Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was born on July 18, 1887, in Fyresdal in southern Norway. His father, Jon Lauritz Qvisling, was a Lutheran pastor and genealogist, while his mother, Anna Caroline Bang, came from a wealthy family in the Norwegian town of Grimstad.
In 1905, the eighteen-year-old Quisling entered military college. Out of 250 cadets, he achieved the highest score on the entrance examinations, which were famous for their difficulty. He then moved on to the military academy to pursue an army career.
Quisling graduated with the best results in the academy's history since its founding in 1817. The Norwegian king rewarded the young cadet by inviting him to an audience. In 1911, Quisling became a member of the Norwegian army's general staff.
Three years later, on July 28, 1914, the First World War began. Norway remained neutral during the war. Quisling detested the peace movement, though the high death toll of the war moderated his views.
In March 1918, he was sent to Russia as an attaché at the Norwegian embassy in Petrograd. Although Quisling was horrified by the living conditions he witnessed there, he concluded that the Bolsheviks held an extraordinarily strong position in Russian society. He marveled at how Leon Trotsky managed to mobilize Red Army forces so effectively.
He argued that the Russian Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky had brought about its own downfall by granting too many rights to the Russian people. When the delegation was recalled in December 1918, Quisling became Norway's military expert on Russian affairs.
In September 1919, Quisling left Norway to become an intelligence officer with the Norwegian delegation in Helsinki, Finland, a position that combined diplomacy and politics. In January 1922, he arrived in the Ukrainian capital of Kharkov to help with humanitarian aid for the League of Nations.
In August of that year, he married a Russian woman, Alexandra Andreyevna Voronina. There appeared to be no romantic relationship between them, and it is assumed that Quisling wanted only to lift the girl out of poverty by giving her a Norwegian passport and financial security.
He soon met Maria Vasilyevna Pasek, a Ukrainian more than ten years younger. The couple behaved as if they were married, claimed that Alexandra was their daughter, and celebrated their wedding anniversary.
Quisling's stay in Russia had the greatest influence on his political thinking. He called his political philosophy universalism, whose aim was to develop a collective consciousness for global unity by transferring consciousness from the individual level to the national level.
Universalism eventually acquired a racial element when Quisling incorporated a belief in Nordic racial superiority. He claimed that the path to world unity could be achieved only under Nordic leadership, which would act against the Jews.
In 1929, Quisling returned permanently to Norway. From 1931 to 1933, he served as Norway's minister of defence for the Agrarian Party. When the Agrarian Party refused to appoint Quisling as its leader, he left it and founded his own party.
In May 1933, he co-founded the political party Nasjonal Samling, which translates as National Unity. Quisling served as the fører, or leader, of the party. Its platform was based on four principles: a corporatist vision of society, an emphasis on nationalism and Christianity, state paternalism, and economic self-sufficiency.
The Nasjonal Samling party failed at the polls, however. In the Norwegian parliamentary elections of 1933, it won 2.2 percent of the vote, and in 1936, in the last elections held before the outbreak of the Second World War, it won only 1.8 percent. Neither result was enough for the party to ever enter the Storting, Norway's unicameral parliament.
The party's declining membership added to Quisling's problems, especially financial ones. For years he struggled with financial difficulties and depended on an inheritance. Moreover, his paintings, which he had acquired cheaply in post-revolutionary Russia, were increasingly labelled copies when he tried to sell them.
His collection numbered some 200 paintings, including works he claimed were by Rembrandt, Goya, Cézanne, and many other masters. Sometimes even originals did not earn as much as Quisling hoped. Vidkun and his brother Arne sold a painting by Frans Hals for only 4,000 dollars, believing it to be a copy rather than a work worth 50,000 dollars. They later saw it reclassified as an original and revalued at 100,000 dollars.
In 1939, Quisling focused his attention on Norway's preparations for the expected European war, which in his view required a drastic increase in the country's defence spending to guarantee its neutrality. Meanwhile, he gave lectures titled "The Jewish Problem in Norway" and supported Adolf Hitler in what appeared to be a growing future conflict.
Although he condemned Kristallnacht, the series of coordinated violent riots against Jews across Nazi Germany and recently annexed territories on November 9 and 10, 1938, he sent congratulations to the German leader on his fiftieth birthday, thanking him for saving Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination.
Quisling also claimed that if an Anglo-Russian alliance made Norwegian neutrality impossible, Norway would have to side with Germany. At an invitation to the country in the summer of 1939, he began a tour of a number of German and Danish cities.
He was received particularly well in Germany, which promised funds to strengthen the position of Nasjonal Samling in Norway and thereby spread pro-Nazi sentiment. At the start of the Second World War in 1939, Norway, like all of Scandinavia, gained new strategic importance for Germany.
