Quisling becomes Prime Minister of Norway

On Sunday 1 February 1942 occupied Norway was given a “national government” (Den nasjonale regjering). At its head stood the leader of the fascist Nasjonal Samling, Vidkun Quisling, who took the title of ministerpresident, or Prime Minister. The ceremony, which propaganda called the “act of state” (Statsakten), took place in the Knights’ Hall of Akershus Fortress in Oslo. A few hours earlier the German Reich Commissioner, Josef Terboven, had accepted the resignation of the ministers he himself had directed since 1940 and approved the choice of Quisling. The event was presented as Norway’s return to self-government. In reality the Reich Commissariat carried on, and Terboven remained the true master of the country until May 1945.

Quisling is often called “the Nazi-allied Prime Minister of Norway”. The description is apt but needs one addition: Quisling did not become head of state or the head of a sovereign government. His cabinet was a collaborationist government operating within limits set by the occupier, and every one of its more important decisions required the approval of the Reich Commissariat.

The road to the “act of state”

Quisling had been waiting for this day for almost two years. On 9 April 1940, the day of the German invasion, he had announced on the radio that he was taking power, but his first “government” lasted six days. The Germans saw him as an obstacle and relied instead on an Administrative Council appointed by the Supreme Court. After Norway’s capitulation in June 1940 and failed negotiations with the Storting, Terboven on 25 September 1940 deposed King Haakon VII and Johan Nygaardsvold’s government, banned all parties except Nasjonal Samling and handed the ministries to commissarial ministers, most of them Quisling’s men. Quisling himself received no office at the time. He was merely the political patron of the ministers and leader of the only legal party.

Throughout 1941 he pressed for more. He argued to the Germans that the occupier’s harsh policy was making the Norwegians hate them, and that Nasjonal Samling would carry out the “new order” more gently and more effectively. Terboven himself supplied him with opportunities. After the milk strike in Oslo in September 1941 the Commissioner declared a state of emergency, and a summary court sentenced the trade unionists Viggo Hansteen and Rolf Wickstrøm to death. At about the same time Norwegians had their radio sets confiscated. Quisling defended these decisions publicly, but drew from them the conclusion that power must at last be handed over to Norwegians from his party. The Germans replied that Nasjonal Samling was too small for that. The party grew mainly through opportunists: at the end of 1940 it had more than 23,000 members, a year later some 10,000 more, but it was still a minority organisation, surrounded by the “ice front” of social boycott maintained by most of society. The only concession was the title of minister, granted to the commissarial heads of ministries on 25 September 1941.

The German position changed around the turn of 1941 and 1942. Terboven, who did not think highly of Quisling, concluded that a Norwegian façade might be convenient: responsibility for unpopular decisions would fall on Norwegians, while the Commissariat kept control. In Berlin there had originally been talk of handing over part of Norway’s sovereignty to the new government, but according to the available studies Adolf Hitler decided in mid-January 1942 that the Reich Commissariat would remain. Hitler valued Quisling for his loyalty and for having warned him in December 1939 about British plans for Norway, but he did not believe Quisling had support in the country and had no intention of tying his own hands with any commitments before the war was over. In January Terboven informed Quisling that the transfer of power had been set for 30 January. The date was postponed by two days. Hitler’s concern for Norway, which after the Vågsøy raid he called the “zone of destiny” of this war, favoured strengthening the German garrison rather than handing power to Norwegians.

Sunday 1 February

Formally, the assumption of power was meant to look like a lawful change of government. On 30 January the commissarial ministers resigned and asked Quisling to accept the title of Prime Minister. The law of necessity was invoked, and the whole procedure was approved by the Supreme Court, by then staffed with men obedient to the occupier. At 12.15 p.m. on 1 February Terboven, in his office in the Storting building, the seat of the Commissariat since 1940, accepted the ministers’ resignation and took note of the choice of Quisling.

In the afternoon the ceremony proper took place in the Knights’ Hall of Akershus Fortress, decorated with swastika eagles and eagles bearing the sun cross, the symbol of Nasjonal Samling. Present were representatives of the Nazified Norwegian administration and the German military and civil authorities. In his first speech as Prime Minister Quisling committed his government to closer ties with Germany, and called the formation of the cabinet “a decisive step on the road to Norway’s full independence”. In the evening party members marched with torches along Karl Johans gate, and the new Prime Minister and his ministers took the salute from the balcony of the Grand Hotel. The celebrations were filmed for the newsreels and recorded by the radio. The next day the censored Aftenposten declared on its front page that 1 February 1942 had been a day “greater than 17 May 1814 and 7 June 1905” – that is, than the day the constitution was adopted and the day the union with Sweden was dissolved.

