Vidkun Quisling

Vidkun Quisling was one of the ablest officers of the Norwegian General Staff, a collaborator of Fridtjof Nansen in humanitarian relief in Soviet Russia and a Minister of Defence before he became leader of a small fascist party to which Norwegians never gave a single seat in parliament. In December 1939 he went to Berlin and tried to convince Adolf Hitler that Britain was about to occupy Norway. On 9 April 1940, the day of the German invasion, he announced on the radio that he was taking power. From 1942 he headed a collaborationist government that worked with the occupier, including in the deportation of Norway’s Jews to Auschwitz. After the war he was sentenced to death and shot. Even during the war his name had become a byword, in many languages, for a traitor and collaborator.

The pastor’s son from Telemark

He was born on 18 July 1887 in Fyresdal in the county of Telemark, the son of Jon Lauritz Qvisling, a pastor of the Church of Norway and a genealogist, and Anna Caroline Bang, the daughter of a wealthy shipowner from Grimstad. He spent his childhood in Fyresdal, in Drammen and in Skien, where his father became parish priest. He was a shy and diligent pupil, gifted in history and mathematics.

In 1905, the year the union with Sweden was dissolved, he entered the Military Academy with the best entrance examination result. He then graduated from the Military College with the highest marks in its history, for which, by custom, he was received in audience by King Haakon VII. On 1 November 1911 he joined the General Staff, choosing Russia as his speciality. In 1917 he was promoted to captain.

Russia, Nansen and two wives

In March 1918 he went as attaché to the Norwegian legation in Petrograd. He looked on the poverty and terror with disgust, yet in his reports he admired how firmly the Bolsheviks held power and how efficiently Leon Trotsky had built the Red Army. He explained the fall of the Provisional Government by its having given people too much freedom. When the legation was withdrawn in December 1918, he became the army’s expert on Russian affairs. The friendship he formed in Petrograd with the diplomat and businessman Frederik Prytz lasted his whole life and later led him into politics. In 1919–1921 he was an intelligence officer at the legation in Helsinki.

In the autumn of 1921 the polar explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen, High Commissioner of the League of Nations, asked him to help with famine relief in Soviet Russia. In January 1922 Quisling arrived in Kharkiv. His report on the catastrophe in Ukraine, where thousands of people were dying every day, helped to secure aid, and Nansen called his work “absolutely indispensable”. In August 1922 he married a very young Russian woman, Alexandra Voronina, and a year later in Kharkiv he took up with a Ukrainian, Maria Pasechnikova, whom he regarded as his wife, although no documents of this second marriage have ever been found. Alexandra was later presented as a foster daughter, and their marriage was annulled in the early 1930s. Maria stayed with him to the end.

After Ukraine he worked for Nansen on the repatriation of refugees in the Balkans, and in 1925 accompanied him on a journey through Armenia, where the League of Nations was to help resettle survivors of the massacres of the Armenians. Meanwhile he lost his post in the army, which had been pared down by budget cuts. Back home and embittered towards the General Staff, he briefly sought contact with the Labour Party, then leaning towards communism, and proposed that it form a workers’ militia. He found no trust there. From 1926 he worked in Moscow, first for Prytz’s firm and from 1927 as secretary of the Norwegian legation, which, after Britain broke off relations with the Soviet Union, represented British interests in the USSR. For this service he was appointed to the Order of the British Empire, an honour King George VI revoked in 1940. The harsh Stalinist years, Moscow’s rejection of Nansen’s projects and rumours, never proven, of his involvement in illegal rouble dealing turned him from a sympathiser of the Bolsheviks into their bitter enemy.

Minister of Defence

In December 1929 he returned to Norway for good. After Nansen’s death in May 1930 he published a newspaper article presenting, as the dead man’s legacy, a programme of “strong and just government” and greater attention to “race and heredity”. In the autumn he published the book “Russia and Ourselves” (Russland og vi), a call to fight Bolshevism. In 1931, together with Prytz, he founded the Nordisk Folkereisning movement, with himself as its leader (fører).

In May 1931, to the surprise of parliament, he became Minister of Defence in the Farmers’ Party government of Peder Kolstad, and after Kolstad’s death in 1932 he kept the portfolio under Jens Hundseid. He began by sending troops to Menstad, where striking workers had clashed with the police. On 2 February 1932 he was attacked in his office by an unknown assailant with a knife, who threw ground pepper in his face. The “pepper affair” divided public opinion: the left claimed the attack had been staged, and the culprit was never identified. On 8 April 1932, in the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, Quisling, instead of defending himself, accused Labour activists and communists by name of preparing a revolution and called them enemies of the fatherland. He became a hero on the right; in parliament the speech was regarded as political suicide, because the evidence was thin.

