My master thesis concerns Sweden during the Second World War, and Sweden´s relation to occupied Norway. During the last spring of the war, German troops still sized 300 000 men terrorized the Norwegian country and populations. Troops evacuated the population in “Finnmark” and destroyed their settlements. As afraid of continued destruction of Norwegian industrial and other interests, the Norwegian government, now seated in London, appealed to Sweden at the beginning of February for a possibly coming and needed military help against remaining German soldiers. Sweden hesitated and waited for the end of the war to come and didn’t want to make any commitment of future actions, but ostensibly started up planning for an eventual military intervention. In April the Norwegian government appealed once again for help and suggested Sweden to mobilize the military as a press on the germen remaining troops to surrender. Sweden hesitated once again and consider to have had full information of the situation in Norway and therefore could hold an opinion of an inoffensive end to the war in Norway. The Norwegian government went very upset, not accepting another state to have better information of the situation in their own country and felt betrayed by Sweden. This thesis tries to describe the disagreement between the two countries and to scrutinize the information Sweden could have had to assert a position of a peaceful end in Norway.

This study is about a mapping of the Swedish Defense Staff's focus area for information gathering regarding the Soviet military capability, based on their military build-up in Estonia during the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940. Relevance for this study is found in the research gap identified in previous research and intends to be able to produce a deeper understanding of the defense staff's view of the military-strategic significance of the Soviet Union's military build-up. This study also deals with the defense staff's need for information gathering and how they attacked and handled challenges. The material in this study consists of archives from the Defense Staff's intelligence department where documents have been analyzed through a qualitative text analysis using hermeneutics as a basis. The theoretical standpoint is based on a cultural analysis of military organizations, that is operationalized using two theoretical concepts. One is future orientation which measures the extent to which a military engages in future-oriented actions such as planning and investing in the future. The second is uncertainty avoidance and measures the extent to which a military relies on rules and procedures to reduce the unpredictability of future events. The conclusions drawn in this study shows that regarding the Soviet military capability the focus was primarily on studying the establishment of Soviet bases in Estonia, in particular the location of the bases. Observations and assessments were also carried out regarding its military strategic importance, such as a more favorable naval strategic position for the Red Fleet where the possibility of operations to certain areas of the Baltic Sea, including Sweden, seemed likely. The conclusion can also be drawn that, of all things, the attachés' continued intelligence gathering was of great importance to the Defense Staff. The interpretation of the material suggests that the defense staff had a culture with a high future orientation, and overall, also a high uncertainty avoidance.