Grabs and Runs

Behind Adolf Hitler's rolling armies last week Little Men began grabbing what the Big Man of Berchtesgaden had pried off for them--unquestionably at his instigation. Again he was using Little Men to consolidate his New Order.

Croatia. No sooner had the Hitler juggernaut rumbled across the northern Croatian plains of Yugoslavia than the formation of an "independent" Croatia was announced, its capital at Zagreb, second to Belgrade among Yugoslav cities. The announcer was a Quisling worthy of the name. He was dark, treacherous Ante Pavelitch, leader of the terroristic Ustashi, a band of rapacious Croat schemers who for years have hated the Serbs, Jews and Croatia's own peasants and plotted with Italian, Hungarian and German money to split Yugoslavia and bring the Ustashi to power.

It was sinister Ante Pavelitch, a peasant himself by birth, who engineered the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille in 1934 (last week Alexander's son, 17-year-old King Peter of Yugoslavia was variously reported with his troops, flying to Cyprus, to Turkey).

After this deed Ante Pavelitch took refuge in Italy, which refused to expel him for French trial. He was sentenced to death in absentia. Last week he proclaimed himself first President of the new Croatia, including Bosnia. Herzegovina, Dalmatia and the old Croat Province. He named as his Premier his fellow Terrorist Slavko Kvaternik. Balkan experts tended to discount as propaganda rumors that the venerable Croat Peasant Leader Vladimir Matchek had sided with the peasant-haters.

Hungary's Little Men also promptly joined the grab. Anti-Axis Premier Count Paul Teleki had died by suicide or murder a fortnight before (TIME, April 14) and Hungary lost no time turning its four-months-old non-aggression pact with Yugoslavia into a scrap of paper. Grim, square-jawed Regent Admiral Nicholas Horthy sent troops into Yugoslavia to seize 8,000 square miles of rich cornfields and dairy lands, watered by the Danube and Tisza Rivers, which the treaty makers took from Austria-Hungary after World War I.

Rumanian forces were reported moving into the corner where Yugoslavia meets Rumania and Hungary.

In Italy one of Europe's currently Littlest Men--Benito Mussolini--talked of claiming districts, north and northeast of Albania, which would almost double Albania's size.

Meanwhile, the Big Man's march and the Little Men's grab raised grave alarm among the two great neutrals bordering on those events.

Turkey, moved to evacuate civilians from European Turkey including Istanbul, offered free transportation to those who would go eastward across the Sea of Marmara or the Bosporus into vast, hilly Anatolia. But at week's end only a few thousands had applied. The only inference from such an attempt at evacuation was that Turkey feared invasion and if invaded intended to fight.

Russia, vast opportunist and peace advocate, worried and warned. Hitler was nearer the richly agricultural and mineral Ukraine than ever before, but Russia signed a treaty to sell Germany 1,000,000 tons of mineral oil. On the other hand, Russia's trade-union paper Trud lauded the Greek-Yugoslav resistance. Vice Commissar for Foreign Affairs Andrei Vishinsky scolded Hungary severely for its Yugoslav grab, saying that it created "a particularly bad impression." In the Baltic States, from which Adolf Hitler's eyes would seem to be at least temporarily averted, Russia last week began evacuating modern industrial machinery and skilled workers by hundreds of carloads, moving them into the Russian interior. Russia did the same thing in 1914.

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