In the final days of apartheid, white extremists were getting desperate. That desperation contributed to one of the strangest political crises of the late 20th century: Sources:https://dcist.com/story/12/09/24/aryan-nations/https://archive.idavox.com/index.php/2012/09/24/the-aryan-nations-show-of-farce-in-dc/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naRGivc7OngGuelke, Adrian. “Political Violence and the South African Transition.” Irish Studies in International Affairs, vol. 4, 1993, pp. 59–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30001810https://antifainfoblatt.de/aib24/suedafrika-machtkampf-krieg-auf-kleiner-flamme https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/white-supremacist-arthur-kemp-steps-leader-neo-nazi-group-national-alliance/ https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/26/world/white-separatists-storm-south-african-negotiations.html?fbclid=IwAR2oDpPTYh0q173RdYwv5cox59uhpyHBrQdGfC65L22gY7pZAcwbArH8BkIhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/how-the-volk-myth-died-it-took-just-a-few-minutes-to-change-the-course-of-south-african-history-john-carlin-reports-from-mafikeng-1428703.html https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/1998/98092123_mma_mmabath3.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20140503185912/ http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/newsticker/rechte-in-suedafrika-rekrutieren-internationale-soeldner---politikermord-lautet-ein-auftrag-die-killer-kamen-von-der-reeperbahn,10917074,8820188.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/13/world/a-homeland-s-agony.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 https://mg.co.za/article/1994-06-17-foreign-hooligans-embarrass-awb/https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/media%5C1997%5C9708/s970821c.htmhttps://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans%5Cpta/2derby1.htmDeath of Apartheid: The Whites’ Last Stand. (1995, May 28). Brian Lapping Associates.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Cyrus the Great of Persia was a conqueror, and he tried to increase his empire by marrying Tamiris, the widow of the king of the Masengeti people.
She refused his offer, and so he decided that he would invade her kingdom instead.
Turns out, that was a big mistake.
Listen to the latest episode of Noble Blood available now.
Listen to Noble Blood on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremurki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dressing. Dressing.
Oh, French dressing.
Exactly. I'm AJ Jacobs, and my current obsession is puzzles.
And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler.
Something about Mary Poppins?
Exactly. This is fun.
You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears.
Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm ready to fight.
Oh, this is fighting words.
Okay, I'll put the hammer back.
Hi, I'm George M. Johnson.
A best-selling author with the second most banned book in America.
Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back.
Part of the power of Black queer creativity is the fact that we got us, you know?
We are the greatest culture makers in world history.
Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media.
September 22nd, 2012.
May have been the first day of autumn, but it was a warm afternoon in Washington, D.C. A charter bus pulled to the curb at the edge of Lincoln Park, and its passengers piled out.
All 14 of them.
Most of the attendees at that day's rally were dressed alike.
Black pants and a blue button-up shirt with a black tie.
The uniform of the Aryan nations.
They'd announced the rally months ahead of time, giving DC locals ample time to plan their counter-protest.
Hundreds of people showed up to see what turned out to be barely a dozen neo-Nazis.
The tiny group marched the mile and a half from the park to the Capitol reflecting pool.
Safely escorted by hundreds of police officers from the D.C. Metropolitan Police, U.S. Park Police, and the U.S. Capitol Police.
Dozens of officers on bicycles and on horseback flanked the little march, keeping counter-protesters at bay.
A phalanx 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 Nazis come!
The Aryan Nations and the Aryan Nationsites will be here to get you American those back to the way it was founded by our founding fathers who are all of the Aryan race. You guys are condoning the murders of the people of South Africa that have done nothing to you.
Nazi Trump!
Surrounded by angry counter-protesters and curious tourists, Aryan Nations member Ryan Mullins tried to address the crowd with a megaphone.
But he was almost completely drowned out by chants of, Nazi scum!
If he did manage to give a speech about the plight of the white South African farmer, it's almost 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.
She stood out in the small crowd, not only as the only woman, but because she was wearing a neatly pressed khaki uniform.
