NAZIS ELUDED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 May 1940, Page 3

NAZIS ELUDED

SCIENTIST’S ESCAPE FROM NORWAY. RUSH TO THE FRONTIER. Professor Lancelot Hogben, who arrived in Stockholm recently with his 21-year-old daughter Sylvia, told how they escaped from the Germans in Norway by disguising themselves. Mr Hogben, 45-year-old writer of scientific best-sellers, went to Scandinavia on a lecture tour. The night before the Germans marched into Oslo he gave an address to the medical faculty of Oslo University (he is Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University and was formerly Professor of Social Biology at London University). He said: “My daughter and I were taxi-ing in Oslo airport a little after seven in the morning to get the plane for Stockholm, when there was an air raid warning. The taxi-man drove to the nearest shelter. Suddenly there came an ear-splitting noise. The sky seemed to bo filled with German bombers. who were skimming the housetops. Above the roar of the motors we could hear the staccato tune of mach-ine-guns. We could see chips and splinters flying off houses where the bullets struck. After an hour we left the shelter. We found all the shops dosed, and all phones cut off. All the taxis had been commandeered to evacuate people from the city. AMERICAN CONSUL’S ADVICE. “We decided to walk back to the British Legation to find what had happened. There we found the American Consul in charge. He said German troops had landed and it was highly dangerous for us to be about. He advised us to leg it as fast as we could to the Swedish border. As we left the legation we saw two German armoured cars with their machineguns trained on passers-by. “I found a shop open and bought a map. I figured out on the quickest way out of the city. The Germans would only be. able to occupy the main road, I thought. I started out with some of our luggage, but soon tired, and left the luggage in a side street. Then we saw German sentries on guard. We went a roundabout way. After 15 kilometres my daughter took off her fur coat and I took off my tie. We disguised ourselves to look like country people. “Then we met a friendly Norwegian driving a milk van. We asked him to take us to one of the stations on the way to the frontier, and he agreed. He took us through mountainous country, where we spun around curves, and skidded on frozen snow. Late at night we reached the frontier at Han.”