Report and proposals on measures to take against attacks and sabotage in Norway, including executions and deportation to forced labor on the eastern front

Top Secret
Wehrmacht Ops. Staff /Qu.2 (II)
[in pencil:] Z.d.A. 2315 [initials] 6/2
2.2.1945.
1 Copy.
[in red pencil:] 1. Op (Army) (North)
2. ? to Qu
SSD—Teleprint
To the High Command of the 20th Mountain Army.
Subject: Orientation about Reich Commissar Terboven's report to the Fuehrer.
I. Appreciation of the Situation.
1. Those responsible for attempts to murder and carry out sabotage are the illegal entities within Norway with a bourgeois-national majority and a Communist minority, as well as individual groups which came direct from England or Sweden, return to Sweden after carrying out their tasks without having got into touch with the population, and from there are transported back to England by air.
The latter group can be left out in these considerations, as it is to be combatted exclusively with military forces or by the Security Police.
2. The bourgeois-national majority was opposed to the Communist minority in its conception of acts of sabotage and murder, and in particular with regard to their extent and nature. This resistance has become progressively weaker during thé course of the past year, among other things essentially owing to the lack of effective measures on our part.
3. Official departments of the exile government, as for instance the Crown Prince Olaf as so-called Commander in Chief of the Norwegian Armed Forces and various others, have called upon the population at home, in speeches and other orders, to carry out
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sabotage. As a result, there is a particularly good possibility here of stamping every supporter of the exile government as an intellectual instigator or accomplice.
4. The aim of coming measures must therefore be
(a) to strengthen the power and will to turn once more against sabotage, by threatening the very influential class of leaders in the bourgeois camp:
(b) thereby to accentuate more and more the antagonisms between the bourgeois and Communists, who form a unified front.
II. Suggestions:
One must here promise that no one of the following suggestions represents a panacea by itself, and just as little can it be used unbendingly and regularly. Assuming that the suggestions under I and II or at least II are approved, each of the other suggestions will help to a greater or lesser extent to stop a further increase in the cases of sabotage, and perhaps even to force a decrease in general.
1. Particularly influential representatives of the explicitly antiGerman and anti-Nazi class of industrialists to be shot without trial on the accusation that they are intellectual instigators or accomplices and stating that they were convicted within the framework of police investigations.
2. Similar men to be sent from the same circle to Germany to work on fortifications behind the Eastern front.
3. In cases where the circumstances are particularly suitable, proceedings to be taken before the SS and Police Court, with the execution of the sentence of death and suitable publicity.
4. Employment of citizen guards with the condition that, if acts of sabotage occur in the objects guarded by them and the persons concerned cannot themselves be brought to book, their male relatives will be sent to the Eastern front to work on defenses and their female ones to work in the German armament industry.
5. Contributions for the upper class of the population.
6. Requisitioning of tobacco and alcohol.
7. Offer of rewards.
8. Whilst postponing other tasks, the extensive employment of units of the Armed Forces for security police actions against dis'-tricts in which a particularly large amount of sabotage material is dropped, or which become particularly noticeable owing to the number of acts of sabotage and attempts at assassination.
9. Deportation to the Reich on principle of all prisoners who are imprisoned for the duration of the war.
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The Fuehrer has only agreed to these proposals in part. Especially in connection with efforts at protection against acts of sabotage, he has rejected the means consisting of taking hostages. Furthermore, he has rejected the shooting of influential Norwegian representatives without trial as a means of combatting sabotage [underlined and sidelined in blue pencil].
For para. 8 of the proposals no special order will be issued, since, in the opinion of the Chief of the OKW, everything necessary has already been laid on.
By order
[signature illegible]
OKW/Wehrmacht Ops. Staff/Qu 2 (II) No. 001117/45 Top Secret.