OFFER TO NEGOTIATE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 115, 13 April 1940, Page 8

OFFER TO NEGOTIATE.

REBUFF TO NORWAY. STOCKHOLM, April 11. The President of the Norwegian Parliament (M. Hambro) declared that Norway offered to negotiate if the Germans stopped hostilities, but the German Minister replied that Germany’s actions developed automatically. M. Hambro added that 2000 Germans landed by ’plane at the Oslo civil aerodrome. The Norwegian ’planes at the southern base had l>een withdrawn before the German attack, and stores of petrol, oil and grain were successfully remoicd.

Professor Kolit (Foreign Minister), in a broadcast, said: “We are **4 war with Germany, consequently we arc the ally of all countries fighting Germany.”

The director of the Oslo wireless station, who has arrived at Stockholm, declared that Major Quisling's followers (the puppet government), and not German troops, first occupied the Oslo station. He added that King Haakon’s appeal to fight against Germany was a big success. Throughout Norway troops were assembling at many points. The German High Command claims that troops hare landed on the Danish island of Bornholm, which Swedish circles describe as the key to the Baltic. From Stockholm the correspondent of the Dagens Nyheter on the Swedish-Norwegian frontier reports that German ’planes bombed and destroyed the headquarters of the Norwegian army. It is reported from Berlin that the German troops in CMo found fifty new American Curtiss ’planes which arrived this week and were not yet assembled. The French military attache at Oslo was captured. The Official German News Agency says there is neither a de facto nor de jure state of war between Oer many and Norway. The Norwegian Government has not made a declaration that it is at war with Germany. The crews of the sunken cruisers Blueher and Karlsruhe are manning coastal batteries at unnamed points in Norway.