A description of the village area from 1895: At Dombås, where there is a telegraph station, the scene had entirely changed, and fields of waving barley and potatoes greeted the eye....

The result was that a company of fallschirmjägers from 1st battalion of the 1st Regiment, 7th Flieger Division was dropped at Dombås on 14 April, intending to cut the rail line.

Only a single group of sixty-three Germans, under the company commander Oberleutnant Herbert Schmidt managed to avoid capture and sealed off the Gudbrandsdal valley holed up in two strategically placed farms.

On 19 April the paratroopers could no longer stand the bombardment and sent forward the captured Norwegian Major Kjøs to convey their surrender message.

All in all 150 fallschirmjägers ended up in Norwegian captivity, being kept in a prisoner-of-war camp near Kristiansund until released when resistance collapsed in South Norway in early May.

[4] On 21 April 1940, a German Luftwaffe bombing attack on the village's railway areas resulted in the first American military casualty of World War II.

Captain Robert M. Losey, an aeronautical meteorologist serving as an air attaché to American embassies in the Nordic countries, was killed while observing the bombing near the entrance to a rail tunnel where he and others had sought safety.

[5][6] Also in April 1940, after evacuating Oslo after the German invasion of Norway, King Haakon VII first travelled with his government to Elverum, but after that city and Nybergsund was bombed by the Luftwaffe the decision was made to move to Gudbrandsdal where the Army High Command had relocated.

Although the Fallschirmjägers never got any nearer the King, who was protected by the local Dovreskogen gun club, they did ambush the cabinet minister Frihagen, capturing his car and a suitcase with 1.5 million kr.

[4] During the German occupation of Norway, Dombås and Oppdal were the locations of the Stalag 380 prisoner-of-war camp, relocated in late 1942 from Skarżysko-Kamienna in German-occupied Poland.