The 9th of April 1940. Under the
codename “Operation Weserübung”, Nazi Germany invades Denmark
and Norway. Strategically, Denmark's importance to Germany is as a
staging area for operations in Norway. In Norway, Germany seeks to secure naval bases
for use against the British fleet in the North Sea and to guarantee vital iron-ore shipments from
neutral Sweden on which Nazi Germany is dependent. While invasion of Denmark lasts less than six
hours and is the shortest military campaign conducted by the Germans during the war, Norway
surrenders to Germany only after 2 months on the 10th of June 1940. On 1 February 1942, the
Germans appoint a minister president whose pro-Nazi collaborationist puppet government
will participate in Germany's war efforts, and sent Jews out of the country to
concentration camps in German-occupied Poland. His name, which will become a byword for
"collaborator" or "traitor", is Vidkun Quisling. Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was
born on July 18, 1887, in Fyresdal in southern Norway. His father Jon Lauritz Quisling
was a Lutheran minister and genealogist and Vidkun’s mother Anna Caroline Bang came
from a wealthy family in Grimstad in Norway. In 1905, then the 18-year-old Vidkun Quisling
entered the War College. Of the 250 cadets, he had achieved the highest score on the notoriously
difficult entrance exams. From the War College, Quisling entered the Military Academy to pursue
a career in the army. Vidkun Quisling graduated with the best grades in the history of the
Academy since its founding in 1817 and the King of Norway rewarded him by inviting
the young Vidkun to an audience with him. In 1911, Quisling joined the General Staff
of the Norwegian Army. 3 years later on the 28th of July 1914, the First World War began.
During the war, Norway was neutral. Quisling detested the peace movement, though the high
human cost of the war did temper his views. In March 1918, he was sent to Russia as
an attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd. Though dismayed at the living
conditions he experienced, Quisling nonetheless concluded that "the Bolsheviks have
got an extraordinarily strong hold on Russian society" and marvelled at how Leon Trotsky had
managed to mobilise the Red Army forces so well. He asserted that by contrast, in granting
too many rights to the people of Russia, the Russian Provisional Government under
Alexander Kerensky had brought about its own downfall. When the legation
was recalled in December 1918, Quisling became the Norwegian
military's expert on Russian affairs. In September 1919, Quisling departed Norway
to become an intelligence officer with the Norwegian delegation in Helsinki in Finland, a post that combined diplomacy and politics
and in January 1922 he arrived in the Ukrainian capital Kharkiv to help with the League of
Nations humanitarian relief effort there. In august of the same year, he married the
Russian Alexandra Andreevna Voronina. It appeared that there was no romantic involvement
between the two and it is believed that Quisling merely seemed to have wanted to lift the
girl out of poverty by providing her with a Norwegian passport and financial security
Soon, he met Maria Vasiljevna Pasetchnikova, a Ukrainian more than ten years his junior.
The couple behaved as though they were married, claimed Alexandra was their daughter,
and celebrated their wedding anniversary. His time in Russia, however, had the
greatest impact on Quisling’s political thought. Quisling called his political
philosophy “Universism.” The goal was to develop a collective consciousness for
global unity by passing a consciousness from the individual level to the national level.
Eventually, Universism took on a racial element as Quisling incorporated a belief in Nordic
racial superiority. He asserted that the path to world unity would only be achieved under
Nordic leadership, working against the Jews. Quisling permanently returned to Norway in
1929. He served as the Norwegian Minister of Defense between 1931 and 1933 as a member of
the Agrarian Party. When the Agrarian Party refused to appoint Quisling as party leader,
he left to form his own party. In May 1933, he co-founded the Nasjonal Samling - meaning
the National Unity - political party. Quisling also became the party’s fører, or leader. The
party’s platform was based on four principles: - a corporatist vision of society
- an emphasis on nationalism and Christianity - paternalism of the state
- and economic self-sufficiency. However, the Nasjonal Samling was not successful
in elections. In the 1933 Norwegian parliamentary elections, the party took 2.2% of the vote.