That same day an incident in Trondheim showed how many Norwegians viewed the new government. The Ministry of Church Affairs had ordered a festive service for the occasion in Nidaros Cathedral at eleven o’clock, to be conducted by a Nasjonal Samling clergyman. The dean of the cathedral, Arne Fjellbu, therefore moved the usual high mass to two o’clock in the afternoon. The “state” service was attended mainly by members of the party and its formations. Crowds flocked to Fjellbu’s service. When some fifteen hundred people were already inside, the police closed the doors half an hour before it was due to begin. The service went ahead, and several thousand people who could not get into the cathedral sang hymns outside, among them “Gud signe vårt dyre fedreland” (“God bless our dear fatherland”). The events in Trondheim marked the beginning of open conflict between the Church and Quisling’s government.

The national government and its limits

Constitutionally, the arrangement was peculiar. The Storting was not formally abolished, merely declared “incapable of functioning”. In theory Norway remained a monarchy, and the Prime Minister claimed that, pending a new order, he exercised the authority which under the constitution belonged to the King in Council and to parliament, since the King and the government had supposedly forfeited it by leaving the country. In practice this meant government based on the leadership principle. Quisling combined executive and legislative power in his own hands, and the earlier decrees of the commissarial ministers were henceforth called laws. He also kept the title of fører of the party. He tried to give his government the appearance of a normal state: he used the state seal, from which the words “Haakon VII, King of Norway” had been removed, held office in the Royal Palace in Oslo, awarded decorations and received visitors like a head of state.

The composition of the government was largely a continuation of the former circle of commissarial ministers. The police were headed by Jonas Lie, justice by Sverre Riisnæs, church and education by Professor Ragnar Skancke, and finance by Frederik Prytz. Two ministers belonged to the Prime Minister’s innermost circle. Albert Viljam Hagelin, a businessman who had lived in Dresden for forty years and in 1939 had helped Quisling gain access to Hitler, headed the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for bringing local authorities, organisations and the administration under party control. The chemist Gulbrand Lunde, before the war a distinguished researcher for the Stavanger canning industry and later Nasjonal Samling’s head of propaganda, was Minister of Culture and Popular Enlightenment. He sought to subordinate cultural life to the party by creating directorates for the press, film and theatre, and at the same time was regarded as an advocate of a Norwegian rather than a pan-Germanic course for the party. The Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, reportedly called him “the best horse in the stable”.

Above all this stood the Reich Commissariat. Terboven had in practice a veto over every initiative of Nasjonal Samling, and German officials vetted every new law. The Security Police and the SD answered to Heinrich Himmler, the army to General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst. Quisling hoped that his new position would allow him to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, an end to the occupation, the recall of Terboven and recognition of Norway’s sovereignty as an ally of the Reich. On 13 February 1942 he went on a state visit to Berlin, where Hitler received him. Everything was discussed, but nothing concrete emerged: Hitler did not want to conclude lasting agreements before the end of the war. Goebbels noted in his diary that Quisling was unlikely to be a “great statesman”. In private the Norwegian Prime Minister met his old patrons in Berlin, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder and Alfred Rosenberg, who now headed the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Quisling began to hatch plans for Norwegian participation in the “new order” in the East.

Laws that backfired on the government

The new government at once set about reshaping society on corporatist and National Socialist lines. On 5 February 1942 Quisling signed three laws. The first introduced compulsory “national youth service” in the party’s youth organisation, modelled on the Hitler Youth. The second created a compulsory teachers’ union, Norges Lærersamband, run by the party. The third compelled publishers to join a party-controlled association. In the months that followed, attempts were made to organise other professions in the same way.

