Thank you for confirming my statement: "Contrary to what my fellow countrymen like to admit...."!

Concerning the numbers, it sems to me that you haven't done your homework properly. This information is easily accessible in a number of books and publications. We shall look into this later in this post.

As you say, this is old news, in Norway we have known about it for more than half a century. However, except for a thread by Kai-Petri, I could not find any information touching the topic.
If I have overlooked some thread dealing with this, it is unintentional and in that case I apologize for repeating the topic.

Norway capitulated on 10th of june 1940, after two months of fighting. By that time the King and his family, the prime minister Nygaardsvold and the cowards in his administration had fled the country, bringing with them the entire gold reserve of the Bank of Norway.

Running out of fuel and ammo, abandonded by their king and looted by their government, the norwegians laid down their arms and went home.
They went back to their work in the forests, in the mines and in the factories. After a while, there were business as usual with the germans.

Some joined the SS and kept on fighting, this time against the communists on the East front. Some went to England and joined the Allies.

Now to the numbers: Construction work started as early as May 1940. Norwegian workers, paid by the hour, constructed runways for the He 111s bombing their fellow countrymen still fighting further north.
(Source: Blindheim, "We fought for Norway", 2007, page 129.)

Later on they worked for the Organization Todt, constructing coastal fortifications, airfields, railways, roads, U-boat pens, barracks and so on.
By the summer of 1942 110 000 norwegians were employed on construction work alone in Norway.
We exported 15 000 tons of aluminum annually to the german war industry.
The export of herring (a fish) rose from 10 000 tons in 1939 to 54 000 tons in 1944.
We exported 30 000 tons of codfish annually.
More than half the amount of the fish consumed by the germans came from Norway.
(Source Aschehoug: " History of Norway", volume 11, page 87.)

In all, 150 000 norwegians were involved in the war effort, paid by the germans.
(Source: Blindheim, "We fought for Norway", page 179.)

Some norwegian companies used forced labour , mainly russian and yugoslavian POWs, supplied by the germans.
Many norwegians made a small fortune on working for the germans.

And you are right! People need food on the table. In our climate they also need houses and heating.
Now, let us imagine a different scenario. What if the norwegians had burnt down their cities, towns, houses, barns, factories and fled into the woods and the mountains?
Without houses and shelter, the situation would clearly have been more difficult for the germans.
What about the norwegians? A large number of them would surely have perished from cold and starvation during the following winters.
Would a scenario like this had been likely? I don't think so, and it didn't happen either.

But this is what the russians did!
They practiced the tactics of the "scorched earth", burning down everything that could be useful for the invading german forces. The following winters, thousands of germans and russians froze to death.

Mother Russia has always sacrificed her children, Norway has not.

We found it more comfortable to submit to Nazi rule.
May be the germans weren't so bad after all. They were polite, unlike most norwegian men at the time. They said "Sie" (a polite form of "you"), "mein Herr", "gnädige Frau" and so on.
The officers were well educated, many of them learned norwegian quickly.
This according to my mother, she was 17 years old in 1940.

In some cases, they also paid for the damage they did. One house owner received 394,60 Norwegian Kroners in compensation from Luftwaffe, after a Bf 109 had damaged his house during a forced landing!

Bf 109 Røros

As time went by, Norway became a steady supplier of commodities to the german war industry.
We had firewood in the forests, there were a lot of fish in the ocean an in the lakes. There were game in the forests and people grew vegetables in their gardens.
Unlike some other european countires, nobody really starved.
(Except for the russian and yugoslavian POWs, they were treated badly.)

But of course, not everybody was happy with the Nazi rule.
Like many other occupied countries, we had resitance groups. The communists had their own, but the "official" group was the Milorg supported by the exile government in London.
This was a left wing government, responsible for the arms reduction of the norwegian forces in the 1930s.
Now these leftists, without any significant military background, would build a military style resistance group to fight the germans.

To lead the group they chose a former lawyer named Jens C. Hauge, a man without any military education, military training or military experience whatsoever.
With him he had a ragtag bunch of drifters, dropouts and criminals, most of them without any military experience as well.

They called themselves "The Boys in the Forest"!
It sounds like like a boy scout story and that is what it was too.
On the orders of the exile government, sitting safely in London, this ragtag bunch would bring the fighting to the german occupation force, probably the best trained and most disciplined army in the world at the time.

The result was as one could expect; they made no difference at all.
They sunk a couple of transport vessels and blew up a couple of warehouses and a chocolate factory, but other than that, they had no impact on the german war machine. They were more annoying to the civilians than to the germans.

These men were supplied by air.
RAF and US aircraft dropped supplies in the mountains and in the forests.

The RAF paid a high price to keep these boy scouts happy in their war games.
Quite a few aircraft and aircrew were lost during these flights, shot down by german fighters and Flak.

RAF lost 23 planes, the US lost 6 planes.
Because of the distance and the payload, the planes were mainly four engine bombers.
(Source: Hafsten/Olsen/Stenersen, 1991/2005)

200 aircrew were killed, some were captured by the germans and some made it to Sweden.
The question is, was it worth the price?

In Norway we have what we call "The Freedom Fighters of 8th of May 1945".
Telling tales of daring actions against the german occupants, they claimed to be war heroes.
Why hadn't anyone noticed? They had been undercover, of course. And the missions were secret!

The leader of Milorg, Jens C. Hauge, was one of these men who claimed to have won the war. He and his men had kept the germans at bay the last year of the war and prevented them from harming the people.

By the end of the war, the germans had 350 000 heavily armed troops in Norway, among them battle hardened units from the East Front.
They also had 540 operational Luftwaffe aircraft of all types, armoured vehicles, destroyers, U-boats, E-boats, guns and fortifications.
In Milorg there were 7000 lightly armed men with little or no military training.
(Source: Hafsten/Olsen/Stenersen, 1991/2005.)

The germans could have "ausradiert" (a german word for "obliterated") the entire population of Norway in a very short time, had they wanted to, and nobody could have stopped them.

Writing the history of WWII in Norway, these impostors and bullshitters have changed the past to make it suit their own images.
Now we have a new generation of historians coming up, and they don't buy the crap written by these old men.
Wanting to find out what really happened, they have interviewed "the other side" too. Time is running out for these veterans, who have been forced to silence by their former opponents.

Regards
RAM