In 1936, the last elections held before the outbreak of World War II, it took only
1.8% of the vote. Neither result was enough for the party to ever hold a seat in the
Storting, the unicameral Norwegian Parliament. In addition, dwindling party membership
created many problems for Quisling, especially financial ones. For years
he had been in financial difficulties and reliant on his inheritance,
while increasing numbers of his paintings which he had acquired cheaply
in post-revolutionary Russia, were found to be copies when he tried to sell them. His
collection stretched to some 200 paintings, including works claimed to be by Rembrandt,
Goya, Cézanne and numerous other masters. However, sometimes even originals did not raise
as much as Quisling had hoped. Vidkun and his brother Arne sold one Frans Hals painting for
just four thousand dollars, believing it to be a copy and not the fifty-thousand-dollar
artwork they had once thought it to be, only to see it reclassified as an original
and revalued at one hundred thousand dollars. In 1939, Quisling turned his attention towards
Norway's preparations for the anticipated European war, which he believed involved a
drastic increase in the country's defence spending to guarantee its neutrality. Meanwhile,
Quisling presented lectures entitled "The Jewish problem in Norway" and supported Adolf Hitler in
what appeared to be a growing future conflict. Despite condemning Kristallnacht which was a
series of coordinated violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently
incorporated territories which occurred on the 9th – 10th of November 1938, he sent the
German leader a fiftieth-birthday greeting thanking him for "saving Europe from Bolshevism
and Jewish domination". Quisling also contended that should an Anglo-Russian alliance make
neutrality impossible, Norway would have "to go with Germany." Invited 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 boost Nasjonal Samling's standing in
Norway, and hence spread pro-Nazi sentiment. At the start of the World War II 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 concerned about maintaining German
naval access to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean via naval bases on the
Norwegian shoreline. In December 1939, first Raeder, then Hitler met with Quisling.
The Fuhrer was generally impressed. Quisling suggested the British were planning to 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 under General Nikolaus
von Falkenhorst began on April 9, 1940. The same day, while the German offensive got
underway, 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, rather than resist, the advancing
Germans. He also announced a new government and declared himself the new head of state.
Two hours later, Quisling repeated his radio announcement. This time, he issued a warning that
“any refusal” to cooperate with the new government would “henceforth involve the most serious
consequences for the individuals concerned.” Quisling now reached the high-water mark of his
political power. On Hitler's orders, Curt Bräuer, Germany's representative in Norway at the time of
the invasion, demanded that King Haakon appoint Quisling head of a new government, thereby
securing a peaceful transition of power and giving legal sanction to the occupation. However,
Haakon rejected this demand. He went further in a meeting with his cabinet, telling the ministers
that he could not appoint Quisling prime minister because neither the people nor the Parliament of
Norway had confidence in him. He let it be known that he would sooner abdicate than appoint any
government headed by Quisling. Hearing this, the government unanimously voted to support the king's
stance. It formally advised him not to appoint any government headed by Quisling and urged the
people to continue their resistance. With his popular support gone, Quisling ceased to be of use
to Hitler. Germany retracted its support for his rival government, preferring instead to build up
its own independent governing commission. On April 15, 1940, Nazi leadership forced him to step down.
Thus, Quisling’s coup only lasted six days and his domestic and international reputation both hit new
lows, casting him as both a traitor and a failure. Norway fell to Germany on June
19, 1940 and the king and Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold
went into exile in London. On April 24, 1940, Hitler appointed Josef
Terboven, Reichskommissar of the Occupied Norwegian Territories. General Von Falkenhorst,
who had planned and commanded the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1940, retained military
control. In addition, all political parties other than Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling were outlawed. As
the leader of Nasjonal Samling, 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 course of the summer of 1942, Quisling
lost any ability he might have had to sway public opinion by attempting to force children
into the Nasjonal Samlings Ungdomsfylking youth organisation, which was modelled on the Hitler
Youth. This move prompted a mass resignation of teachers from their professional
body and churchmen from their posts, along with large-scale civil unrest. His
attempted indictment of Bishop Eivind Berggrav proved similarly controversial, even amongst his
German allies. Quisling now toughened his stance, telling Norwegians that they would have the new
regime forced upon them "whether they like it or not." On 1 May 1942, the German High Command
noted that "organised resistance to Quisling has started" and Norway's peace talks with
Germany stalled as a result. On 11 August 1942, Hitler postponed any further peace negotiations
until the war ended. As an added insult, for the first time he was forbidden
to write letters directly to Hitler. Quisling believed that the only way he could win
back Hitler's respect would be to raise volunteers for the now-faltering German war effort. After
the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, he committed Norway wholeheartedly
to German plans to wage 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 were
sent to the Eastern front. Germanic SS was the collective name given to paramilitary
and political organizations established in parts of German-occupied Europe between 1939
and 1945 under the auspices of the German SS. One of Quisling’s first acts in his role as
minister president was to reinstate the so-called Jewish paragraph of the Norwegian constitution.
