The Norwegian Resistance: Up Against the Enigmatic Quisling
The quisling
On 24 October 1945, Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi, was executed by a firing squad. He was the ultimate traitor, and a new word was introduced: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘quisling’ is ‘a person cooperating with an occupying enemy force; a collaborator; a traitor.’
Before the war
Born 18 July 1887, Vidkun Quisling’s life and career had been promising. As a youth, the son of a Lutheran pastor, he was considered quite a mathematical mastermind and he graduated from military school, with the highest marks ever recorded in Norway.
Quisling as prime minister
In his time in the army, he made it to the rank of Major. After he left in the 1920, Quisling became a humanitarian, during the great famines in Russia. In this period, he turned into a fervent anti-Communist and, was therefore, assisted the British in their diplomatic squabbles with the Soviets. This resulted in Quisling being awarded with the CBE in 1929, which King George VI revoked in 1940.
Between 1931 and 1933 Quisling was Norway’s Minister of Defence but then, disillusioned in the democratic system, he resigned and established his own Nasjonal Samling, ‘National Unity’ party, the Norwegian equivalent of the German Nazi Party. But the Norwegians had no sympathy for fascism and in the 1933 national elections, Quisling’s fascist party gained only a little over 2% of the votes and no seats in Parliament.
With no popularity and no substantive influence, Quisling’s political future in the Storting (Parliament) looked bleak. But when he visited Adolf Hitler in December 1939, he found his match.
His role during the War
Left to right: Quisling, Himmler, Terboven and Von Falkenhorst in Oslo 1941.
Six days before the Germans invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, Quisling met up with German agents in Copenhagen and shared intelligence about Norway’s defences. On the day of the invasion, Quisling went to the Oslo’s radio station to declare himself prime minister. German representatives demanded that Norway’s king, Haakon VII, accept Quisling’s position, but the king refused. He and his family were meanwhile in danger and had to flee to England, where the King headed the Norwegian government-in-exile.
But Quisling felt energized by the German backing and ordered all resistance activities to stop. However, once Germany had taken control of Norway, they did not make Quisling prime minister straightaway. Josef Terboven as Reichskommissar was his boss, but he played a prominent role in their government of occupation. Two years later, in 1942, Quisling was finally appointed prime minister, but the Germans still supervised him. However, his license to run the country in a fascist manner was increased.
Trial and execution
On 9 May 1945, the day after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Quisling was arrested. And King Haakon returned to his country.
Norway had abolished capital punishment in 1905, but the government-in-exile had reinstated it to order the death sentence for Quisling and two other Nasjonal Samling leaders, Albert Viljam Hagelin and Ragnar Skancke.
Charged with high treason, Quisling was executed by firing squad on 24 October 1945. He was 58.
Theories
Quisling rejected orthodox Christianity and called his own theory of life Universism. He had planned to make Universism the official state religion in Norway as “the positing of such a system depends on the progress of science.” He was a staunch believer in Norse mythology but further embraced the idea of reincarnation. Contrary to Hitler, whom he otherwise worshipped, Quisling was not overly charmed by race supremacy.
Quisling and Hitler in January 1945
In his book, also titled Universism, Quisling explained his views on morality, law, science, art, politics, history, race, and religion. He never finished it, and what was published of his work in newspaper articles has never been considered a great philosophical importance.
Personality
Quisling was a man of impulse. Not that his actions were based on sudden whims, but they did spring from hardcore convictions that spurred him to act in haste when he thought he saw an opening. He had many obsessions—for example; he wanted to believe that the Nordic race was the foundation of all civilization, but his knowledge of history thwarted his own beliefs, which he knew not to be true.
Another conviction was the romantic view of the position of the “sturdy peasant farmer” in society, which reminds us of Rousseau’s concept of ‘the noble savage’. He was a man torn by contradictory influences.
To his supporters, Quisling was considered a hard-working and conscientious administrator, knowledgeable and with an eye for detail. He propagated he cared about his people and maintained high moral standards. To his opponents, Quisling appeared unstable and undisciplined, abrupt, generally threatening. He was both these people, at ease with friends and stressed when confronted with his political opponents. During formal dinners, he repeatedly said nothing until abruptly bursting out in a flood of dramatic and sentimental rhetoric. He thought large groups to be conspiratorial.
As head of his government, Quisling rose early and worked hard. He actively took part in nearly all government matters, reading all letters addressed to him or his chancellery personally and marking a surprising number of action. Party members didn’t receive favors, nevertheless Quisling and his government didn’t himself share in the wartime hardships of fellow Norwegians. He never lived extravagantly.
Post-war interpretations of Quisling’s character are also mixed. Collaborationist behavior was largely viewed because of mental deficiency, leaving the personality of the clearly more intelligent Quisling an “enigma.” He was instead seen as weak, paranoid, intellectually sterile and power-hungry: ultimately “muddled rather than thoroughly corrupted.”
Another view is that Quisling was a mini-Hitler with a CMT (chosenness-myth-trauma) complex, or megalo-paranoia, more often diagnosed in modern times as narcissistic personality disorder. He was “well installed in his personality,” but unable to gain a following among his own people, as the Norwegian population wasn’t mirroring Quisling’s ideology. He was “a dictator and a clown on the wrong stage with the wrong script.” (biographer Dahl). One professor stated that quisling’s philosophical goals “fitted the classic description of the paranoid megalomaniac more exactly than any other case he’d ever encountered.” Thank God the Norwegians weren’t susceptible to the “Quisling mania” or things could have turned out different. (HB)
Mugshot Quisling 1945
Quisling never saw himself as a traitor. This is what he wrote in prison before his execution:
“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.”
Well, he hasn’t!
