German occupation of Norway and exile in Sweden

On April 9, 1940 troops of the German Wehrmacht attack Norway. Willy Brandt has to flee from Oslo and the Gestapo (secret police), which wants to arrest him along with other German emigrants.
On the advice of his friend Paul Gauguin-a grandson of the famous painter-Brandt puts on a Norwegian uniform and allows himself to be taken prisoner by German troops together with Norwegian soldiers.
Brandt remains unrecognized. In June 1940 he is released as a prisoner of war and returns briefly to Oslo. In August of the same year he flees from there to Sweden. In Sweden Willy Brandt is at first interned. In August 1940 he becomes a Norwegian citizen, his German nationality having been nullified in September 1938.
His new passport is issued by the Norwegian embassy in Stockholm. In the winter of 1940/41 Brandt illegally returns once more to Norway and establishes connections with the Norwegian resistance.
After 1941 Willy Brandt lives with his family in Stockholm. Since 1942 he directs the Swedish-Norwegian Press Bureau, which provides information about conditions in occupied Norway. In October 1944 under the decisive influence of Willy Brandt the members of the SAP Group in Stockholm decide to join the group of German social democrats who lived likewise in exile in Stockholm. The SAP dissolve itself and Willy Brandt once again is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD ).