A ship was chartered by the Council for German Jewry, a UK-based group, to bring as many Jews as possible to Cape Town, leading to the Greyshirts organising a mass protest against the move. The scale of opposition was such that Sarah Millin appealed to Jan Smuts to deal with the Greyshirts, although her request was ignored.[4] Indeed, relations between the National Party and the Greyshirts actually improved, initially as a result of a 1937 letter from Frans Erasmus, at the time Secretary of the National Party, praising the Greyshirts for bringing the "Jewish problem" to the fore and culminating in a number of leading Greyshirts also holding National Party membership.[5]