Osvald Group

Osvald Group
Participant in World War II
Active	1940–1944
Leaders	Asbjørn Sunde
Area of operations	Norway
Strength	Around 150 saboteurs and helpers (1944)
Allies	Communist Party of Norway, Milorg, XU, SOE, 2A
Opponents	Nazi Germany, Nasjonal Samling
Battles and wars	Sabotage, assassinations

The Osvald Group was a Norwegian sabotage organisation—the most active one in Norway from 1941 to the summer of 1944. It performed around- or more than 110 sabotage actions. (There were 39 sabotage actions according to Asbjørn Sunde's book from 1947.)

The organisation was originally a branch of the Wollweber League, a subsidiary to the Soviet secret police organization NKVD which dissolved when Ernst Wollweber was arrested in 1940.

Martin Hjelmen was its first leader until Asbjørn Sunde took over in 1938.

Historian Lars Borgersrud says about the origins of the group's name, that "The Norwegian section of Wollweber's sabotage instrument was called 'the Osvald Group' («Osvald-gruppa») after the pseudonym of the leader, Martin Hjelmen"—Osvald.Osvald was also one of the pseudonyms used by Asbjørn Sunde.

After the arrest of Ernst Wollweber and the revelation of the Wollweber League, the Osvald Group was intact in Oslo, but had lost contact with Moscow, and had no funding. The group stored explosives around the country. They initiated their sabotage activities shortly after Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and continued until the Osvald Group was demobilised in 1944, by orders from Moscow. Their first railway sabotage mission was undertaken on 20 July 1941, the explosion of a Wehrmacht train at Nyland Station in Oslo. In July 1942 Sunde held his first sabotage course at Rukkedalen (where they had their headquarters)]. "A short time later he actioned against German friendly" companies in Hadeland.

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Wikipedia