The trial of Quisling

On 20 August 1945 the main hearing opened in Oslo in the case against Vidkun Quisling, leader of the fascist Nasjonal Samling party and head of the collaborationist government of the German occupation. The case was heard by the Eidsivating Court of Appeal (Eidsivating lagmannsrett), which in the post-war treason cases sat as a court of first instance. The proceedings took place in the great hall of the Freemasons’ Lodge building in the city centre and were followed by crowds of spectators and by journalists from many countries. The man whose name had already in 1940 become a byword for traitor in many languages stood before a Norwegian court as the first and most important defendant in the great reckoning with collaboration.

From capitulation to indictment

The German forces in Norway laid down their arms together with the rest of the Wehrmacht – the surrender signed at Reims came into force on 8 May, and during the night of 8–9 May it was confirmed at Karlshorst in Berlin. Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, the real ruler of the occupied country, committed suicide on 8 May. On 7 May Quisling was still speaking on the radio, calling for calm, and on 8 May his men negotiated with the leadership of the resistance (Hjemmefronten) the terms of his arrest. According to his biographer Hans Fredrik Dahl, Quisling did not want to be treated as a common criminal, but nor did he demand better treatment than his party comrades. The civilian leadership of the resistance, represented by the lawyer Sven Arntzen, insisted, however, that he be treated like any other murder suspect. On the morning of 9 May Quisling and his ministers reported to the main police station in Oslo at Møllergata 19 and were arrested.

For the first few weeks he was watched day and night to prevent him from committing suicide. As early as 26 May, during questioning before an examining court, he spoke for the first time about his conversations with Adolf Hitler in December 1939. In the summer he was moved to Akershus Fortress. His defence counsel was the lawyer Henrik Bergh, who was at first – as Dahl writes – not particularly well disposed towards his client, but who came to believe that Quisling had, by his own lights, acted for the good of Norway, and built the defence on that. The prosecution was led by the public prosecutor Annæus Schjødt.

The first indictment concerned the coup of 9 April 1940, when on the day of the German invasion Quisling announced on the radio the formation of his own government and countermanded the mobilisation, as well as his activities as leader of Nasjonal Samling and as “minister-president” (from 1 February 1942): aiding the enemy and unlawful attempts to change the constitution. It also covered responsibility for the death of the police officer Gunnar Eilifsen, shot in August 1943 under a law passed retroactively by Quisling’s government. On 11 July 1945 a supplementary indictment was brought: further charges of complicity in murder, theft and embezzlement and, above all, a charge of conspiring with Hitler over the invasion and occupation of Norway. Quisling did not dispute most of the facts but pleaded not guilty, maintaining that he had always worked for a free and independent Norway.

Ten days in court

The trial was presided over by Judge (lagmann) Erik Solem, co-author of the wartime treason legislation. The Norwegian encyclopaedia Store norske leksikon describes the trial as exemplary, conducted strictly but efficiently. The defendant was given ample time to speak, and defence witnesses were heard. The same encyclopaedia nevertheless points to weaker aspects of the proceedings: evidence freshly found in German archives was produced that neither Quisling nor his counsel had seen before, the defendant did not have full access to his own papers, and during the trial he was subjected to painful neurological examinations ordered without the proper procedure. Quisling’s health deteriorated and his defence lost coherence.

The defence strategy was to play down his links with Germany and stress that Quisling had fought for the country’s full independence – which to most Norwegians sounded like a denial of what they had lived through. Dahl writes that the defendant had to balance “on a thin line between truth and falsehood” and emerged as a figure who was “elusive and often pitiful”. In his closing speech the prosecutor, on the basis of testimony from German officials, held Quisling responsible for carrying out the Holocaust in Norway. In the autumn of 1942 Norwegian police officers had arrested Jews, Quisling’s government had decreed the confiscation of their property, and in all some 770 people were deported from the country, most of them to Auschwitz; little more than thirty survived. The deportations were organised by the Germans, but the arrests were carried out by Norwegian officials. Schjødt demanded the death penalty. The speeches of defence counsel and of the defendant himself changed nothing.

On 10 September 1945 the court sentenced Quisling to death by firing squad. According to Dahl he was found guilty on almost all counts apart from a few minor ones; Store norske leksikon stresses that the reasoning of the judgment even held against him acts not covered by the indictment. Quisling protested his innocence, and his counsel sought an acquittal. On 13 October the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal, and ten days later the Council of State rejected his plea for clemency. Before that, Quisling had also given evidence in the trials of other members of Nasjonal Samling. He was shot at 2.40 a.m. on 24 October 1945 at Akershus Fortress.

The death penalty restored

The sentence gave rise to legal disputes that have not died down to this day. No execution had been carried out in Norway since 1876, and the death penalty had been removed from the peacetime criminal code at the beginning of the 20th century. It survived only in the military penal code for time of war. Johan Nygaardsvold’s government-in-exile in London extended its application by decrees of October 1941 and January 1942, and gave the treason provisions (landssvikanordningen) their final form on 15 December 1944. Critics argued that in practice these provisions operated retroactively and that the death penalty had been restored by the government before parliament had met. In considering Quisling’s appeal, the Supreme Court held that the decrees had been issued in wartime and thus within the scope of the military code’s provision on the death penalty in time of war. The Storting ratified them in 1945.

Quisling’s trial was the first act of the great reckoning with collaboration (landssvikoppgjøret), which lasted until 1948. According to Store norske leksikon, 92,805 cases were dealt with in all and 46,085 people were punished, about 17,000 of them with prison sentences; the great majority of the rest accepted fines or loss of civil rights, often as rank-and-file members of Nasjonal Samling. Thirty Norwegians were sentenced to death, and 25 of the sentences were carried out. Most of those executed were officers of the Norwegian State Police or the Gestapo guilty of torture and murder; only three were politicians – besides Quisling, the ministers Albert Viljam Hagelin and Ragnar Skancke. Twelve soldiers and officials of the occupying power were also shot. These were the last executions in Norwegian history. As early as 1945 the press was debating the point of the death penalty, and a later survey of Oslo lawyers showed them almost evenly divided in their assessment of the reckoning.

Significance

By then Crown Prince Olav (on 13 May) and the government-in-exile had returned to Oslo, followed on 7 June – exactly five years after he had left the country – by King Haakon VII, who in April 1940 had refused to appoint Quisling prime minister. On 25 June Einar Gerhardsen’s government of national unity took office. The trial closed the period of occupation in a legal and political sense. The post-war courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, accepted the government’s position that the lawful authority in 1940–1945 had been the King and the government in London, acting under the mandate given by the Storting at Elverum in April 1940; Quisling’s “national government” therefore had no legal basis whatsoever.

The case ran in parallel with other reckonings in liberated Europe. On 15 August 1945, a few days before the hearing opened in Oslo, a court in Paris sentenced Marshal Philippe Pétain to death, although de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. On 20 November the trial of the major German war criminals before the International Military Tribunal was to open in Nuremberg. Against the background of these trials Quisling’s case was a special one: it concerned a man who had not only collaborated with the occupier but, in the court’s view, had helped to prepare the invasion of his own country. In many languages – English and Polish among them – his name has remained a term for a collaborator and traitor.