Fører of a small party

After the fall of the Hundseid government in 1933 Quisling and the lawyer Johan Bernhard Hjort turned his movement into a party, Nasjonal Samling (National Unity), founded in May 1933. Its programme promised strong government above the parties, the replacement of parliament by a chamber of estates, a struggle against Marxism and an alliance of the Germanic peoples. The party borrowed symbols from Norway’s medieval past, the cross of St Olaf and the name Hird for its paramilitary wing, and its members greeted one another with the cry “Heil og sæl”. In the elections of October 1933 it won 27,850 votes, about 2 per cent, and no seats. Quisling was no orator: he spoke in a monotone, stressing the wrong words.

In the following years the party came to resemble the Nazi NSDAP ever more closely. In 1934 Quisling attended the congress of fascist movements at Montreux and made contact with the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Open antisemitism entered the programme. In 1936, when Trotsky, exiled from the USSR, was living in Norway, Quisling made his presence an election issue, but Nasjonal Samling won even fewer votes, 26,577. At the beginning of 1937 Hjort left the party with many members. In that year’s local elections Nasjonal Samling was reduced to a sect.

In 1939 he declared that if an alliance between Britain and the USSR made neutrality impossible, Norway must stand with Germany. Although he condemned Kristallnacht, he sent Hitler a telegram on his fiftieth birthday thanking him for saving Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination. In June 1939 he was a guest at the congress of the Nordic Society in Lübeck and was promised German money.

December 1939 in Berlin

At the beginning of December 1939 Quisling went to Berlin. Through Rosenberg and his associate Albert Viljam Hagelin, who spoke excellent German and was given to exaggeration, he reached Grand Admiral Erich Raeder on 11 December; since October Raeder had been urging Hitler to seize bases in Norway. Quisling argued that the government in Oslo would secretly consent to a British landing and offered to prepare a coup with German help. On 14 and 18 December Hitler received him. Hitler assured him that he would prefer a neutral Scandinavia but would respond to a British landing, and promised the party money. After these talks the OKW, the Wehrmacht High Command, began to study the possibility of occupying Norway, and in January 1940 Hitler handed the planning over to Keitel. Historians still argue over whether Quisling understood that he was encouraging an invasion, and whether he and the Germans he spoke to came away from these meetings with the same understanding.

After that the Germans kept him out of the preparations. In the winter he was seriously ill with a kidney complaint. After the Altmark incident in February 1940 Hitler decided to hurry, but also concluded that a Quisling putsch was unnecessary. He entrusted the operation to General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst and on 29 February told Rosenberg that Quisling would not be drawn into it. At the beginning of April Quisling met an officer of the Abwehr in Copenhagen, who questioned him about Norway’s defences, but he learned nothing about the date of the attack.

A coup by radio

On 9 April 1940 Germany attacked Denmark and Norway. The cruiser Blücher, carrying the officials who were to take over the administration in Oslo, was sunk in the fjord by the guns of Oscarsborg fortress, and the King and the government of Johan Nygaardsvold managed to leave the capital. In the resulting vacuum Quisling, backed by Rosenberg’s German liaison man, decided to act on his own. At around 7.30 p.m. he walked into the studio of the Norwegian radio and announced that the Nygaardsvold government had stepped down and that a “national government” had taken power, with himself as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. He cancelled the mobilisation and called further resistance “criminal destruction of life and property”. It was the first coup d’état in history carried out by radio. Hitler endorsed him that same evening.

The coup proved a fiasco. Officers and the police ignored Quisling’s orders, including the order to arrest the government at Elverum. On 10 April the German envoy Curt Bräuer demanded that the King appoint Quisling Prime Minister. Haakon VII refused and declared that he would rather abdicate; the government backed him unanimously and called for continued resistance. The Germans therefore dropped Quisling. On 15 April civil authority in the occupied part of the country passed to an Administrative Council of respected officials, and Quisling had to step aside. That same day the British newspaper The Times wrote in a leading article of “Quislings everywhere”. The name began to take on a life of its own.

At the occupier’s side

On 24 April 1940 Hitler appointed Gauleiter Josef Terboven Reich Commissioner for Norway. Terboven could not stand Quisling and in the summer sent him off to Germany. Quisling returned thanks to the intercession of Rosenberg and Raeder, after a conversation with Hitler on 16 August. On 25 September 1940 Terboven proclaimed that the King and the government in exile no longer held any authority, dissolved all parties except Nasjonal Samling and appointed a council of commissarial ministers, most of them from Quisling’s party. Quisling himself did not sit on it, but as party leader he became the political patron of the new administration. Party membership then grew to several tens of thousands, although according to his biographer Hans Fredrik Dahl it never exceeded 40,000 at any one time.

