At the time, people's attitudes to the Møllersen report depended on which of the workers' parties they supported. Two historians have since studied the report. In the spring of 1951, Per Karstensen discussed the question in his Master's thesis at the University of Oslo and in the autumn of 1970, Egil Christensen took it up again. Although he did his work during a cold part of the cold war, Karstensen's conclusion was that some of the Labour Party's doubts about the report were unfounded. Some years later, Christensen found it not unlikely that ``Møllersen's report is accurate''.(48)

The difficulty with this source is that it originates with one of the three people at the meeting, and is rejected as incorrect by the other two. Strictly speaking this leaves the historian to determine how probable or improbable the contents of the document are. Karstensen in particular presents material that indicates that the report is probably true, despite the strong denials by his fellow Labour members Tranmæl and Evensen. Karstensen later became the Labour Party's President of the Odelsting, a division of the Storting.

The present account will make two points which neither Karstensen nor Christensen touches upon. One point concerns events in the middle of March 1944, i.e. three weeks before the meeting between Tranmæl, Evensen and Møllersen, at the NKP's wartime underground headquarters. Some of the people there broke with Furubotn and transferred their allegiance to Asbjørn Sunde (``Osvald'')(49). There had been a rumour in NKP circles some time before this dramatic event to the effect that Furubotn was a Gestapo agent, and the rumour was given ``firmer'' foundations by the Gestapo publication ``The Communists' Judas act'' in February 1944. The rumour was one cause of the unrest at the headquarters.(50) It could easily have reached Stockholm by the beginning of April 1944. Communications between the underground in Norway and Sweden were so good that Tranmæl and Evensen in all likelihood heard of the events at the NKP hideout before Hans Møllersen arrived on 5 April. They may thus at the time have been convinced that Furubotn was a German agent. Tranmæl would not have regarded the ideological divide as a big one for Furubotn to cross: in 1940 he had called the Communists ``Nazi-Communists''. Besides, a number of politicians on the left, like Haakon Meyer and Halyard Olsen, had engaged themselves rather heavily in collaboration with the Germans and NS early in the war.

There is also an event in the county of Telemark to be placed alongside Møllersen's experience in Stockholm. In 1944, Ivar Hobbelhagen, who was chairman of the Hereya workers' union and a member of the Labour Party's illegal central committee, reported to underground trade union groups in Telemark that the Communists had informed the Germans of the Deichmann meeting. This information stems from an interview with Haakon A. Ødegaard in 1977.(51) He switched from Labour to the NKP during the war, before going back to Labour in the 1950s. From 1967 to 1971, he was chairman of the national chemical industry workers' union. According to Ødegaard, Labour Party officers in Telemark accepted Hobbelhagen's information, which made underground work there very difficult for the Communists. Ødgaard's account of the information from Hobbelhagen must be regarded as correct(52), and suggests a link between it and what Møllersen reported from his meeting on 5 April 1944 with Tranmæl and Evensen. They probably did say what Møllersen reported and continues to maintain to this day.(53)

When Furubotn saw Møllersen's report in 1945, he had little reason to doubt it. Information from party members both in Stockholm and in Norway strengthened his belief that Tranmæl had spread the rumour that he was a Gestapo agent. When he published the report in 1945, Furubotn was convinced that it was genuine. The charge that he used something which he knew was false to cause a breakdown of the unification negotiations in 1945 must be rejected. He believed Møllersen.