It had been nearly 20 years since the fall of the apartheid regime, and over a decade since she'd married an American.
and moved to Louisiana.
But it seems Monica Huckett Stone still had her Afrikaner resistance movement uniform in the back of her closet.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guides.
*Music*
We are nearing the end of the story of Monica Huggett Stone.
Not because I'm done digging I could write half a dozen more episodes, but because I think you'll start to get restless if I keep trying to tell the same story for months at a time.
I know 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 2012, talking about the modern 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 50-year-old white supremacist newspapers from Afrikaans, or poring over 30-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 his 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 2012.
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 in South Africa.
Which, if you don't remember the episode, It's 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 Huggett's name showed up in the historical record alongside a bombing.
In 1980, she was a member of a small Afrikaner nationalist terrorist cell calling itself the Witkommando, 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 Witt Commando turned out to be Italian fascists, and Monica Huggett'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 1980s.
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 Horst Klenz and his South African accomplices.
They carried out an attack on a UN office in Namibia in 1989, 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 Afrikaner neo-Nazi organization called the Orde Borafolk.
After another series of bombings and arrests, they all somehow ended up no longer in jail.
That group, the Ordoborafolk, 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 1990s.
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 1993, at an international fascist rally in Belgium, leaders of European neo-Nazi groups met to discuss sending 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 ethnostate.
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 episode sifting through the distant past, Looking at the history of the Klan in South Africa and 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 apartheid wasn't a single moment.
There were years of political negotiations before that election in April of 1994.
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 Terreblanche, offering his thoughts on the negotiation process to a reporter in May of 1993.
If they believe that they can negotiate for our fatherland and get it back, I'll let them try.
I'm preparing myself for the war.
An increasingly desperate and fractured extreme right wing was doubling down on violence.
But the political process was proceeding without them.
And everything they did to try to stop that process only seemed to accelerate it.
On April 10th, 1993, the Saturday before Easter, Chris Hani was assassinated.
Hani was the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party and the Chief of Staff of the ANC's armed wing, Mukonto Wisizwe.
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 recon mission.
But when he spotted Honey returning home from buying a newspaper, accompanied only by his 15-year-old daughter, he knew he'd never get a better shot.
As Honey stepped out of his car, the killer shouted his name.
And as Hani 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 Terreblanche had publicly confirmed that the killer, a Polish immigrant named Janusz Walus, had been a member of the Afrikaner resistance movement.
Once in custody, Walus 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 Ordoboro folk had stolen from an Air Force base three years earlier.
When Waloosa's apartment was searched, officers found a printed list of names.
Given that Chris Hanney's name was on that list and he'd just been shot to death, It appears to have been a hit list.
But Wallace almost certainly didn't write that list himself.
It was mostly high-profile political figures like Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, and Communist Party chair Joe Slovo.
But there were also the names of several journalists, most of whom published only in Afrikaans, which Wallace 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, Kemp was not involved.
He was not charged, and he claimed he'd had no idea the list would be used in any murders.
In hours of Hani's murder, Nelson Mandela gave a televised address urging calm.
Chris Hani.
Championed the cause of peace, trudging to every corner of South Africa, calling for a spirit of tolerance among all our people.
We are a nation in mourning.
Our pain and anger is real.
Yet we must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris, Ani gave his life for.
Ani's murder didn't have the desired effect.
It didn't provoke violent reprisals from anti-apartheid groups.
It didn't disrupt the ongoing negotiations.
It didn't make the African National Congress less willing to compromise during those negotiations.
If anything, it had the opposite effect.
Mandela's public addresses in the days that followed were calm, reasonable, and committed to peace.
And the ruling National Party had nothing to celebrate in Hani's death either.
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 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
I'm Gilbert King.
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
In June of 1993, 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 25, 1993, thousands of armed Afrikaner nationalists showed up outside the World Trade Center.
The newly formed Afrikaner Volksfront, 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 Terre Blanche, an AWB member drove an armored car through the front of the building, and the crowd easily overcame the police and swarmed inside.
All of a sudden, I saw the security people running out and I said, what's up?
And they said, they've broken through and they're coming.