Quisling hoped that loyalty to Germany would bring Norway independence in a “Greater Germanic” Europe. He recruited volunteers for the Waffen-SS and for the Norwegian Legion, which after the invasion of the USSR fought at Leningrad. In a speech in Frankfurt in 1941 he called for the Jews to be removed from Europe and settled outside it. In Norway his men took over public offices, and the occupier’s terror grew. In September 1941, after a strike in Oslo, the Germans shot two trade unionists. Norwegians responded with the “ice front”, a social boycott of party members.

Minister-President

On 1 February 1942, at a ceremony in Akershus Fortress, Quisling became “Minister-President” (ministerpresident) of the national government. He also kept the title of fører. The first amendment to the constitution restored the ban on Jews entering Norway, which had been lifted in 1851. Quisling’s power was, however, limited: Terboven and his Reich Commissariat had the last word on all important matters. In August 1942 Hitler rejected his efforts to obtain a peace treaty and sovereignty for Norway, and even forbade him to write to him directly.

The year 1942 brought Quisling his most resounding defeats. When he tried to force teachers to join a new professional body, and young people to join a party youth organisation modelled on the Hitler Youth, thousands of teachers refused. Some were arrested and sent to forced labour in the north, but the government had to back down. The bishops of the Church of Norway, led by Eivind Berggrav, resigned their offices, and most of the clergy followed them. In 1943 a retroactive law was used to sentence to death and shoot the police officer Gunnar Eilifsen, who had refused to arrest women evading compulsory labour.

The destruction of Norway’s Jews

The registration of Jews in Norway was carried out in 1942 on German initiative, with the participation of the Norwegian police and administration. On 26 October 1942 the police arrested Jewish men, and the same day Quisling’s government passed a law confiscating Jewish property. On 26 November the ship Donau carried 532 people, men, women and children, away from Oslo. Further transports followed. In all about 770 Jews were deported from Norway, most of them to Auschwitz. Only a little over thirty of them survived the war. The deportations were organised by the Germans, but the arrests were carried out by Norwegian police officers and members of the Hird. According to Dahl, Quisling did not know the date of the first transport in advance, but in December he publicly defended the operation and presented it as the joint work of his movement and the occupier. How much he knew of the fate of the deportees remains disputed. Some historians believe he gave credence to German assurances of “resettlement”; others point out that information about mass murder had been reaching him and his circle since 1941.

Downfall

In the last years of the war Quisling was weary and increasingly isolated. His meetings with Hitler, the last at the end of January 1945, gained him nothing. At that time the Germans withdrawing from Finland were burning northern Norway and evacuating its inhabitants by force. After Hitler’s suicide Quisling still proposed a transitional government involving his administration, but no one took it seriously. On 7 May 1945 Germany capitulated. On 9 May Quisling gave himself up at the police station at Møllergata 19 in Oslo and was arrested.

His trial before the Court of Appeal in Oslo lasted from 20 August to 10 September 1945. He was charged with treason, collaborating with the Germans in preparing the invasion, illegal attempts to change the constitution, embezzlement and complicity in the deaths of people, Eilifsen among them. His defence was that he had always acted for a free and independent Norway. On 10 September 1945 he was sentenced to death. No death sentence had been carried out in Norway since 1876, and the death penalty had been removed from the peacetime penal code at the beginning of the 20th century. The government in exile had reintroduced it by decree for traitors and war criminals, which later gave rise to legal disputes. On 13 October the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal. Vidkun Quisling was shot at Akershus Fortress at 2.40 a.m. on 24 October 1945. His last words are said to have been: “I am convicted unjustly and I die innocent.” Quisling’s house on the Bygdøy peninsula, which he named Gimle, now houses a centre for Holocaust studies.

Significance

Quisling did not bring about the German invasion of Norway, but he made it easier. His December talks in Berlin gave Raeder the argument the admiral needed and prompted Hitler to order the first studies. After that the Germans managed without him, and his coup of 9 April did the occupiers more harm than good, because it stiffened the will to resist of the King, the government and most Norwegians. Nasjonal Samling never won popular support, and Quisling’s power lasted only as long as German bayonets.

His name outlived him as a word. After The Times article of 15 April 1940, “quisling” became the term in English and many other languages for a collaborator who helps an invader rule his own country. The name was later applied to other leaders of governments that existed by the occupier’s grace, in Europe and in Asia.