Pacification Begins

Norway's gaunt Haakon VII was a king with less than half a country last week as Nazi Blitzkriegers stormed through his realm and shot up his peace-loving subjects and their stumbling allies (see p. 22). Rome's Il Messaggero hopefully reported that he was about to board a British cruiser to seek security in England.

In Berlin, Realmleader Hitler took the first steps towards adding Nordic Norway to his Reich, thereby approaching slightly nearer his Mein Kampf dream of a Nazi Empire of 250,000,000. Declaring that through its resistance to "protection" the Norwegian Government had affiliated itself with the Allies, he proclaimed a state of war, placed the occupied sections of Norway under a Reich Commissar, and assigned Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo the task of "pacifying" the country. To exercise supreme Government authority in Norway, Hitler sent to Oslo one of his youngest and most ardent disciples, 42-year-old Josef Terboven, Gauleiter of Essen, publisher of Field Marshal Hermann Goring's Essener National-Zeitung, a Jew-hater and energetic protagonist of the Nazi Herrenvolk (ruling caste) ideology.

Recalling recent photographs of loaded and peripatetic gallows wheeled through Polish village streets by Gestapo pacifiers, Norwegians awaited with uncertain emotions the arrival of Hitler's envoy and Himmler's bullyboys.

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