for nearly a year. Here's AWB's leader, Eugene tare Blanche, offering his thoughts on the negotiation process to a reporter in May of nineteen ninety three.

wing Mukanto with Siezway. He was a beloved and immensely popular leader within the African National Congress, particularly among young anti apartheid activists. He'd given his bodyguard the day off, and he was supposed to be at home. His killer hadn't actually intended to carry out the plan that day.

In particular, he would later claim he'd only been in the area conducting one last reconmission, but when he spotted Hani returning home from buying a newspaper, accompanied only by his fifteen year old daughter, he knew he'd never get a better shot. As Hanni stepped out of his car, the killer shouted his name, and as Honey turned around to see where the voice had come from, his killer fired, hitting him four times in the chest and head. The

assassin was arrested almost immediately. One of Hani's neighbors, a white woman, called the police and was able to give them the killer's license plate. When police found him that afternoon, the murder weapon was still sitting on the back seat of his car. By Monday, Eugene taire Blanche had publicly confirmed that the killer, a Polish immigrant named Yanush Walous, had been a member of the Africaner Resistance movement. Once in custody, Wallous confessed to a police officer he had

incorrectly assumed was a fellow traveler. There were plenty of police officers who would have been on his side he murdered a black communist, after all, but this turned out not to be one of them. He told the officer that the gun had been given to him by Clive Derby Lewis, a sitting member of Parliament in the Conservative Party. It had also been one of the guns the Ordoborofolk had stolen from an Air Force base three years earlier.

When Walous's apartment was searched, officers found a printed list of names. Given that Chris Hani's name was on that list and he'd just been shot to death, it appears to have been a hit list, but Walous almost certainly didn't write that list himself. It was mostly high profile political figures like Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, and Communist Party chair Jo Slovo, but there were also the names of several journalists, most of whom published only in Afrikaans, which

Walous could not read. The same list of names was later found in the personal papers of Clive Derby Lewis's wife, gay but white supremacist journalist Arthur Kemp would later testify that he'd been the original author of the list. As far as the official record goes, Camp was not involved, he was not charged, and he claimed he'd had no idea the list would be used in any murders. Within hours of Haney's murder, Nelson Mandela gave a televised address urging con.

It only served to demonstrate the extreme right wing's willingness to disrupt the process by any means necessary. They understood that they were just as likely to find themselves in a Nazi's crosshairs as the men on the other side of the negotiating table. It wasn't long after Hani's murder that it was announced that they'd set a date the elections would go forward, taking place in April of nineteen

ninety four. In June of nineteen ninety three, around the time the election date was announced, negotiations about what that government would look like were still ongoing, and they were held at the Kempton Park World Trade Center. On June twenty fifth, nineteen ninety three, thousands of armed Africaner nationalists

showed up outside the World Trade Center. The newly formed Africaner Folksfront, an umbrella organization of right wing groups, staged a protest outside earlier in the morning, harassing delegates as they arrived. As the day wore on, the crowd began to grow restless, particularly among the ranks of the AWB. On orders from Eugene Tareblanche, an AWB member, drove an armored car through the front of the building, and the crowd easily overcame the police and swarmed inside.

have that I know are of Monica Huggett. We're taken in twenty twelve, and she was nearly seventy years old then, so it was impossible for me to try to find her in old photos. But I do know she was there. She said so herself in this wistful reminiscence about that day in an interview she did in twenty nineteen.

both cases. There were reports of protesters pissing and shitting on office furniture on the floors, and some of the protesters just look like they're along for the ride, they're just enjoying the chaos. They're just smash things and wandering around, but there are also clear leaders and more militant elements that are obviously focused on a mission. History really does rhyme, I guess. But just like the assassination of Chris Hani,

this attempt to derail the negotiations backfired badly. Here's a and C negotiator and present day South African President Cyril Ramaposa in an interview in nineteen ninety five.