Erich Raeder, head of the German navy from 1939 to 1943, was interested in maintaining the German navy's access to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean through naval bases on the Norwegian coast. In December 1939, first Raeder and then Hitler met with Quisling. The meeting impressed the German leader.
Quisling hinted that the British were planning a move into Norway for their own strategic needs. Alarmed Germany began planning Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Denmark and Norway.
The German invasion of Norway, led by General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, began on April 9, 1940. On the same day the German offensive was under way, Quisling attempted to seize power in the world's first radio-broadcast coup d'état.
He announced to the Norwegian public that they should welcome the advancing Germans rather than resist them. He also announced the creation of a new government and declared himself the new head of state. Two hours later, Quisling repeated his radio statement, this time warning that any refusal to cooperate with the new government would from then on have the most serious consequences for those involved.
Quisling had now reached the peak of his political power. Kurt Bräuer, the German representative in Norway at the time of the invasion, demanded on Hitler's orders that King Haakon appoint Quisling to head a new government, which would ensure a peaceful transfer of power and legal approval of the occupation.
Haakon refused the demand. At a meeting with his cabinet, he went further and told his ministers that he could not appoint Quisling as prime minister because neither the Norwegian people nor parliament trusted him. He said he would rather abdicate than appoint a government led by Quisling.
In response, the government unanimously supported the king's position, formally advised him not to appoint any government led by Quisling, and called on the people to continue their resistance. When Quisling lost the people's support, he ceased to be useful to Hitler.
Germany withdrew its support for his rival government and instead preferred to form its own independent government commission. On April 15, 1940, the Nazi leadership forced him to resign. Quisling's coup thus lasted only six days, and his domestic and international reputation sank to a new low, casting him in the role of traitor and failure.
Norway fell to Germany on June 10, 1940, and the king and Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold left for exile in London. On April 24, 1940, Hitler appointed Josef Terboven as Reich Commissioner for the occupied Norwegian territories. Military control was retained by General von Falkenhorst, who in 1940 had planned and commanded the German invasion of Denmark and Norway.
In addition, all political parties except Quisling's Nasjonal Samling were outlawed. As leader of Nasjonal Samling, Quisling gained a place at the head of a cabinet under Terboven. In early 1942, Terboven appointed him prime minister of the National Government. Norway was essentially a puppet state under German control.
In the summer of 1942, Quisling lost any ability to influence public opinion when he tried to force children to join the Nasjonal Samling youth organization, Unghird, which had been created on the model of the Hitler Youth. The move triggered mass resignations of teachers from professional organizations and of church officials from their posts, as well as widespread civil unrest.
Similarly controversial, even among his German allies, was his attempt to prosecute Bishop Eivind Berggrav. Quisling hardened his stance and told Norwegians that the new regime would be imposed on them whether they liked it or not.
On May 1, 1942, the German high command noted that organized resistance to Quisling had begun, and Norway's peace negotiations with Germany stalled as a result. On August 11, 1942, Hitler postponed further peace negotiations until the end of the war. A further insult to Quisling was that he was for the first time prevented from writing letters directly to Hitler.
Quisling believed that the only way to regain Hitler's respect was to obtain volunteers for the now faltering German war effort. After the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, he unconditionally dedicated Norway to German plans for waging total war. About 15,000 Norwegians volunteered for combat service on the Nazi side, and of the 6,000 Norwegians sent into action within the Germanic SS, most were sent to the Eastern Front.
The Germanic SS was the collective name for the paramilitary and political organizations that arose in some parts of German-occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945 under the auspices of the German SS. One of Quisling's first acts as prime minister was the restoration of the so-called Jewish paragraph of the Norwegian constitution. This paragraph, which had been removed in 1851, barred Jews from immigrating to Norway.
From October to November 1942, Quisling signed a series of laws that enabled the arrest of all Norwegian Jews, the confiscation of all property and assets owned by Jews, and the registration of all Norwegian Jews. At the time of the German invasion, approximately 2,100 Jews lived in Norway, among them about 350 German and Austrian refugees seeking refuge from Nazi Germany.
A month after the mass arrest of Jewish men, Nazi officials cooperating with Quisling's Nasjonal Samling began arresting women and children according to pre-prepared plans. Norwegian police arrested Jews throughout Norway and brought them to Oslo for deportation to Germany.
The first deportation of 532 Jews left Oslo on November 26, 1942. Another 158 people were deported on February 25, 1943, followed by transfers of smaller groups. In total, 772 Norwegian Jews were deported from the Norwegian capital to Germany.
From Oslo, the weakened Norwegian Jews were sent by ship to the German port city of Stettin, which today belongs to Poland. They were then transported by train to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered immediately upon arrival. By the end of the war, however, 34 Norwegian Jews had survived, all of them men.