The laws of 5 February provoked the broadest civil resistance in the history of the occupation. On 14 February an underground committee sent teachers a model declaration: they could not take part in bringing up young people according to the party’s guidelines, as this was against their conscience, and they did not regard themselves as members of the new union. According to Norwegian studies, the great majority of the country’s roughly 14,000 teachers signed it. Tens of thousands of parents protested too. In March the authorities closed the schools for a month on the pretext of saving fuel, and on 20 March the police arrested some 1,100 teachers. Several hundred of them – by various counts from about 500 to more than 600 – were sent in the spring to forced labour on German construction sites at Kirkenes, beyond the Arctic Circle. In the end the government had to back down: the teachers’ union was declared a non-political organisation, and in the autumn of 1942 the deportees were released. The national youth service was never fully introduced.

At the same time the conflict with the Church of Norway was intensifying. On 19 February Fjellbu was removed from office, and on 24 February all the bishops resigned their state offices while retaining their spiritual ministry. At Easter, on 5 April 1942, the confession “Kirkens grunn” (“The Foundation of the Church”) was read from the pulpits, and the great majority of the clergy followed the bishops. Quisling regarded himself as head of the Church in his capacity as the King’s deputy, and blamed the clergy’s revolt above all on the Bishop of Oslo, Eivind Berggrav. In April Berggrav was arrested and placed under house arrest in his cabin at Asker, where he remained until the spring of 1945. The new bishops and parish priests appointed by the government held services before empty pews. The conflicts with the teachers and the Church, and earlier with sportsmen and judges, showed within the first few months that Quisling’s government would not win society over. They also strengthened the civil resistance movement, whose leadership acted in concert with the government in London.

On 12 March 1942 a law made Nasjonal Samling the party of state (statsbærende parti), and Norway officially became a one-party state. In the same month the government restored to the constitution the ban on Jews entering Norway, which had been abolished in 1851. It was the only change to the constitution that Quisling made.

The persecution of the Jews

Policy towards the Jews lay not with the Norwegian government but with the German Security Police. At the beginning of 1942 the Germans ordered Jews’ identity papers to be stamped with the letter “J”, and the Norwegian police carried out their registration. By various counts, a little over 2,000 Jews were then living in Norway, including refugees from Central Europe. The main operation came in the autumn. On 26 October 1942 the Norwegian State Police arrested Jewish men, and the same day Quisling’s government passed a law confiscating Jewish property. In November women and children were arrested. On 26 November the ship Donau carried 532 people away from Oslo. In all, some 770 Jews were deported, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where almost all of them perished. About two-thirds of Norway’s Jews managed to escape, mainly to Sweden, often with the help of the resistance. The deportations were organised by the Germans, but the arrests were carried out by Norwegian policemen, members of the party militia, the Hird, and the Norwegian SS. According to Quisling’s biographer Hans Fredrik Dahl, the Prime Minister did not know the date of the first transport in advance, but in December 1942 he publicly defended the operation and presented it as a joint achievement of his movement and the occupier. How much he knew about the fate of the deportees remains a matter of dispute among historians. Some of them, such as Bodil Stenseth, believe he must have known more than he admitted.

Place in the war

Quisling’s government was one of a series of collaborationist administrations that the Third Reich created or tolerated in conquered Europe, but its position was peculiar. It was neither the government of a formally independent state, like Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia or Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy France, nor the occupier’s direct administration, like Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s Reich Commissariat in the Netherlands. It was a Norwegian façade over a German Commissariat that went on deciding everything that mattered: the economy, the police, repression and the costs of the occupation. To Norwegians, the overwhelming majority of whom remained loyal to the King and the government in London, it was a government of traitors, and they regarded its acts as null and void.

Quisling’s hopes were soon dashed. On 11 August 1942 Hitler postponed all talk of a peace treaty with Norway until the end of the war, and Quisling learned that he was no longer allowed to write to Hitler directly and that all business was to go through Terboven. He never regained the initiative for the rest of the war. Gulbrand Lunde died on 25 October 1942 when the car carrying him and his wife rolled off a ferry into the Romsdalsfjord. The investigation ruled it an accident, although there were rumours of assassination. Increasingly isolated, Quisling still met Hitler, for the last time in January 1945, and gained nothing. After Germany’s capitulation in May 1945 he gave himself up to the police. Convicted of treason, he was shot at Akershus Fortress, the very place where less than four years earlier he had celebrated his “act of state”. Hagelin and Skancke, among others, were also sentenced to death and executed. Even during the war his name had entered many languages as a byword for a traitor collaborating with the enemy, and in Norway 1 February 1942 has remained a symbol of a collaboration that failed to win over society.