And then my own security man simply grabbed hold of me and ran.
Pandemonium just broke out in the entire building.
Many people on the ANC side, from the government side, all huddled into the government offices.
Officials on both sides of the negotiating table fled.
Fearing they'd be shot and killed by the armed men.
For two hours, the AWB occupied the World Trade Center, smashing windows and furniture.
They took over the conference room where the negotiations had been going on and spray-painted separatist slogans on the walls.
Now, the only photos I have that I know are of Monica Huggett were taken in 2012, and she was nearly 70 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 2019.
They did the negotiations at the World Trade Center at the airport in Johannesburg.
It's not far from where I live.
And I.
We went there one day when the AWB had made a sort of a Panzerwagen and went through the glass.
They really smashed the glass.
Oh my goodness, it just came down like diamonds.
And then we were about maybe 2,000, 3,000 people there protesting.
There's quite a bit of actual video of this event.
And it looks Really familiar.
It looks unsettlingly like footage of the protesters storming the congressional chambers at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
And I don't just mean visually, although the visual similarities are striking, but there's that same sort of unnerving mix of bloodlust and lighthearted adventurism.
In both cases, there were reports of protesters pissing and shitting on office furniture and 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 smashing 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 ANC negotiator and present-day South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in an interview in 1995.
I was able to discuss the events with some of the National Party ministers and they, in the end, I think drove them more and more away from having any form of understanding or even sympathy with the right-wingers.
This kind of stunt only made the far-right look more unreasonable, more unstable, and less viable as any kind of political partner.
The adults were at the negotiating table.
And these hooligans were driving trucks through windows and pissing 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 Volkstadt, 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 1994.
A white Afrikaner 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 KwaZulu was meant for the Zulu people, Franske and Siske were for the Xhosa people, Ofudat Swana 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 1970s designated all Black South Africans as citizens only of their Homeland.
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 1994, Lucas Mangope was the president of Bofu Datswana.
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 of South Africa.
Black South Africans were preparing to cast their ballots in a national election for the first time.
And that would mean an end to the Mangope presidency.
Because his country wouldn't exist anymore.
In early March of 1994, Mangope announced that Bofu Tatswana, or BOP for short, that's not just me shortening it, that is apparently what people call it, but he announced that BOP would not be 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 Bofu-Totswana crisis, the podcast Lions Led by Donkeys did an episode about it in December of 2021.
It's a fun listen.
Mangope was no stranger to unrest.
This wasn't even his first coup.
He'd put down an attempted coup in 1990, and he was briefly deposed by his own military in 1988.
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.
Who is a man named Konstant Viljoen.
Viljoen had retired as a general nearly a decade earlier.
And in 1993, he and three other retired generals formed the Afrikaner Volksfront, an attempt to unite the disparate elements of the white extreme right wing.
As a former general, Viljoen was confident that if he ever went to war, a good chunk of the military would follow him.
I also had forces available, I would say, from what would split off from the defence force.
Because had I really taken a military action, there was a real danger of polarisation within the defence force.
It would certainly have been a substantial number of people that would have split from the defence force and would have joined me in fighting for the liberation of the Afrikaner people.
By 1994, Viljoen claimed to have over 50,000 men under his command.
Trained paramilitaries, military reservists, and sympathetic members of the military who would follow his orders.
It all sounds a bit odd.
Why would Afrikaner nationalists lift a finger to help any black person?
But it's a little more complicated than black and white.
If BAP 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 Afrikaner militia could keep Mengope 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 ethnostate.
But perhaps most importantly, Viljoen was taking a calculated risk.
If his Volksfront 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 embolden 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, Viljoen 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.
Some of my colleagues and I feared very much that the echelons of the army So in March of 1994,
the government took a sort of wait-and-see approach to the whole affair in Bopp.
They couldn't risk a mass defection within the military.
And maybe things would have been different if Eugene Terreblanche was more of a team player.
We'll never know.
When the dust finally settled, everyone else involved agreed that no one had invited Eugene Terreblanche to the Autogolpe.
But the AWB refused to be left out.
