Ole Paus (general)

He was born and grew up in Vienna, Austria-Hungary as the son of the Norwegian Consul-General in Vienna, Thorleif (von) Paus, and a Viennese mother of Jewish descent, Gabrielle ("Ella") Stein. On his father's side he belonged to the Norwegian Paus family and he was named for his grandfather, the steel industrialist and banker Ole Paus (who was a first cousin of Henrik Ibsen). He was a maternal grandson of the Viennese lawyer August Stein (1852–1890). August Stein left the Jewish Community of Vienna in 1877[1] and he and his children were baptized as Catholics in 1885/86. Ella left the Catholic Church when she married Ole's father. During his childhood the family name was officially spelled von Paus in Austria-Hungary, although the family sometimes used the spelling de Paus. The particle von in the country was a privilege of the Austro-Hungarian nobility and foreigners deemed to be of equivalent status; his father had moved to Vienna as a consular official and been registered under that name by the foreign ministry. The particle was banned by law in Austria in 1919, and after he had moved to Norway he was known as Ole Paus, as the family did not use a particle in Norway. He was the father of the singer Ole Paus.[2]

He graduated from the Theresianum in 1929. He subsequently moved to Norway at the age of 19. After learning Norwegian, he attended the Norwegian Military Academy and graduated as an officer in 1932. He graduated from the Norwegian Military College in 1938, from the Senior Officers' School in the United Kingdom in 1947, and attended the NATO Defence College in Paris in 1963.[3][4][2]

During the Second World War, he joined the exile Norwegian High Command in London, where he served in the military intelligence service as head of the army group, in succession to Paal Frisvold.

In 1949 he served in the Independent Norwegian Brigade Group in Germany. He served as the Norwegian military attaché in Stockholm from 1953 and Helsingfors from 1954. In 1964 he was promoted to major-general; at the time only the King was a full general, the rank of lieutenant-general was rarely used and major-general was in practice the highest rank for most active-duty officers. He was commander-in-chief in Central Norway from 1964 to 1971. From 1971 to 1974 he was Land Deputy of the Allied Forces Northern Europe, i.e. the Norwegian representative in the NATO military command for Northern Europe (Denmark, Norway, Northern Germany and the Baltic Sea).[4][2]

In 1973 he became a Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav, the Norwegian equivalent of a British knighthood.

Among friends and family he was known as "The General" (Norwegian: Generalen).[5]

• 1932: Lieutenant
• 1943: Captain
• 1945: Major
• 1951: Lieutenant colonel
• 1956: Colonel
• 1964: Major general

• Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav, 1973, for services towards the restoration of the Archbishop's Palace, Trondheim
• Commander of the Order of the Sword, for services as military attaché in Sweden
• Several others