Nazi-occupied Norway's puppet government repeatedly asked Berlin to establish Norwegian territories in the Soviet Union during World War II, documents released in Oslo on Thursday revealed.

The documents, posted on the National Archive Service's website, showed that the fascist National Unification party that ruled Norway for most of the 1940-45 occupation had requested several different Soviet territories.

The archives posted 281 documents showing the Norwegian "lebensraum" ambitions, out of a total of around 5,000 World War II documents published in connection with the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Norway on April 9.

National Unification "launched a vigorous campaign to get German authorities to accept the idea of a territory under Norwegian administration in what was expected to be a quickly defeated Soviet Union," the archives website says in an introduction to the newly released records.

Not long after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the collaboration government under Vidkun Quisling established a "Russian office" and an institute called "Austrveg" in Oslo to promote the idea, the documents showed.

The Norwegian fascists had first requested a protectorate in the northwestern Murmansk area, but faced with German resistance moved their sights to areas in today's Ukraine and Belarus.

Ministers in the puppet government went so far as to travel to Ukraine to stake out an appropriate area, the documents revealed.

The documents shed new light on "how closely the occupation government in Norway worked with Nazi-Germany on its genocide plans for the East," Terje Emberland, a senior researcher at an Oslo-based Holocaust Studies centre, told AFP.

Head of the SS, Heinrich Himler, however had no interest in establishing Norwegian territories in the Soviet Union, instead arguing that Norwegians should be used as "armed farmers," helping to colonise the front lines, Emberland said.

Instead, the Nazis were eventually forced to retreat and in late 1944, Soviet troops began chasing the Germans out of Northern Norway.

After the war, fascist leader Quisling was convicted of high treason and executed on October 24, 1945.

His name lives on however: today the word quisling is synonymous with traitor in many countries.