Longest-Serving Foreign Minister

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30856, 15 September 1965, Page 17

Longest-Serving Foreign Minister

(N Z. Press Association—Copyright)

OSLO, September 14.

The Norwegian Labour Party’s election defeat means the exit from the world scene of Mr Halvard Lange, the world’s longest-serving Foreign Minister.

He was appointed Foreign Minister in 1946 and he has headed the Foreign Ministry ever since, apart from four weeks in 1963 when a short lived non-Socialist Coalition Government was in power. Mr Lange is a founder member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Ministerial Council.

His views on foreign policy and Norway's security were accepted within all the country’s political parties except the Communists and the Leftwing Socialist People’s Party. Mr Lange, aged 63, is the son of Dr. Christian Lange, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and secretary-general of the Parliamentary Union. He soon came into contact with the Labour movement and during a stay in London as an official of a peace movement in his youth he joined the British Independent Labour Party. Imprisoned In 1940 Mr Lange was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1940, freed the next year and arrested again in 1942. He spent six months in solitary confinement before being sent to Sachsenhausen

concentration camp, from which he was rescued by the Swedish Red Cross in April, 1945. He met many of his future Government colleagues in the camp, including Mr Einar Gerhardsen, the outgoing Prime Minister.