On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany launched Operation Weserübung, invading both Denmark and Norway. Denmark fell in less than six hours, the shortest military campaign the Germans conducted during the war. Norway held out for two months before surrendering on June 10, 1940. Germany wanted Norway for its naval bases in the North Sea and Atlantic, and to guarantee shipments of Swedish iron ore vital to the German war effort.
But the occupation also produced one of history’s most infamous collaborators, a man whose name became a permanent word for betrayal. Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was born on July 18, 1887, in Fyresdal in southern Norway. His father was a Lutheran minister and genealogist, and his mother came from a wealthy family. In 1905, the eighteen-year-old Quisling entered the War College, achieving the highest score on the notoriously difficult entrance exams among 250 cadets.
He graduated with the best grades in the history of the academy since its founding in 1817, and the king of Norway rewarded him with a personal audience. In 1911, Quisling joined the general staff of the Norwegian Army. When the First World War broke out in July 1914, Norway remained neutral. Quisling detested the peace movement, though the war’s human cost tempered his views.
In March 1918, he was sent to Russia as an attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd. Despite being dismayed by living conditions there, he concluded that the Bolsheviks had an extraordinarily strong hold on Russian society and marveled at how Leon Trotsky had mobilized the Red Army. He argued that the provisional government under Alexander Kerensky had brought about its own downfall by granting too many rights to the Russian people. After the legation was recalled in December 1918, Quisling became Norway’s military expert on Russian affairs.
He served as an intelligence officer in Helsinki in 1919, and in January 1922 he arrived in Kharkov to assist with a League of Nations humanitarian relief effort. In August 1922, he married a Russian woman, Alexandra Andreevna Voronina, apparently not out of romance but to lift her out of poverty and provide her with a Norwegian passport and financial security. Soon after, he met Maria Vasiljevna Pasesnikova, a Ukrainian more than ten years his junior, and the couple behaved as though they were married. His time in Russia deeply shaped his political thinking.
Quisling developed a philosophy he called Universalism, which sought a collective consciousness for global unity, moving from the individual to the national level. Eventually, Universalism took on a racial element, incorporating a belief in Nordic racial superiority. He asserted that world unity could only be achieved under Nordic leadership. Quisling permanently returned to Norway in 1929.
He served as Minister of Defense from 1931 to 1933 as a member of the Agrarian Party, but when that party refused to make him its leader, he left and co-founded his own political party in May 1933, the Nasjonal Samling, meaning National Unity. Quisling became its leader, or fører. The party’s platform rested on four principles: a corporatist vision of society, an emphasis on nationalism and Christianity, paternalism of the state, and economic self-sufficiency. The party failed at the ballot box.
In the 1933 parliamentary elections it took 2. 2 percent of the vote, and in 1936 it took only 1. 8 percent, never enough to win a seat in the Storting, Norway’s parliament. Dwindling membership created financial problems for Quisling, who depended on his inheritance.
He had collected some 200 paintings cheaply in post-revolutionary Russia, claiming works by Rembrandt, Goya, and other masters, but increasing numbers proved to be copies. Even some originals sold for less than expected. He and his brother sold a Frans Hals painting for just $4,000, believing it a copy, only to see it reclassified as an original and revalued at $100,000. By 1939, Quisling turned his attention to Norway’s preparations for a European war he believed was coming.
He argued for a drastic increase in defensive spending to guarantee Norwegian neutrality. He also gave lectures titled “The Jewish Problem in Norway” and, despite condemning Kristallnacht, the coordinated violent riots against Jews in Germany in November 1938, sent Adolf Hitler a fiftieth birthday greeting thanking him for saving Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination. Quisling contended that if an Anglo-Russian alliance made neutrality impossible, Norway would have to side with Germany. In the summer of 1939, Quisling toured German and Danish cities, receiving a particularly warm reception in Germany, which promised funds to boost Nasjonal Samling and spread pro-Nazi sentiment in Norway.
When the Second World War began, Norway gained new strategic importance. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the German Navy, was concerned about maintaining German naval access to the North Sea and the Atlantic through Norwegian shoreline bases. In December 1939, Quisling met with Hitler and suggested the British were planning to move into Norway. Alarmed, Germany began planning the invasion.
When the German offensive began on April 9, 1940, Quisling attempted to seize power in the world’s first radio broadcast coup. He announced to the Norwegian public that they should welcome the advancing Germans, declared a new government, and proclaimed himself head of state. Two hours later, he repeated the announcement, warning that refusal to cooperate would bring the most serious consequences. Quisling had reached the high-water mark of his political power.
On Hitler’s orders, Germany’s representative demanded that King Haakon appoint Quisling head of a new government, securing a peaceful transition and legal sanction for the occupation. The king refused, telling his cabinet he could not appoint a man in whom neither the people nor parliament had confidence, and he made clear he would sooner abdicate than appoint any government led by Quisling. The government unanimously backed the king and urged continued resistance. With popular support gone, Quisling became useless to Hitler.
Germany withdrew support for his rival government, preferring to build its own independent governing commission. On April 15, 1940, Nazi leadership forced him to step down. His coup had lasted only six days, and his domestic and international reputation hit new lows, casting him as both traitor and failure. Norway fell to Germany in June 1940, and the king and prime minister went into exile in London.
