On April 9, 1940, the morning in Norway was sharp and brittle as warships pushed up the fjord and engines echoed across the air. Sirens rose and fell. People looked up at the low sky and heard aircraft crossing the city.
Rumors spread quickly. Germany had attacked, and the capital was about to fall. For months, Norway had tried to remain neutral, but its long coastline was vital to the war.
The Germans wanted control of ports and fjords to secure the flow of iron ore from Sweden that kept their factories alive. They also wanted to block Britain, which had been planning its own move into Scandinavia. Denmark, lying in the path to Norway, was seized within hours.
Now Oslo faced the same fate. The king and government retreated inland. In the evening, the national radio went silent, then crackled back to life with a voice claiming to speak for the nation.
It announced a new government and demanded that resistance stop. The broadcasts sounded confident, but the city was not convinced, and neither was the country. Spoken with shock and disbelief, the name of this Nazi collaborator would one day define the word traitor.
That name was Vidkun Quisling.
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling was born on the 18th of July 1887 in Fyresdal, a rural municipality in the Norwegian county of Telemark. His father was Lutheran pastor and genealogist Jon Lauritz Qvisling, and his mother Anna Karolina Bang came from a well-known family in the south of Norway.
He did well at school and chose the army for his career. In 1905, he earned the top entrance score at the Norwegian Military Academy. One year later, he moved to the Norwegian Military College and graduated with the best results since the college was founded in 1817. In 1911, he joined the general staff.
During the First World War, which started in the summer of 1914, Norway stayed neutral. As a result, Quisling's early military service was spent in study and staff work rather than on the battlefield. He was ambitious, disciplined, and sure that he could serve a larger national purpose.
When the First World War ended in November 1918, Quisling went abroad and began the part of his life that first made his name known outside Norway. He worked closely with the explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen and helped organize humanitarian relief during the famine of 1921 in the Volga region of Russia.
In these years, he also met Alexandra Andreevna Voronina and married her a few days after her 17th birthday in August 1922. Only a year later, she was pregnant and Quisling insisted on her having an abortion.
In 1923, Quisling met his second wife, Maria Vasilyevna Paseknikova. He allegedly married her even though his first marriage was still valid. Over the next few years, he presented his first wife to the public as his daughter.
In 1923, the trio went to Paris and in 1924 back to Norway, where they separated and Alexandra went back to France, where she lived for some time in Nice and later immigrated to China. Quisling soon worked for Nansen again, this time traveling to Armenia and back to Moscow, where he was employed by British diplomacy.
For his services to Britain, he was appointed as a commander of the Order of the British Empire. Years later, in 1940, this honor was revoked by King George VI for Quisling's collaboration with Nazi Germany.
During his diplomatic activities, Quisling was accused of using diplomatic channels to smuggle millions of rubles to the black market. Despite the allegations never being confirmed, he came back to Norway in 1929 as a rich man.
After his arrival, he sold a large number of antiques and works of art that he had acquired cheaply in post-revolutionary Russia. It included works from artists like Rembrandt, Goya, and Cézanne.
Quisling was also active in literature, and his works, which were openly racist and anti-Bolshevik, gave him large publicity. Soon he entered politics, and from 1931 to 1933 he served as minister of defense of Norway.
Quisling spoke often against the political left and warned that Norway stood at risk from both foreign and domestic enemies. He thought the country needed a new kind of national unity that would remove conflict from politics. He was a sharp critic of parliamentary bargaining and believed that interest groups weakened the nation.
In 1933, he founded a new radical party, Nasjonal Samling, meaning National Gathering. Inspired by German Nazis, he took the title Fører and set out a program that mixed nationalism, authoritarian rule, and corporatism.
He spoke of a society where professional groups would be organized and cooperate under a state that stood above party quarrels. He wrapped his movement in symbols from Nordic history and Christian language and promised to defend Norway from communism.
The party won no seats in the Storting. The Norwegian National Assembly stayed small and was largely overlooked by voters. In the next few years, Quisling associated himself more with other far-right movements in Europe.
