File:Arbeidstjenesten AT (Norges NS Nasjonal Samlings arbeidstjeneste) offisersuniform sveitfører. WWII Norwegian Labour Service paramilitary uniform 1940s mannequin. Anno Musea i Nord-Østerdalen Norway CC BY-SA NØT.03224-4.jpg

Hans Otto Frøland, Gunnar Damhagen Hatlehol & Mats Ingulstad (Norwegian University of Science and Technology): Regimenting Labour in Norway During Nazi Germany's Occupation (2017):

[...] from 1941 onwards Norwegians were directly conscripted for work through [...] Arbeidstjenesten (Labour Service), was organized by Administrasjonsrådet (Administrative Council), which was established as a Norwegian civilian authority after the King, Cabinet, and many members of parliament had fled Oslo. On 25 September 1940 Reichskommissar Josef Terboven disbanded the Administrative Council and appointed his own Kommissarische Staatsräte, and the Labour Service was embedded in a new Ministry for Labour Service and Sport, led by Nasjonal Samling politician Axel Stang. One of his first actions was to introduce a law that made labour service compulsory, in order to “raise the Norwegian youth in Norwegian national spirit.” From April 1941 the Labour Service was obligatory for all young men who would otherwise have served in the Norwegian armed forces. The goal was to bring 18,000 men into the service, spread over three three-month contingents.

While originally presented as apolitical and voluntary, the Labour Service was gradually Nazified to follow the example of the Reichsarbeitsdienst. Through annual drafts the organization came to embody the increasing willingness of the occupier to mobilize domestic labour through compulsion. The first cohort was drafted in May 1941 for a three-month period, but starting in 1943 the service was extended to six months, at a time when roughly 6,000 Norwegians were serving at any given moment. The Labour Service deployed approximately 40,000 Norwegians over the course of the occupation, but these workers were seldom used on German construction sites or for identifiably German purposes. Rather, the aim was to use it for simple physical labour, rather than the type of skilled tasks required in construction. Over the summer of 1941 73.8 per cent of the Labour Service engagement was in agricultural work, 4.5 per cent in forestry, 3.4 per cent for roads, and the remainder in various types of relief work.20 This emphasis on agricultural work was also predominant in the voluntary Kvinnelig Arbeidstjeneste (Women’s Labour Service), which from 1942 gradually took on more characteristics of an obligatory service, including the establishment of camps with fixed service periods.