on the floor. Any remaining hope of effectively disrupting the political process was fading quickly, and while opinions on the extreme right varied widely as to what the most effective course of action might be, most extremists had their sights set on a folk shot a white South African state, if they couldn't stop what was coming for the nation of South Africa, they'd have to find a way to secure a nation of their own, and to do that well,

they'd need an army. Something very strange happened in March of nineteen ninety four, a white Africaner nationalist militia took up arms to keep a black man in power. Let's back up for a second. This is a bit of history I was admittedly unfamiliar with, so maybe you'd also benefit from a brief explanation of apartheid South Africa's semi sovereign bantustans. Under apartheid, South Africa established what they called native reserves. These were territories set aside for the forcible

resettlement of black South Africans. They were allegedly meant to be homelands for particular ethnic groups, So the Bantustan of Quasulu was meant for the Zulu people, frans Ke and Siske were for the Kosa people, both with Atswana for the Swana people, and so on. In practice, though, it was pretty arbitrary, and more importantly, they functioned to strip

black South Africans of their citizenship. Laws passed in the nineteen seventies designated all black South Africans as citizens only of their home land, that is, the Bantustan they'd been assigned to, and not a citizen of the country of South Africa. Of the ten Bantustans, four were recognized as independent states by the Government of South Africa. No one

else in the world recognized these as sovereign nations. But in nineteen ninety four, Lucas Mangope was the president of Bothu Tatswana and he wanted to remain the president after the upcoming elections, though all of the Bantustans would be reincorporated into South Africa and all South Africans, black and white, would be full citizens of the nation.

participating in the election at all. But with the potential disestablishment of their country on the horizon, civil servants wanted assurances that their pensions would be paid, and the president ignored them. Strikes and civil unrest quickly devolved into a bit of a situation when the police joined the protest. This is an incredibly strange bit of history, and I'm speeding through it here because we've got other places to

go today. But if you're interested in a bit more about the Boufu Tatswana crisis, the podcast Lions Led by Donkeys did an episode about it in December of twenty twenty one, and it's a fun listen. Mengobe was no stranger to unrest. This wasn't even his first coup. He'd put down an attempted coup in nineteen ninety and he was briefly deposed by his own military in nineteen eighty eight, but the South African government intervened, sending in troops to

restore him to power. This time, though it wasn't the South African government he turned to for help was a man named Constant Villiun. Villiune had retired as a general nearly a decade earlier, and in nineteen ninety three, he and three other retired generals formed the Africaner Folksfront, an attempt to unite the disparate elements of the white extreme right wing. As a former general, Villiune was confident that if he ever went to war, a good chunk of the military would follow him.

it's a little more complicated than black and white. If Bob could successfully refuse to participate in the election, maybe other Bantustans would follow suit, making the election less legitimate and weakening the state. And if this African or militia could keep Mangope in power, they would have access to land and weapons in a sovereign nation within South Africa's borders. It could be a stronghold from which to launch more attacks.

And perhaps they hoped to eventually negotiate with Mangope for a bit of land of their own within his territory so they could start their own white ethno state. But perhaps most importantly, Millyun was taking a calculated risk. If his Folks Front militia came to Mangope's aid, the South African government might send in the military to restore order.

And there was a widespread belief on the right and a profound fear within the government that the military would refuse those orders that they would not fire on a white militia. If the military were to refuse those orders, it would embold in white right wingers around the country to take up arms. After all, who was going to

stop them. And if the military refused orders to fire on his militia, Villyun could potentially take control of a significant portion of the military and maybe they could topple the entire government. Here's South African Communist Party chair and ANC negotiator Joe Slovo, describing that fear.

showed up anyway. Terre Blanche had put out a call to AWB members in an address on Radio Pretoria, that pirate radio station where our German mercenaries had been assigned guard duty on March eleventh, nineteen ninety f for Eugene Terreblanche and a few hundred men under his command. Arrived in Bob Jack Turner, leader of the soldiers loyal to Mangope,

did not want AWB there. Their reputation for uncontrollable racist violence preceded them, and Turner was worried that the black soldiers under his command would panic at the sight of Terre Blanche's neo Nazis. What they actually did, though, was mutiny.

and the soldiers wouldn't have any part in it. When the soldiers threatened to attack the AWB men, if they didn't leave. Hair Blanche's convoy begrudgingly packed up and started to leave. On the way out of town, though, they started shooting black civilians at random. As the convoy rolled through a town, picking off passers by from their car windows, an angry mob formed blocking their path. The web vehicles fired into the crowd and that sent everyone running, and

this was the last straw for the BOP police. These neo Nazis had felt quite brave when they were shooting at unarmed civilians, but it was a very different story when someone in an armored vehicle started shooting back. Several people in the convoy were hit, but they all managed to escape except the last car at the very end of the line. The driver of a blue Mercedes was shot and killed, leaving his passengers two other AWB members stranded.

