Ruth Weiss, a South African journalist forged by the Nazi persecution she experienced as a child in Germany, who covered the malignant flowering of apartheid in the early 1960s and later wrote about the brutal white regime in Rhodesia before being expelled from the country, died on Sept. 5 at a hospital in Aalborg, Denmark. She was 101.
Her death was announced by the nonprofit organization Ruth Weiss Gesellschaft, founded in Germany by Ms. Weiss’s friends to promote her work.
Her long life and the hundreds of articles and many books she wrote were shaped by twin experiences of discrimination: first, as a girl, when her life was upended after the Nazis came to power in 1933, and then three years later, when her family immigrated to Johannesburg on one of the last refugee boats allowed into South Africa.
From being an object of exclusion and persecution, she became a witness to it. And like many other refugee Jews, she became a determined opponent of apartheid.
“Blacks under apartheid — Jews under the swastika. Was it all that different?” she asked in a lecture in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1979, as she recounted in her 2014 memoir, “A Path Through Hard Grass: A Journalist’s Memories of Exile and Apartheid.”
She concluded that it was not. Her discursive memoir is shot through with repugnance at the brutal treatment of Black people that she witnessed as a young woman in her adopted land.
Her friend Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist, lauded Ms. Weiss’s “natural modesty” in the introduction she wrote to the memoir.
It was that self-effacing quality, paradoxically, that launched Ms. Weiss’s career in journalism: her willingness to write on behalf of someone else.
During the 1950s in Johannesburg, she was married to a fellow-refugee journalist named Hans Weiss, who though a correspondent for German newspapers was often unable to work as he suffered from depression and other illnesses.
Ms. Weiss wrote some of his articles for him, under his name — initially the ones dealing with economics, as she had worked for a large South African insurance company — and, in the process, she became a journalist.
She also took over his other journalist work, she wrote in her memoir. “This became the pattern of our lives.”
When their marriage began to founder in the early 1960s, she blossomed as a journalist — but now under her own name. She became the business editor of the fortnightly South African magazine News Check, and later a correspondent for the country’s leading business weekly, Financial Mail. She accepted overseas assignments for both publications, traveling throughout Africa and Europe.
“It was an exciting and busy time for the media,” she wrote. “We covered the emergence of MK” — the military wing of the African National Congress, the oldest liberation movement in Africa — “the arrests and detentions, and the government’s decision to leave the Commonwealth and turn South Africa into a republic on 31 May 1961.”
But the pressures on Ms. Weiss and her liberal friends were intense. “I never parked in front of certain houses,” she wrote, referring to the houses under surveillance by the Special Branch, South Africa’s secret police. “Telephone calls were kept short and to the point. The multiracial parties of the fifties were a thing of the past.”
She recalled meeting Nelson Mandela.
“I was having dinner at a friend’s house when her cook came in and whispered something to her,” Ms. Weiss wrote. “She excused herself and returned a few minutes later, asking if I could help her in the kitchen. A large man was sitting at the table, enjoying a plate of soup. He smiled at us. Nelson Mandela. At that time he was on the run.”
Through it all — even before she began working as a journalist — her hatred of apartheid was unwavering. “I don’t like your system,” she told her astonished employer at the insurance company, a nationalist Afrikaner named Chris Bischoff. “I think it’s unjust and must be abolished.”
In 1966, after the birth of her son, she was offered a job by the Financial Mail as bureau chief in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). With the situation in South Africa growing increasingly untenable, she eagerly accepted. But she soon ran afoul of the government there — and of Prime Minister Ian Smith, who had declared the country’s independence from Britain — by reporting on its strenuous efforts to evade crippling United Nations-imposed sanctions.
By 1968, she was living in London and had taken a job at The Guardian newspaper. “I was not allowed to return to Rhodesia nor indeed to South Africa,” she wrote. “I received the order forbidding my entry with the threat of instant arrest if I as much as set a foot on Rhodesian soil while I was working at The Guardian.”
Still, the decision to write about the sanctions evasion had been an easy one, once she received the tip from several businessmen, although she knew it would mean the end of her time in the country, and of a job in which she had thrived for two years.
“As an economic journalist, I could not simply let it go,” she wrote. “I had to find out what was happening.”
Ruth Löwenthal was born on July 26, 1924, in Fürth, Germany, the younger of two daughters of Richard Löwenthal, who worked in the toy industry in nearby Nuremberg, and Selma (Cohen) Löwenthal. (One of her sister Margot’s classmates at the town’s Israelitische Realschule was a certain Heinz, later known as Henry Kissinger.)
In 1933, when the Nazis took power, Ruth’s idyllic childhood ended. “I no longer had any friends,” she wrote. “Everyone sat as far away from me as possible. During the break, no one came near me.”
After her father lost his job, relatives in South Africa invited him to immigrate. The family joined him in Johannesburg three years later. “We had the right skin color, even if we had the wrong religion,” she told an interviewer for the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
Ruth graduated from Parktown High School for Girls in 1939. Her father ran a small grocery store, and her parents could not afford to send her to college. Instead, she joined the youth group of the Independent Jewish Cultural Association, where she met Mr. Weiss. That was “my university,” she told the German newspaper Die Zeit last year.
She worked for the bookstore Mr. Weiss owned, and then for a law firm and in the insurance industry, where she became a company secretary and held positions of increasing responsibility.
After her stint at The Guardian in London, Ms. Weiss returned to Africa in 1970 as business editor of The Times of Zambia. Five years later, she moved to Germany to serve as the Africa expert at Deutsche Welle, in Cologne. By the late 1970s, she was back in London, working as a freelance journalist. She went on to train journalists in the newly independent Zimbabwe in the 1980s, where she witnessed Robert Mugabe’s rise to power, first as prime minister and later as president. She also helped found the Zimbabwe Institute of Southern Africa, a discussion forum intended to help prepare the country for the end of apartheidthat met at Cold Comfort Farm, a farm outside Harare.
Ms. Weiss spent much of the 1990s living on the Isle of Wight in England, where she wrote novels, children’s books and nonfiction. Among her books translated into English are “Zimbabwe and the New Elite” (1994); “Sir Garfield Todd and the Making of Zimbabwe” (1999), written with Jane Parpart; and “Peace in their Time: the Peace Process in Northern Ireland and Southern Africa” (2000).
In her final decades, Ms. Weiss was in great demand as a lecturer in Germany because of her role as a so-called Zeitzeugin, or witness to history.
She and Mr. Weiss divorced in the 1960s. She is survived by their son, Alexander, whom she joined in Aalborg in 2015, and a grandson.
In the introduction that Ms. Gordimer wrote for “A Path Through Hard Grass,” she praised Ms. Weiss’s “innovative intelligence, political acumen and courage to take risks.”
Ms. Weiss, she wrote, was “the most humane woman I have ever met.”
Addressing the state Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany in 2023, Ms. Weiss said: “Racism, antisemitism and misanthropy know no borders. These are injustices that must be fought everywhere.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Maya Tekeli contributed reporting.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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