This paragraph, which had been removed in 1851, prevented Jews from immigrating to Norway. From
October through November 1942, Quisling signed a series of laws that enabled the arrest of
all Norwegian Jewish men, the confiscation of all Jewish-owned property and assets, and
the registration of all Norwegian Jews. There were approximately 2,100 Jews in Norway at
the time of the German invasion. Among them were 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 the Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling began to arrest women and children. Acting
on plans that had been previously developed, the 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 were deported on February 25, 1943, followed
by transfers of smaller groups. In all, 772 Norwegian Jews were deported from the
Norwegian capital to Germany. From Oslo, Norwegian Jews were sent by ship to the German
port city of Stettin, today’s Szczecin in Poland. They were then transferred by train to
Auschwitz where most were gassed immediately upon arrival. However, 34 Norwegian Jews—all
men—ultimately did survive to see the end of the war. Fortunately however, many Jews received
advance warnings of the roundups from Norwegian policemen and members of the underground. As
a result, many of Norway's Jews, about 1,000, escaped to neutral Sweden with the aid of the
underground and many others went into hiding. Following the deportation 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. Quisling became entangled
in a similar debacle in early 1944 when he forced compulsory military service on elements
of the Hirden, causing a number of members to resign to avoid being drafted. The Hirden was
a uniformed paramilitary organisation during the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany,
modelled the same way as the German SS. On 20 January 1945, Quisling made what would
be his final trip to visit Hitler. He promised Norwegian support in the final phase of the
war if Germany agreed to a peace deal that would remove Norway's affairs from German
intervention. This proposal grew out of a fear that as German forces retreated southwards
through Norway, the occupation government would have to struggle to keep control in northern
Norway. To the horror of the Quisling regime, the Nazis instead decided on a scorched earth
policy in northern Norway, going so far as to shoot Norwegian civilians who refused to
evacuate the region. The period was also marked by increasing civilian casualties from Allied air
raids, and mounting resistance to the government within occupied Norway. The meeting with the
German leader proved unsuccessful and upon being asked to sign the execution order of thousands
of Norwegian "saboteurs," Quisling refused, an act of defiance that so enraged Terboven,
acting on Hitler's orders, that he stormed out of the negotiations. On recounting the events of the
trip to a friend, 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 30 April
1945. Privately, Quisling had long accepted that National Socialism would be defeated and on 7 May,
he ordered police not to offer armed resistance to the Allied advance except in self-defence
or against overt members of the Norwegian resistance movement. The same day, Germany
announced it would surrender unconditionally, making Quisling's position untenable. A realist,
Quisling met military leaders of the resistance on the following day to discuss how he would
be arrested. Quisling declared that whilst he did not want to be treated as a common criminal,
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 ensure a peaceful transition
to avoid turning "Norway into a battlefield." On 9 May 1945, Quisling and his ministers
turned themselves in to police. Quisling was transferred to Cell 12 in Møllergata
19, the main police station in Oslo. The cell was equipped with a tiny table, a basin,
and a hole in the wall for a toilet bucket. After ten weeks being constantly watched to
prevent suicide attempts in police custody, he was transferred to Akershus Fortress and
awaited trial as part of the legal purge. The trial opened on 20 August 1945. Quisling
was charged with murder, embezzlement, theft, and other crimes. The most worrying of all
for Quisling was the charge of conspiring with Hitler over the invasion and occupation
of Norway. In court, Quisling argued that he acted in Norway’s best interest and 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 the country at large,
where he remained almost universally despised. In the later days of the trial, Quisling's
health suffered, largely as a result of the number of medical tests to which he was
subjected, and his defence faltered. The prosecution's final speech placed responsibility
for the Final Solution being carried out in Norway at the feet of Quisling, using
the testimony of German officials. On 10 September 1945, when
the verdict was announced, Quisling was convicted on all but a handful
of minor charges and sentenced to death. After giving testimony in a number of
other trials of Nasjonal Samling members, Quisling was executed by firing squad at Akershus
Fortress on 24 October 1945 at 02:40. His last words before being shot were, "I'm convicted
unfairly and I die innocent." After his death his body was cremated, leaving the ashes to
be interred in Fyresdal, where he was born. Quisling's residence, Villa Grande, which he
called "Gimlé", a name taken from Norse mythology, today hosues the Norwegian Center for Holocaust
and Minority Studies which is a research, education and documentation center in Oslo
focusing on the Holocaust, other genocides, extremism, antisemitism, hate speech, and the
situation of minorities in contemporary societies. On 8 May 1945, 1 day before he turned
himself in to police, Quisling 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 Olav.” However, he was wrong. While the saga of Saint
Olav became central to a national identity and is a symbol of Norwegian independence and
pride, Vidkun Quisling has become one of history's most infamous traitors owing
to his collaboration with Nazi Germany. Outside of Norway, the word “quisling” has
outlasted the memory of Vidkun Quisling himself and became synonymous with “traitor,” a use
that began during the war. The word “ quisling” continues to be applied to political
figures who collaborate with outside powers, especially invading forces. However, it is also
used as a general term for a traitor. Thus, his betrayal of Norway to Germany has made his name
into a label for all collaborators and traitors. There were no teras shed for Vidkun Quisling. thanks for watching the World History
Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notific ification icon so you don't miss our next episodes we thank
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