The video of this moment is surreal. I mean, it's bizarre that there's even video of this moment to watch, and it shows three men in their khaki uniforms and they've sort of spilled out of this blue Mercedes and they're lying on the ground and one of them appears to be already dead and the other two are wounded lying on the ground, surrounded by photojournalists snapping pictures.

be granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When he appeared before the Commission in nineteen ninety eight, Eugene

Terreblanche himself cross examined him about the incident. After some extensive back and forth, with terre Blanche really taking advantage of this opportunity to spin his version of events, Minatto again explained that he shot those men because he had witnessed them shooting civilians, saying, quote, it was quite clear that the killings were going to continue, and I decided that rather than to leave those people to destroy the

black people who won't do me any good. But the only alternative is to do away with them, and that is exactly what I did. Within hours of the shooting at the convoy, the BOP soldiers had run the entire Folks Front out, and once all the white paramilitary forces had withdrawn, the South African Defense Forces moved in and the mutining soldiers quickly surrendered and Mengoe was removed from power. The government of Bofu Tatswana was dissolved by the end

of the day. The whole disastrous affair was the end of Constant Villiun's dreams of a Boer Folkstadt. As the leader of the Afrikaaner Folks Front, he had been loudly calling for a boycott of the elections. The day after his troops were run out of bob he announced that not only was he no longer opposing the election, he had in fact decided to run in the election under the banner of his newly formed Freedom Front Party, a

conservative party representing white interests. So this is the context the subject of our story.

Those three AWB members were shot on March eleventh. On March twelfth, Constant Villejune announced that he was on board with the elections and was in fact running for office, and on Monday, March fourteenth, nineteen ninety four, three German mercenaries opened fire on South African police officers in Tierport, outside of Pretoria. Exactly what happened is impossible to say.

Even reporting from the time just isn't consistent. Some reports say police simply happened to notice several men in combat fatigues in a car and tried to pull them over. Other reports say the men intentionally led officers into a trap, but either way, at some point those Germans started firing their AK forty sevens at the two police officers, wounding but not killing them. When the shooting stopped, police found the body of Thomas Konst in the brush near by.

He had a pair of night vision goggles on and several hundred rounds of ammunitions trapped to his body. Stephen Rays was apprehended alive. The third man, Horse Cleans, managed to flee the scene, but he was arrested several days later, along with a fourth mercenary, Alexander Nydline. That much we know for sure. Thomas Coons died, Stephen Rays was arrested that night, and Clen's and Nydeline were picked up that weekend.

Everything else is a little bit fuzzy. In the last episode, I mentioned that Monica Huggett was in charge of picking the mercenaries up from the airport. She was the first point of contact for each batch of foreign fighters. When Raised, Nydeline, and Coons arrived in South Africa in January of nineteen ninety four, she set them up with their first assignment, serving as armed guards for the right wing pirate radio station Radio Pretorio. Now this is absolutely just me spitballing.

I'm just guessing here, but I have to wonder if this confrontation had something to do with the radio station. Remember, this shootout is happening just days after the internationally televised violence in Bob and when Eugene Tarblance was trying to recruit ADVB members to go there in the first place,

he made the announcement on Radio Pretoria. The radio station isn't mentioned in any of the reporting about the shootout, but I wonder if this alleged trap they led police into was connected to their job protecting the station, or if police were patrolling the area near the station specifically because of the recent events in Bop. Maybe they expected Tare Blanche to show back up and announce a new

hair brain scheme. An article published in Aberlin newspaper that month, though, says that they'd grown bored of standing around guarding the station and had struck off on their own. Maybe they saw footage of civilians being shot by the AWB convoy and instead of feeling disgusted, they felt left out and they wanted to find their own adventure. I guess we can't really know. I have a lot of unanswered questions about this incident, but one of them stands out above

the rest. When doctors removed the bullets that had struck those police officers. One of them didn't match. It hadn't come from any of our German mercenaries. That bullet had been fired by Eugene Decoc. Decoc was a death squad leader. He had been a colonel in the South African Police Force, but he was relieved of duty in nineteen ninety three as part of the National Party's last ditch efforts at

damage control after public revelations about state sponsored terror. As the commander of the Counterinsurgency Unit C ten, Decoc oversaw the kidnapping, torture, and murder of countless anti apartheid activists. Later testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation committ would connect Decoq's C ten unit to the violent attacks in Namibia in nineteen eighty nine, the ones intended to undermine Namibian independence. After his bullet was discovered inside that policeman in nineteen

ninety four, a police spokesman said quote. He told investigators he was on a neighboring property when he heard shooting. Fearing for his life, he fired in the general direction of the muzzle fire. I know it's a mess of a story, But that bit about Namibia might be jumping out at you. Those violent attacks in nineteen eighty nine intended to undermine Namibian independence. Two weeks ago we discussed one of those attacks in great detail, the murder of

a UN security guard in aut Yo. That operation was later revealed to have been funded by the South African government. But one of the men who actually threw a grenade at the UN office was German mercenary horse to cleanse. So what are the odds that two men who'd participated in the same state backed terrorism in nineteen eighty nine would just completely accidentally cross paths again five years later while one of them was in the middle of a

shootout with the police. It's possible that the answers are buried somewhere in the case file for Decoc's later conviction for crimes against humanity, but a quick search didn't seem promising a coincidence for the ages.

