Paul Sauer

When Sauer was six years old, the family moved to his father's farm, Uitkyk, in the Stellenbosch district.

At the age of eleven, he went to SACS in Cape Town where he became head boy of Rosedale house and captain of the first rugby team .

The next year he was a candidate again in Stellenbosch, this time for the House of Assembly, and he gained 65 more votes than in 1923, but lost by 470, because after the terror of 1923,[clarification needed] the South African Party registered hundreds of Coloured people as voters.

In 1929, he stood in Victoria West as candidate of the NP against the later SAP Senator A. M. Conroy and defeated him by 88 votes.

Four years later, he was asked by the NP from Humansdorp to run for office there in place of the recently deceased minister Charlie Malan.

The Fagan Commission accepted African urbanisation as a fact and recommended adapting the pass laws and migrant labour system to recognise the reality of racial interdependence in the economy (in 1948 the proportion of white employees employed in industry was 34 per cent and in decline).

By contrast, the Sauer Commission looked to a more comprehensive solution to the native question along the lines of 'total segregation'.

In wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, Sauer along with Eben Dönges and Ben Schoeman called for a relaxation of certain Apartheid policies, which was subsequently rejected by Verwoerd.

Sauer retired from active politics in 1963 and died on 11 January 1976 of a lung disease and was buried in Stellenbosch.