German troops in occupied Oslo, 1940

An officer in a peaked cap faces soldiers and a man in a dark uniform on a quay; above a harbour crowded with ships an officer scans the sky beside a raised gun. Beneath the painted letters LENGE LEV a German poster addresses the 'Bevölkerung von Oslo': no one may be in the streets between seven in the evening and six in the morning, no more than three persons may gather. Columns of soldiers march through shopping streets and under the trees of an avenue. Among them stands an older scene of children fed at a soup kitchen, apparently from the years of the First World War.

Oslo was occupied without a fight on 9 April 1940 by troops flown in to Fornebu. The same evening Vidkun Quisling proclaimed himself head of government on the radio; the Germans dropped him within a week, and from 24 April Josef Terboven ruled Norway as Reich commissioner.