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Before the rise of Nazism, the ministers of the Dutch Reformed churches did not interfere with the trade unions, but from 1934 is the three Dutch Reformed Churches in South Africa began to play a leading part in the campaign of the Nationalist Party to disrupt the trade unions. They came out openly on the side of Nazism and in support of a policy of ruthless oppression of non-Europeans. They exploited the deeply religious feelings of the Afrikaner people to spread Nazi propaganda and to make converts for the Nationalist Party. At a general meeting of the Hervormde Kerk at Pretoria, held in June, 1937, members of the Church and were warned not to join trade unions; they were communist organisations, godless and knowing no colour bar. In May 1937, the Synod of the leading Dutch Reformed Church set up a special commission to inquire into and report on Communism in the South African Trade Unions, The report was published in booklet form in 1939. Goebbels himself could not have improved on the style and presentation of the brochure. Two thousand copies of the report were published. A copy was brought to me during a strike of tobacco workers in Rustenburg in the Transvaal in 1940. Several hundred-tobacco workers had been employed under appalling conditions, at a maximum wage of about 25s. a week, and they had asked Johanna Cornelius, then organiser of our union, to help them. During the strike that followed, the ministers of the Dutch Reformed Churches sided openly with the employers and distributed copies of the report, directing special attention to a photograph of white and non-white workers together at a meeting. I read the report and found nothing Christian in it. In content, style and vulgarity, it was a crude imitation of Mein Kampf - one long, foul slander against South African trade union leaders, with myself heading the list.
I issued summons against the reputed author of the report, Dr. H. P. Wolmarans, and the publishers, Voortrekkerspers Beperk, a publishing house in Johannesburg, owned by leaders of the Nationalist Party. Each of the defendants paid £300 and costs into Court. I dropped the action against Wolmarans, but decided to proceed against the Voortrekkerspers. I knew that, in deciding to proceed with the action, I took a grave risk. The publication, admittedly, was highly defamatory, but the two defendants had each paid in £300 and costs. The Court might very well hold that £600 was adequate damages, in which event I would be liable for the costs of the trial, amounting perhaps to many thousands of pounds. I decided, however, that the reactionaries who were trying to turn South Africa into a Third Reich and to destroy democracy and the free trade union movement must be fought at all costs. The case, therefore, would not merely be an action between Sachs and a Nationalist publishing company. It would be a battle between democracy and fascism.
The case was heard in the Witwatersrand Local Division of the Supreme Court before Mr. Justice Murray, a descendant of an old and proud Afrikaner family. It lasted about two weeks and attracted widespread public interest.
On the 3rd February 1942, Mr. Justice Murray delivered his judgment. The court was packed with garment workers and ministers of the Dutch Reformed Churches. I was awarded £ 600, instead of the £300 paid into court by the Voortrekkerpers Beperk, and over £6,000 costs.
The garment workers were jubilant and so were true democrats. My success inspired all the members of the National Executive Committee of the South African Trades and Labour Council, numbering over twenty, to institute actions for defamation against the Voortrekkerspers. These actions were settled out of court, the defendant company paying substantial sums to every plaintiff. I had hoped that the Nationalists had by now learnt their lesson and would stop slandering trade union leaders. In fact, for several years, the Nationalist speakers and press did refrain from defaming their opponents. Subsequently, however, slander continued to be a major weapon of Nationalist propagandists.
From 1934 onwards, the Nationalist Party and its stooge organisations began to use not only slander, but also physical violence against individuals and organisations opposing them. Labour, trade union and even United Party meetings were regularly invaded and broken up by bands of fascist hooligans, armed with bicycle chains, knuckle dusters and other weapons. As stated previously, the Reformers even went so far as to seize by force the office of the Mineworkers' Union and had to be ejected by a Court Order. The day after the assassination of Charlie Harris by a Nationalist fanatic, scores of people in the streets of Johannesburg greeted me with the macabre question: "Are you still alive?" Indeed, the chief of the C.I.D. in Johannesburg sent for me and told me that my life was in danger and that I should carry a gun to protect myself. A licence for a revolver was duly issued to me and also to other officials of the union, whose lives were threatened. I carried on with my work as usual, but found it revolting that, in a so-called civilised community, peaceful and law-abiding citizens should be subjected to threats of violence and murder. Officials and members of the union and many of my friends worried about me constantly and, whenever I had left a meeting or a friend's home at night, would anxiously telephone to inquire whether I had reached home safely.
On February 13th, 1940, I was addressing a meeting of about a hundred garment workers in Brixton, a working-class suburb of Johannesburg, on a purely trade union matter. Suddenly, a band of about fifty Nationalists, armed with all sorts of weapons and led by one Simon Schoeman, a Reformer, rushed up to the meeting and, shouting: "Where is the Jew Communist Solly Sachs?" dragged me off the platform and violently assaulted me. I was taken to hospital by ambulance and remained in bed for nearly two weeks. Later, Schoeman appeared in the Magistrate's Court to answer a charge of assault. The Magistrate, Mr. H. J. S. Johannes, described the violent assault as a "political brawl" and fined Schoeman £1. The public of Johannesburg was somewhat shaken by this trivial sentence imposed for a brutal and unprovoked assault and The Star, the leading daily paper, criticised the sentence. The union sent a strong protest to the Minister of Justice, Dr. Colin Steyn, who shared our concern, but was apparently powerless to do anything. There were some peculiar features about the conduct of the trial. First, the magistrate allowed numerous irrelevancies to be introduced by the defence; secondly, despite my requests to the prosecutor to apply
Section 363 (1) of Act 31 of 1917, for an order for compensation for my spectacles, which had been broken by the accused, the prosecutor refused to do so. For some reasons unknown to me, two ministers of the Dutch Reformed Churches, in clerical garb, sat in court throughout the proceedings. Subsequently, when I instituted a civil action against Schoeman, I was paid £30. The entire costs of the defence were borne by the Reformers.