And they showed up anyway.
Ter 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 11th, 1994, Eugene Ter Blanche and a few hundred men under his command arrived in Bopp.
Jack Turner, leader of the Bopp 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 Ter Blanche's neo-Nazis.
What they actually did, though, was mutiny.
When my own troops heard that some of the weapons were being earmarked for the Fox Front, They didn't like it very much.
In actual fact, they refused to load any weapons onto vehicles and that any of the weapons were to be given to the Volksfront.
When the BAP soldiers saw AWB men were part of the Volksfront contingent, they refused.
They refused to participate.
They wouldn't arm any of the white paramilitary men.
A.W.B.
or otherwise.
And maybe they would have happily collaborated with just the Folks Front.
But when A.W.B.
arrived, they no longer made any distinction between the two.
Anyone willing to stand with A.W.B.
was just as bad as they were, and the BOP soldiers wouldn't have any part in it.
When the soldiers threatened to attack the A.W.B.
men if they didn't leave, Terre Blanche's convoy begrudgingly packed up and started to leave.
On their way out of town, though, they started shooting black civilians at random.
As the convoy rolled through a town, picking off passersby from their car windows, an angry mob formed, blocking their path.
One of the AWB vehicles fired into the crowd and that sent everyone running.
And this was the last straw for the BAP 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.
Can you just get us some help for him, please?
He's just wounded.
Are you finished with your photos and stuff?
Please get the ambulance man.
We need the ambulance for this guy that's wounded.
They're just lying there in the dirt, bleeding, and reporters are asking them questions.
One reporter asked them if they're members of AWB, and one of the bleeding men says yes.
And then, with the journalist's cameras still rolling, a BOP police officer calmly walked over and shot all three men at point-blank range.
That officer, Ontlametza Bernstein Mignazzo, would eventually be granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When he appeared before the commission in 1998, Eugene Terreblanche himself cross-examined him about the incident.
After some extensive back and forth, with Terreblanche really taking advantage of this opportunity to spin his version of events, Mignazzo 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, it 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 BAP soldiers had run the entire Volksfront out.
And once all the white paramilitary forces had withdrawn, the South African defense forces moved in.
The mutinying soldiers quickly surrendered, and Mengope was removed from power.
The government of Bofu Thotswana was dissolved by the end of the day.
The whole disastrous affair was the end of Constantin Vilyun's dreams of a Boer Volksstadt.
As the leader of the Afrikaner Volksfront, he'd been loudly calling for a boycott of the elections.
The day after his troops were run out of BAP, 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 finds herself in.
Monika Haggett was hosting these German mercenaries in her home as a part of this larger effort to disrupt the upcoming election.
And with the failure in Bob, the Volksfront not only lost its leader when Wilhelm abandoned the plan, but they'd suffered a pretty serious blow to morale.
Seeing your brothers-in-arms shot like stray dogs in the street on the evening news might lead you to ask yourself some hard questions about your commitment to the cause.
Those three AWB members were shot on March 11th.
On March 12th, Konstantin Vilyun announced that he was on board with the elections and was in fact running for office.
And on Monday, March 14th, 1994, 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-47s at the two police officers, wounding but not killing them.
When the shooting stopped, police found the body of Thomas Kunst in the brush nearby.
He had a pair of night vision goggles on and several hundred rounds of ammunitions trapped to his body.
Stephen Reyes was apprehended alive.
The third man, Horst Klenz, managed to flee the scene, but he was arrested several days later, along with a fourth mercenary, Alexander Neidlein.
That much we know for sure.
Thomas Kunst died.
Stephen Reyes was arrested that night, and Klenz and Neidlein 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 Rey, Snideline, and Kunst arrived in South Africa in January of 1994, she set them up with their first assignment, serving as armed guards for the right-wing pirate radio station, Radio Pretoria.
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 Ba.
And when Eugene Terblanche was trying to recruit AWB 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 Maybe they expected Terre Blanche to show back up and announce a new harebrained scheme.
An article published in a Berlin 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 de Kock.
De Kock was a death squad leader.