He went to the Montreux Fascist Conference in Switzerland in December 1934 and also met with German Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. In 1939, he toured Nazi Germany. And on the 14th of December 1939, just a few months after the Second World War began on the 1st of September, he met Adolf Hitler.
After this visit, Quisling received funds for his party from Germany. A few days before the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, he met with German intelligence officers who asked him for information on Norwegian defenses and military protocols. As a former defense minister, he had access to crucial information.
On the 9th of April 1940, German forces invaded Norway and Denmark by sea and air. The Norwegian king, Haakon VII, and government refused to surrender. They moved out of the capital, Oslo, and continued to fight against the Nazis.
Quisling felt that his chance finally came and made his most famous move. With Nazi support and a pre-prepared list of ministers, he went to the radio studio in Oslo and declared himself prime minister.
He ordered mobilization and any resistance against German occupiers to stop, and called the legitimate members of the government who left Oslo to continue fighting the Germans deserters. His orders to stop fighting and arrest the king and other ministers were ignored by the Norwegians.
The king, Haakon VII, refused to appoint Quisling as prime minister and declared the German invasion unlawful. Within days, German authorities set Quisling aside while they built their own administrative structure, hoping they would come to terms with a king.
The attempted coup had been the first of its kind on radio. Yet it brought no real authority, and it bred a deep hatred of his name across Norway. Vidkun Quisling became a traitor and failure at the same time.
But the failed coup was not the end of his political activities and collaboration with Nazi Germany. The German occupation settled in, and with it came a slow reshaping of the state.
Quisling at the end served as an acting prime minister, but real power was in the hands of the German administration and occupational forces. While the king continued to fight the Germans and went into exile in the United Kingdom, Quisling was helping the Nazis to suppress any resistance against them.
Leaders of the opposition and activists were persecuted and executed. The state police was formed to help the Gestapo, the German secret police, hunt resistance fighters. All parties were abolished except Quisling's Nasjonal Samling.
Quisling was helping the Nazis in these activities, and in February 1942 he finally became prime minister of the Norwegian government. All this time he worked alongside the German civilian ruler Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, responsible for German rule over Norway.
Quisling was active not only in fighting against Norway's resistance fighters and opposition to his collaborationist regime, but also in the persecution of the Jews in Norway. The Jewish community in Norway was not large, but persecutions hit them hard. More than half of the Norwegians who died in Nazi concentration and extermination camps were Jewish.
Even as the tide of war turned after Stalingrad in 1943 and Allied advances on other European theaters of war, Quisling continued to support Germany. His regime staged parades, ceremonies, and propaganda events, insisting that German victory was still possible. But the words rang hollow.
Resistance activity grew. Allied air raids intensified, and German prisons and camps filled with hostages and fighters from Norway. In northern Norway, the occupiers prepared a scorched-earth retreat. Villages and farms in the counties of Finnmark and Troms were burned and tens of thousands of people were forced south.
Quisling's regime in Oslo could not stop Germany's destructive policies, and it had no real power against German military orders. After the war, the ruins in northern Norway stood as a sign of what the occupation had meant when German decisions were carried out without restraint in Norwegian territory.
In May 1945, the occupation ended in Norway. German forces finally surrendered, and Quisling was arrested. From the 20th of August 1945, he faced trial in the great legal purge that followed the war. The courtroom became a place where the country's anger and its desire for law met in public.
The charges included high treason against the Norwegian state, murder, and embezzlement. His defense tried to show that he had acted for Norway's good in a difficult time. Quisling said he wanted to protect the country from civil war and foreign rule, but the judges and the public did not accept this.
The court announced its verdict on the 10th of September 1945, finding him guilty and sentencing him to death. On the 8th of May 1945, just one day before Vidkun Quisling surrendered to the police, he declared that within 10 years he would be remembered as a new Saint Olaf, a symbol of Norway's independence and pride. But he was gravely mistaken.
During and after the Second World War, his name entered the language as a synonym for betrayal. Quisling became a word for traitor, spreading quickly, and it has never disappeared.
On the 24th of October 1945, at 2:40 a.m., the most infamous traitor of the Second World War was executed by a firing squad at Akershus Fortress in Oslo. He was 58 years old. His last words before being shot were, "I'm convicted unfairly and I die innocent."