already been arrested by then. When the next round of mercenaries arrived from Europe just a few days after the shootout, there was no one waiting for them at the airport. Ronald Doyster, Ralph Morajaz, and falk Semeng waited at the airport for nearly an hour before they tried calling the number they'd been given by their European contacts at Monica

Huggitt's house. A woman answered and told them she had no idea where Monica was, but she gave them the address so they could take a taxi and wait for her there. They were sitting in Monica's living room when they found out she'd been arrested on a weapons charge, so she was certainly in police custody on March seventeenth, nineteen ninety four, but she pretty quickly made bail. An Associated Press report published a week after the incident, quotes

from a German television News broadcast. I searched desperately for actual video of this segment, but to no avail. I did find a copy of the TV guide for ard that German TV network for this date, March twenty second, nineteen ninety four, but unfortunately, it does us absolutely no good to know that this segment probably aired after a German dubbed rerun of the American police drama Lady Blue.

But the AP write up says an anonymous South African woman with knowledge of the German Mercenary cell appeared on the broadcast, and the woman said that Horst Cleans had stayed in her home for some time and that the group he was operating with had come to South Africa

to assassinate Nelson Mandela. Reporting from the same time period in the Johannesburg City Press says that upon arrival in the country, the German mercenary stay in a private home in Kempton Park, where they were given money and documents before being dispatched to their assignments. Given that we know for certain that Monica's Kempton Park home was Deyster's destination, it seems likely that she is this unnamed woman from Kempton Park with the election just weeks away, the plan

was unraveling. Our Dutch mercenary Ronald Deuster, was unable to make contact with Monica Huggett. He was redirected to a farm owned by another AWB member. With his vast experience as a soldier for hire, he was put to work teaching the group how to make car bombs. In a later confession, Doyster explained that he was quite good at making car bombs, having successfully detonated several in Bosnia, but

he found the whole operation here just embarrassingly amateurish. He said the people on the farm were ridiculous and pathetic and that quote. The whole camp was in chaos. They couldn't even source the materials he'd asked for to make nail bombs, and the guy he was trying to explain

car bombs to didn't know anything about explosives. He was, of course personally and ideologically interested in participating in a white revolution, but he was a career mercenary and his top priority is always his own survival, and this obviously wasn't going to work. So he went to the police. He was willing to exchange information about this operation in exchange for his own freedom, and when his information proved to be valuable, he was hired by South African intelligence

to assist them in taking down the network. Searchlight magazine's nineteen ninety six series of articles about this whole operation mentions only in passing that Monica Huggitt went right back to her old ways after being released, placing more ads for soldiers in Eastern European newspapers. But there's no date attached to that in the article, because at some point she left. Sometime in nineteen ninety four, Monica Huggitt left

South Africa. Nelson Mandela was elected president in April, apartheid was over. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission wouldn't be formed for another year and a half, so there was no promise of amnesty on the table in nineteen ninety four. I don't know if she left to avoid prosecution, or if she left because she couldn't bear the torment of living in an integrated society, or for some other reason, but she did leave.

a visa at all? Over the course of those three interviews, did they just talk about her mother's cows or did they ask about the terrorism because they obviously knew some information about her If they knew about the cows, did they ask her if she planned to visit the American clansmen who'd sent her the bomb making manual the VIT Commando had relied on when they made those bombs that they set off in Professor's offices in nineteen eighty Did they ask her about the weapons charge she was still

out on bond for, or the dead mercenary who'd been staying in her guest room.

boor mystic. And in the weeks I've spent putting this together, history has marched on. It was the President's bizarre our executive order condemning South African land perform that sent me down this path in the first place, and he's only doubled down on his commitment to the white genocide conspiracy theory since then. No, I think there is a whole

episode's worth of story left to tell. But if I've somehow misjudged how much of the story is actually left, I can always feel some time by reading you the absolutely dreadful poems written by one of those mercenaries. Treed Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Dolly Conker. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme

music was posed by Brad Diggert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I would have definitely read.