On 9 April 1940, Nazi Germany launched Operation Weserübung, invading Denmark and Norway. Denmark fell in under six hours, the shortest military campaign the Germans would conduct during the war. Norway held out for two months before surrendering on 10 June. Germany wanted Norway for naval bases to challenge the British Fleet in the North Sea and to protect shipments of iron ore from neutral Sweden, on which the Reich depended.
But the occupation would soon place Norway under the shadow of a man whose name, in time, would lend the world a new word for traitor: Vidkun Quisling. Quisling was born on 18 July 1887 in Fyresdal in southern Norway. His father was a Lutheran minister and genealogist, his mother came from a wealthy family in Grimstad. As an eighteen-year-old in 1905, Quisling entered the War College, scoring the highest marks on the notoriously difficult entrance exams.
From there he went to the military academy, graduating with the best grades in the academy’s history since its founding in 1817, a feat the King of Norway recognized by inviting the young officer to an audience. In 1911 he joined the general staff of the Norwegian Army. When the First World War broke out in July 1914, Norway remained neutral. Quisling disliked the peace movement, though the human cost of the war tempered his views.
In March 1918 he was sent to Russia as an attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd. Though dismayed by the living conditions he witnessed, he concluded that the Bolsheviks had an extraordinarily strong hold on Russian society and admired how Leon Trotsky had mobilized the Red Army, even as he judged the provisional government under Alexander Kerensky had brought about its own downfall by granting the Russian people too many rights. Quisling’s time in Russia left a lasting mark on his political thinking. By 1919 he had become Norway’s military expert on Russian affairs; in September of that year he went to Helsinki as an intelligence officer, and in January 1922 he arrived in Kharkiv in Ukraine to assist with League of Nations relief work.
That August he married a Russian woman, Alexandra Voronina, though the match appears to have involved no romance. It is believed he simply wanted to lift her from poverty by giving her a Norwegian passport and financial security. Soon he met Maria Vasilievna Pasetsnikova, a Ukrainian more than ten years his junior, and the couple behaved as though married, claiming Alexandra as their daughter and celebrating their wedding anniversary. Quisling called his political philosophy Universalism.
The goal was a collective consciousness for global unity, passed from the individual to the national level, but it soon took on a racial element as he incorporated a belief in Nordic racial superiority. The path to world unity, he asserted, could only be achieved under Nordic leadership, and it would be achieved working against the Jews. He returned to Norway permanently in 1929 and served as Minister of Defense between 1931 and 1933 as a member of the Agrarian Party. When that party refused to make him its leader, he left to form his own.
In May 1933 he co-founded the Nasjonal Samling, the National Unity party, with himself as its Führer. Its platform rested on four principles: a corporatist vision of society, nationalism and Christianity, paternalism on the part of the state, and economic self-sufficiency. The party failed at the polls. In 1933 it took 2.
2 percent of the vote; in 1936, the last election before the war, only 1. 8 percent. Neither result earned a single seat in the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. Dwindling membership created financial problems as well.
For years Quisling had relied on his inheritance, and increasingly many of the roughly two hundred paintings he had bought cheaply in post-revolutionary Russia were found to be copies. Sometimes even originals did not sell well. He and his brother sold one Frans Hals painting for only four thousand dollars, believing it a copy, only to see it reclassified as an original and revalued at one hundred thousand. In 1939 Quisling turned toward the coming European war.
He believed Norway’s defenses needed a drastic increase to guarantee its neutrality. At the same time he delivered lectures titled “The Jewish Problem in Norway” and supported Adolf Hitler in what appeared to be a growing future conflict. Though he condemned Kristallnacht, the coordinated anti-Jewish riots of November 1938, he sent Hitler a fiftieth-birthday greeting thanking him for saving Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination. Should an Anglo-Russian alliance make neutrality impossible, Quisling argued, Norway would have to go with Germany.
Invited to Germany in the summer of 1939, he toured German and Danish cities and was received particularly well in Germany, which promised funds to boost Nasjonal Samling and spread pro-Nazi sentiment in Norway. At the start of the war, Norway gained new strategic importance for Germany. 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 bases. In December 1939 Raeder arranged a meeting between Hitler and Quisling.
The Führer was generally impressed. Quisling suggested the British were planning to move into Norway for their own strategic needs. Alarmed, Germany began planning Operation Weserübung. On the day of the invasion, 9 April 1940, as German forces under General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst advanced, Quisling attempted to seize power.
In the world’s first radio broadcast coup, he announced to the Norwegian public that they should welcome the Germans rather than resist, declared a new government, and named himself head of state. Two hours later he repeated the broadcast, warning that any refusal to cooperate would involve the most serious consequences for the individuals concerned. It was the high-water mark of his political power. On Hitler’s orders, Curt Bräuer, Germany’s envoy in Norway, demanded that King Haakon appoint Quisling head of a new government, securing peaceful transition and giving legal sanction to the occupation.
The King refused. He told his cabinet he could not appoint Quisling prime minister because neither the people nor the parliament had confidence in him, and he let it be known he would abdicate before appointing any government headed by Quisling. The cabinet voted unanimously to support the King, formally advised him against appointing Quisling, and urged the people to continue resistance. With popular support gone, Quisling ceased to be of use to Hitler.
Germany withdrew its support for his rival government and instead built its own independent governing commission. On 15 April 1940 Nazi leadership forced Quisling to step down. His coup had lasted only six days, and his reputation at home and abroad had hit new lows, casting him as both traitor and failure. Norway fell to Germany on 10 June 1940, and the King and prime minister Johan Nygaardsvold went into exile in London.