Fortunately, many Jews received warnings about the roundups from Norwegian police officers and members of the resistance. As a result, many Norwegian Jews, about 1,000, escaped with the help of the resistance to neutral Sweden, and many others went into hiding.
After the deportation of the Jews, Germany deported Norwegian officers and eventually tried to deport students from the University of Oslo. The scale of the arrests outraged even Hitler. Quisling became entangled in a similar debacle in early 1944, when he forced compulsory military service in the Hird, prompting a number of members to resign to avoid conscription.
The Hird was a uniformed paramilitary organization modelled on the German SS during the Nazi German occupation of Norway. On January 20, 1945, Quisling set out on his last journey to Hitler. He promised Norwegian support in the final phase of the war if Germany agreed to a peace agreement that would exempt Norwegian affairs from German intervention.
The proposal stemmed from concern that, as German troops retreated south through Norway, the occupation government would have to fight to maintain control in northern Norway. To the horror of the Quisling regime, the Nazis instead decided on a scorched-earth policy in northern Norway and went so far as to shoot Norwegian civilians who refused to evacuate the region.
This period was also marked by a growing number of civilian casualties from Allied air raids and growing resistance to the government in occupied Norway. The meeting with the German leader proved unsuccessful, and Quisling then refused to sign an order to execute thousands of Norwegian saboteurs.
This act of defiance enraged Terboven, acting on Hitler's orders, so much that he walked out of the negotiations. When recounting the events of the trip to a friend, Quisling broke down in tears, convinced that the Nazi refusal to sign a peace agreement had sealed his reputation as a traitor.
Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. In private, Quisling had long come to terms with the fact that National Socialism would be defeated, and on May 7 he ordered the police not to offer armed resistance to the advancing Allies, except in self-defence or against members of the Norwegian resistance movement.
On the same day, Germany announced that it was surrendering unconditionally, making Quisling's position untenable. A realist, Quisling met with resistance military leaders the following day to discuss the manner of his arrest. Quisling stated that he did not want to be treated as an ordinary criminal, but that he also did not want preferential treatment over his colleagues from Nasjonal Samling.
He claimed that he could have let his units fight to the end but chose to ensure a peaceful transition to prevent Norway from becoming a battlefield. On May 9, 1945, Quisling and his ministers turned themselves in to the police.
Quisling was taken to cell 12 on Møllergata 19, the main police station in Oslo. The cell was equipped with a small table, a washbasin, and a hole in the wall for a toilet bucket. After 10 weeks in police custody, where he was constantly watched to prevent possible suicide attempts, he was transferred to Akershus Fortress to await trial as part of the legal purge.
The trial began on August 20, 1945. Quisling was charged with murder, embezzlement, theft, and other crimes. His greatest worry was the charge of conspiring with Hitler over the invasion and occupation of Norway.
At the trial, Quisling claimed that he had acted in Norway's best interest and always with the aim of restoring Norwegian independence. He distorted the truth several times, and the truthfulness of most of his statements won him few supporters across the country, leaving him almost universally despised.
In the later days of the trial, Quisling's health deteriorated, especially as a result of a series of medical examinations he underwent, and his defence weakened. In its closing argument, the prosecution, based on testimony from German officials, attributed the Final Solution, as implemented in Norway, to Quisling.
When the verdict was handed down on September 10, 1945, Quisling was found guilty on all but a few minor charges and sentenced to death. After testifying in a number of other trials of Nasjonal Samling members, Quisling was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress on October 24, 1945, at 2:40 a.m.
His last words before being shot were: "I am convicted unjustly and I die innocent." After his death, his body was cremated and the ashes were placed in Fyresdal, where he was born. Quisling's estate, which he called Gyl, a name taken from Norse mythology, is today home to the Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, a research, educational, and documentation centre in Oslo focused on the Holocaust, other genocides, extremism, antisemitism, hate speech, and the situation of minorities in contemporary society.
On May 8, 1945, the day before he turned himself in to the police, Quisling declared: "I know that the Norwegian people have sentenced me to death and that the easiest thing for me would be to take my own life. But I want to let history pass its own judgment. Believe me, in 10 years I will become another Saint Olaf."
He was wrong. While the saga of Saint Olaf became a central part of national identity and a symbol of Norwegian independence and pride, Vidkun Quisling, through his collaboration with Nazi Germany, became one of the most famous traitors in history. Beyond Norway's borders, the word "quisling" has outlived the memory of Vidkun Quisling himself and become a synonym for a traitor, its use beginning already during the war.
The word "quisling" continues to be used for political figures who collaborate with external powers, especially invading forces, but also as a general term for a traitor. Through his betrayal of Norway in favour of Germany, his name thus became a designation for all collaborators and traitors. No tears were shed for Vidkun Quisling.