NO SUBMISSION TO OUTRAGE

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 189, 7 May 1940, Page 7

NO SUBMISSION TO OUTRAGE

Norwegians Will Not Be Slaves CALL BY LEADER Patience And Trust In Aid From Allies (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, May 5. Professor Koht, the Norwegian Foreign Minister, in a broadcast to the Norwegian people, said he had come to London to confer with the British Government as to the best way of helping Norway. He was also going to Paris before returning to Norway. “I have seen a lot of destruction by the German military machine in Norway,” he said. “Their bombs have devastated beautiful, peaceful places in the valleys and fiords. I have seen weeping women and children take shelter in woods and cellars. What the Germans do not venture to do against the nations with which they are at war, they have done against us, who had no wish other than to be neutral. That is how they treat Germanic-Nordic people who will not submit themselves to the German yoke. “Many ask,” Professor Koht continued, “could the country have been spared? But the question was no longer whether we could have remained neutral, but which of the belligerent great Power's we should join. It has been complained that we were too strictly neutral. That is the best proof of our absolute neutrality. But Germany wanted to drag us into the war at any price and occupied the most important strategic points five or six hours before the delivery of the Note to the Norwegian Government on April 9. . “Nobody reading the 13 points of the memorandum placed before Norway can doubt that it was bound to lead to war with the Allies. It is enough to consider the first point in the Note, which said that all fortresses, coastal batteries, communications, and postal communications should be part of the German war machine. Norway would thus be cut off from the Western world. German Hypocrisy. “The Germans say that tire Western Powers are hypocrites, but nothing could be more hypocritical than this memorandum. It offered the protection of our neutrality by a nation which had sunk our ships and killed hundreds of our seamen. The last poiut promised to respect Norway’s integrity and give us back our independence after the war, but we refused to believe in such promises with the fate of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland fresh in memory. “It is perhaps Germany’s worst defeat in recent years—this moral ■defeat that no one in the world dares any longer to trust a word that the present German Government utters. It has rendered the term, ‘the honour of a German,’ a term of derision. We deeply regret Hie decline of German politics • and culture. “The Norwegians will not be slaves. Wo were not armed as we ought to have been, and we must take all the responsibility for this, but, even so, our navy inflicted severe damage on the enemy,; and in our valleys the Norwegian army fought stubbornly against heavy odds.” Immediate Results Impossible. Professor Koht appealed to the Norwegians to be patient. Help from the Allies could not have an immediate effect, and conditions in Norway itself made immediate results impossible, but the Allies had promised Norway full aid, and it was a point of honour for them to fulfil it. “We trust in them and on our side must not lose patience. That, is our duty toward the country we love and which we want, to keep independent, during the coming ages." Professor Koht was accompanied to London by the Norwegian Defence Minister, M. Ljnngberg; the British Minister in Oslo, Sir Cecil Dornier, and Lady Dormer; as well as the wife of tlie French Minister io Norway.