On April 24, 1940, Hitler appointed Josef Terboven as Reich Commissioner of occupied Norwegian territories, with General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst retaining military control. All political parties except Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling were outlawed, and Quisling was given a position as head of the cabinet under Terboven. In early 1942, Terboven appointed Quisling Minister President of a national government, essentially a puppet state under German control. In the summer of 1942, Quisling lost any ability to sway public opinion by attempting to force children into the Nasjonal Samling youth organization, modeled on the Hitler Youth.
The move prompted a mass resignation of teachers and churchmen and caused large-scale civil unrest. His attempt to indict Bishop Eivind Berggrav proved controversial even among his German allies. Quisling toughened his stance, telling Norwegians the new regime would be forced upon them whether they liked it or not. On May 1, 1942, the German command noted that organized resistance to Quisling had started, and Norway’s peace talks with Germany stalled.
On August 11, 1942, Hitler postponed further peace negotiations until the war ended, and for the first time forbade Quisling from writing directly to him. Quisling believed the only way to win back Hitler’s respect was to raise volunteers for the faltering German war effort. After the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, he committed Norway wholeheartedly to German plans for total war. About 15,000 Norwegians volunteered for combat duty on the Nazi side, and of the 6,000 sent into action as part of the Germanic SS, most went to the Eastern Front.
One of Quisling’s first acts as Minister President was to reinstate the so-called Jewish paragraph of the Norwegian Constitution, which had been removed in 1851 and had prevented Jews from immigrating to Norway. From October through November 1942, he signed laws enabling the arrest of all Norwegian Jewish men, the confiscation of Jewish-owned property, and the registration of all Norwegian Jews. Approximately 2,100 Jews were in Norway at the time of the invasion, including about 350 German and Austrian refugees who had sought haven from Nazi Germany. A month after the mass arrest of Jewish men, Nazi officials working with Nasjonal Samling began arresting women and children.
Norwegian police arrested Jews throughout Norway and brought them to Oslo for deportation. The first deportation of 532 Jews left Oslo on November 26, 1942. Another 158 were deported on February 25, 1943, followed by smaller groups. In all, 772 Norwegian Jews were sent from Oslo to Germany, then by train to Auschwitz, where most were gassed upon arrival.
Only 34 Norwegian Jews, all men, survived to see the end of the war. Many Jews received advance warning from Norwegian police and members of the underground. About 1,000 escaped to neutral Sweden with underground aid, and many others went into hiding. After the deportations, Germany deported Norwegian officers and attempted to deport students from the University of Oslo.
Even Hitler was incensed by the scale of the arrests. In early 1944, Quisling forced compulsory military service on members of the Hirden, a uniformed paramilitary organization modeled on the German SS, causing resignations from men seeking to avoid the draft. On January 20, 1945, Quisling made his final trip to visit Hitler. He promised Norwegian support in the final phase of the war if Germany agreed to a peace deal removing Norway’s affairs from German intervention.
The Nazis instead decided on a scorched-earth policy in northern Norway, shooting civilians who refused to evacuate. The meeting failed, and when Quisling refused to sign the execution order for thousands of Norwegian saboteurs, an enraged Hitler supporter stormed out. Quisling broke down in tears, convinced the Nazi refusal to sign a peace agreement would seal his reputation as a traitor. Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.
Quisling had long accepted that national socialism would be defeated. On May 7, he ordered police not to offer armed resistance to the Allied advance except in self-defense or against resistance members. The same day, Germany announced its unconditional surrender. Quisling met with resistance military leaders to discuss how he would be arrested, declaring he did not want to be treated as a common criminal but did not want preferential treatment either.
He argued he could have kept his forces fighting until the end but chose a peaceful transition to avoid turning Norway into a battlefield. On May 9, 1945, Quisling and his ministers turned themselves in. He was held in cell 12 at Møllergata 19, the main police station in Oslo, under constant watch to prevent suicide. After ten weeks, he was transferred to Akershus Fortress to await trial.
The trial opened on August 20, 1945. He was charged with murder, embezzlement, theft, and, most seriously, conspiring with Hitler over the invasion and occupation of Norway. Quisling argued he had acted in Norway’s best interest and always aimed to restore Norwegian independence, but he misrepresented the truth on several occasions, and his statements won him few advocates in a country that almost universally despised him. On September 10, 1945, the verdict was announced: convicted of all but a handful of minor charges, Quisling was sentenced to death.
He was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress on October 24, 1945, at 2:40 a. m. His last words were: “I am convicted unfairly and I die innocent. ” His body was cremated, and his ashes were interred in Fyresdal, where he was born.
One day before turning himself in, Quisling had said he knew the Norwegian people had sentenced him to death but wanted history to reach its own verdict, predicting that in ten years he would be another Saint Olaf. He was wrong. His residence, Villa Grande, which he called Gimle, now houses the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies.
The word “Quisling” has outlasted the man himself, becoming synonymous with traitor and collaborator, a term still applied to those who betray their country to outside powers.