His sympathies were heavily influenced by the Second Boer War, which was perceived by Hamsun as British aggression against a weak nation, as well as by his Anglophobia and Anti-Americanism. During the 1930s, most of the Norwegian right-wing newspapers and political parties were sympathetic in various degrees to fascist regimes in Europe, and Hamsun came to be a prominent advocate of such views. During World War II, he continued to express his support for Germany, and his public statements led to controversy; in particular, in the immediate aftermath of the war. When World War II began, he was 80 years old, almost deaf, and his main source of information was the conservative newspaper "Aftenposten", which had been sympathetic to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from the beginning. He suffered two intracranial hemorrhages during the war.