MORE NAZI LIES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 128, 30 April 1940, Page 6

MORE NAZI LIES.

“Our steps have saved Scandinavia from annihilation,” declared the Nazi Foreign Minister (Herr von Ribbentrop) when seeking to justify the German invasion of Denmark and Norway. Pursuing that theme he has now “discovered” from documents alleged to have been found on a British officer captured in the Norwegian fighting that the Allies had a grand plan to invade Norway on April 6 and <, the climax to long preparation in which the Norwegian Government was quite willing to lend a most helpful hand. These German “facts” have been issued in a White Book, ceremoniously distributed by von Ribbentrop when he made his “very important” speech to foreign Press correspondents and diplomatic representatives. Norway, we are told, co-operated with the Allies in the plan to help Finland against the Bolsheviks, but Sweden maintained strict neutrality. Norway, of course, must be discredited ; she is one of the Allies. Sweden, however, whose integrity may soon suffer from Nazi aggression, is exhibited to the world as a virtuous State, when both Scandinavian countries, as it has well been proved, maintained the strictest neutrality. Yon ltibbentrop’s “greatest sensation in the world” will not reach the dimensions its authors carefully planned. In the United States it has been frigidly received, because opinion there, just as in any other country without Nazi bias, knows that Hitler and his associates must “discover” some means to justify their act against Norway. So they resort to lies, still believing that the greater the lie the more readily will it be accepted by some people. Hitler’s conscience is bad; he has made a terrible mess of the Norwegian affair. He has lost a great part of his Navy, and his troops can only fight desperately against the fate that confronts "them in that mountainous country. Meanwhile the Norwegian people are being bludgeoned into service for the Nazis where they are in power; failure, to obey means mass execution, and until the Allies liberate these people the outrages the Nazis practised in Poland with systematic savagery will be unhappily recorded in Norway. The world knows where the responsibility for all these ghastly crimes lies.