In April 1940 Hitler appointed Josef Terboven Reichskommissar of occupied Norway, while General von Falkenhorst retained military control. All political parties other than Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling were outlawed. Quisling was given a position as head of the cabinet under Terboven. In early 1942 Terboven appointed him Minister President of a national government that was essentially a puppet state under German control.
In the summer of 1942 Quisling lost any ability he might have had to sway public opinion by attempting to force children into the Nasjonal Samling’s youth organization, modeled on the Hitler Youth. The move prompted a mass resignation of teachers and clergymen from their posts along with large-scale civil unrest. His attempted indictment of 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 1 May 1942 the German command noted that organized resistance to Quisling had started, and Norway’s peace talks with Germany stalled. On 11 August 1942 Hitler postponed any further peace negotiations until the war ended and, as an added insult, 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 wholly to German plans for total war.
About fifteen thousand Norwegians volunteered for combat on the Nazi side; of six thousand 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, a provision removed in 1851 that prevented Jews from immigrating to Norway. From October through November 1942 he signed a series of laws enabling the arrest of all Norwegian Jewish men, the confiscation of Jewish property and assets, and the registration of all Norwegian Jews. There were about 2,100 Jews in Norway at the time of the invasion, among them some 350 German and Austrian refugees.
A month after the mass arrest of the men, Nazi officials working with Nasjonal Samling began arresting women and children. Norwegian police arrested Jews throughout the country and brought them to Oslo. The first deportation of 532 Jews left Oslo on 26 November 1942; another 158 were deported on 25 February 1943, followed by smaller groups. In all, 772 Norwegian Jews were deported to Germany.
From Oslo they were shipped to Stettin, today’s Szczecin in Poland, and then by train to Auschwitz, where most were gassed immediately on arrival. Only 34 Norwegian Jews, all men, survived to see the end of the war. Many Jews, however, received advanced warning from Norwegian policemen and the underground. Around one thousand escaped to neutral Sweden, and many others went into hiding.
Following the deportations of the Jews, Germany deported Norwegian officers and finally attempted to deport students from the University of Oslo. Even Hitler was incensed by the scale of the arrests. In early 1944 Quisling became entangled in a similar debacle when he forced compulsory military service on members of the Hirden, a uniformed paramilitary organization modeled on the SS; a number of its members resigned to avoid being drafted. On 20 January 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 proposal grew out of a fear that as German forces retreated southward through Norway, the occupation government would struggle to keep control in the north. To Quisling’s horror, the Nazis instead decided on a scorched-earth policy in northern Norway, even shooting Norwegian civilians who refused to evacuate. The period was marked by increasing civilian casualties from Allied air raids and mounting resistance.
The meeting with Hitler failed. When Quisling was asked to sign execution orders for thousands of Norwegian saboteurs, he refused, an act of defiance that so enraged Ambassador Bormann, acting on Hitler’s orders, that he stormed out of the negotiations. Quisling broke down in tears, convinced the Nazi refusal to sign a peace agreement would seal his reputation as a traitor. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945.
Quisling had long accepted privately that national socialism would be defeated. On 7 May he ordered police not to offer armed resistance to the Allied advance, except in self-defense or against members of the Norwegian resistance. The same day Germany announced its unconditional surrender, making Quisling’s position untenable. A realist, Quisling met the military leaders of the resistance to discuss how he would be arrested.
He declared he did not want to be treated as a common criminal, but he did not want preferential treatment compared to his Nasjonal Samling colleagues. He argued he could have kept his forces fighting until the end, but had chosen peaceful transition to avoid turning Norway into a battlefield. On 9 May 1945 Quisling and his ministers turned themselves in to the police. He was transferred to a cell in Oslo’s main police station, furnished with a tiny table, a basin, and a hole in the wall for a toilet bucket, and watched constantly to prevent suicide attempts.
After ten weeks he was moved to Akershus Fortress to await trial. As part of the postwar legal purge, his trial opened on 20 August 1945. He was charged with murder, embezzlement, theft, and other crimes, but the most worrying charge was conspiring with Hitler over the invasion and occupation of Norway. In court Quisling argued he had acted in Norway’s best interest, always with the goal of restoring Norwegian independence.
He misrepresented the truth on several occasions, and the truthful majority of his statements won him few advocates in a country where he remained almost universally despised. As the trial wore on, his health suffered from the number of medical tests he was subjected to. The prosecution placed responsibility for Norway’s Jews at Quisling’s feet, using testimony from German officials. On 10 September 1945 he was convicted of all but a handful of minor charges and sentenced to death.
After giving testimony in several other trials of Nasjonal Samling members, he was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress on 24 October 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 interred in Fyresdal, where he was born.
A day before he turned himself in, Quisling had said, “I know that the Norwegian people have sentenced me to death and that the easiest course for me would be to take my own life, but I want to let history reach its own verdict. Believe me, in ten years time I will have become another Saint Olaf. ” He was wrong. The saga of Saint Olaf became central to Norwegian national identity and independence.
Vidkun Quisling became one of history’s most infamous traitors for his collaboration with Nazi Germany. His residence, Villa Grande, which he had called Gimlé, a name from Norse mythology, today houses the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, a research and education center in Oslo focusing on the Holocaust, other genocides, extremism, anti-Semitism, hate speech, and minorities. Outside Norway, the word “Quisling” outlasted the man. It became synonymous with traitor, a use that began during the war and continues to be applied to political figures who collaborate with outside powers, especially invading forces.
His betrayal of Norway made his name a label for all collaborators. There were no tears shed for Vidkun Quisling.