A celebrated jurist, including by future President Nelson Mandela, he served the NP government as a prosecutor in the Treason Trial until his death.
[2] During this time Pirow was a keen sportsman and was a champion at the javelin throw, whilst also excelling at boxing, wrestling, fencing, sprinting, swimming, horsemanship and big game hunting.
[4][5] Pirow came under the influence of Tielman Roos, an important figure in Transvaal and became a member of James Barry Munnik Hertzog's National Party being elected to parliament for Zoutpansberg in 1924.
[3] His role in the cabinet also included responsibility for railways and harbours and from this basis he founded South African Airways and furnished it with Junkers aircraft.
[10] In the Foreign Office, it was believed that Hitler was "testing the weaker vessel first" as a gambit to force the British, the French and the Belgians to return the former German African colonies.
[10] According to the source, Hertzog was planning to keep Southwest Africa and also felt that Britain should not return either Tanganyika (modern mainland Tanzania) or Cameroon to Germany.
[12] During this tour he also met Benito Mussolini, António de Oliveira Salazar and Francisco Franco and became convinced that a European war was imminent, with Nazi victory assured.
[14] Daniel François Malan initially tolerated the actions of the New Order, but soon came to see it as a divisive influence on the HNP and at the Transvaal party congress of August 1941, he forced through a motion ending the group's propaganda activities, particularly their insistence on an authoritarian single-party state.
[15] Fearing an Afrikaner division, however, Pirow refused to run in the 1943 general election although a number of his fellow NO members did, all of them heavily defeated.
Although Pirow continued to publish a newsletter until 1958, his political support dwindled with the end of the war, with the New Order essentially being subsumed by the Reunited National Party.
[16] Having been removed from the political scene, largely by Malan's influence, Pirow became a friend of Sir Oswald Mosley and with him developed an idea for the division of Africa into exclusively black and white areas.
[3] The two met after Pirow read a copy of Mosley's book The Alternative and by 1947 they were in discussion over founding an anti-communist group to be known as the "enemies of the Soviet Union" (although this plan never reached fruition).
[17] Mosley publicly endorsed Pirow's African plan, as part of his Europe a Nation project, at a joint press conference in April 1948.