He'd been a colonel in the South African police force, but he was relieved of duty in 1993 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-10, de Kock oversaw the kidnapping, torture, and murder of countless anti-apartheid activists.
Later testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would connect de Kock's C-10 unit to the violent attacks in Namibia in 1989, the ones intended to undermine Namibian independence.
After his bullet was discovered inside that policeman in 1994, 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 1989 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 Outyo.
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 Horst Klenz.
So what are the odds The two men who'd participated in the same state-backed terrorism in 1989 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 de Kock's later conviction for crimes against humanity.
But a quick search didn't seem promising.
A coincidence for the ages, maybe.
happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Scobie.
I just knew him as a kid.
And he was just staring at me.
Um, Gilbert King?
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh he's a killer, he's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2.
Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Thank you.
But back to our Germans.
A later report in Searchlight Magazine says that after they were arrested, one of the Germans talked, telling police that it had been Monica Huggett who'd introduced them to Klenz.
And based on the timeline of events and the fact that one of them was already dead, it had to have been Stephen Reyes who ratted Monica out.
Nideline and Klenz weren't taken into custody until Sunday, and Monica had 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 Deuster, Ralph Marajas, and Falk Zemeng waited at the airport for nearly an hour before they tried calling the number they'd been given by their European contacts.
At Monica Huggett'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 17th, 1994.
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 22nd, 1994, 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, Appeared on the broadcast.
And the woman said that Horst Klenz 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 mercenaries stay in, quote, 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 Doyster'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 Doyster, 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 1996 series of articles about this whole operation mentions only in passing that Monica Huggett 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 1994, Monica Huggett 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 1994.
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.
When I tried to go over to the United States the first time, I had to go for three interviews.
And they even knew my mother was a farmer and asked me when I go to the States for three months who's going to take care of the cows.
They asked me that.
The consul, not, yeah.
So eventually, I'm not going into detail, but anyway, I got the visa and I went to the United States in 1994.
I came back in 96. And then I got married in 2000 to an American citizen, Jim Stone.
I wish she would go into detail.
How exactly did she manage to spend two years in the United States on a three-month visa?
And why was she granted 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 Klansmen?
Who'd sent her the bomb-making manual the Viet Commando had relied on when they made those bombs that they set off in professors' offices in 1980?
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?
I really would love to know how those interviews went.
Because somehow, she gained legal entry into the United States.
She spent two years here on that three-month visa before returning to South Africa in 1996.
In the summer of 2000, she married a retired sports broadcaster from Louisiana at a ceremony in her hometown of Kempton Park, and the couple returned to Mandeville, Louisiana together.
I know I promised this story was over, and it seems absolutely criminal of me to stretch this out over so many episodes.
But in my defense, I did warn you that there might not be an episode this week at all.
I lost most of my work days this week covering a trial here in Charlottesville.
I'll tell you about that soon, too.
But I don't want to rush the ending of this story.
I mean, I didn't even have time to tell you about Monica's belief in the prophecies of a long-dead boar mystic.
And in the weeks I've spent putting this together, history has marched on.
It was the president's bizarre executive order condemning South African land reform 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 fill some time by reading you the Absolutely dreadful poems written by one of those mercenaries.
Music We Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Geoghegan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Cyrus the Great of Persia was a conqueror, and he tried to increase his empire by marrying Temyrus, the widow of the king of the Masengeti people.
She refused his offer, and so he decided that he would invade her kingdom instead.
Turns out, that was a big mistake.
Listen to the latest episode of Nobleblood, available now.
Listen to Noble Blood on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dressing. Dressing.
Oh, French dressing.
Exactly. Oh, that's good.
I'm AJ Jacobs, and my current obsession is puzzles.
And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler.
Something about Mary Poppins?
Exactly. This is fun.
You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears.
Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm ready to fight.
Oh, this is Fighting Words.
Okay, I'll put the hammer back.
Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a best-selling author with the second most banned book in America.
Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back.
Part of the power of Black queer creativity is the fact that we got us, you know?
We are the greatest culture makers in world history.
