Rolf Jørgen Fuglesang: Secretary General of the Nasjonal Samling (1933-1945), Minister of Culture (1942-1945) and President of the Kulturting

• SPEECHES OF ROLF JØRGEN FUGLESANG
• Party and State (1942)

Background

Fuglesang graduated in arts in 1928 and became a cand.jur in 1933. Already during his studies he became a supporter of Vidkun Quisling, and he immediately joined Nasjonal Samling when the party was founded in 1933.

Nasjonal Samling

In 1933, he became the party's permanent general secretary. In this capacity, he led NS during the first wave of support in 1933–34, then during the consolidation leading up to the 1936 election, and then during the subsequent three years of catastrophic decline, all the while with a free hand and full confidence from the party leader, who preferred to stay away economy and organization.

Nor did Quisling inform his closest associate of the approaches he made to Hitler during the trip to Berlin in December 1939. The coup d'état on 9 April 1940 therefore came as a complete surprise to Fuglesang. Loyalty to Quisling was, however, unshaken, and Fuglesang took it upon himself to lead the reconstruction of the party, which from the autumn of 1940 was the only one allowed in Norway. The work required large German subsidies, but also considerable leadership capacity to keep order in the mass influx and lead a National Socialist tightly structured movement of around 50,000 members, monitored and neutralized with respect to all approaches to opposition formations. 

In his position as party minister after 25 September 1940, Fuglesang had at his disposal a party secretariat with several hundred employees, complete with a nationwide intelligence service and a special department of the Reichskommissariat, the so-called Einsatzstab, for help. NS became an unusually efficient and well-oiled organization by Norwegian standards

In the early stages of the occupation, he was regarded by the Germans as one of their strongholds, among others, due to his focus on National Socialist race ideas. Fuglesang became an advocate of pan-Germanic and racial ideas, which led to an approach from Heinrich Himmler himself. Towards the end of the war, however, he was a figurehead of the opposition to the Germans inside NS.

In January 1944, he accompanied Vidkun Quisling on his visit to Adolf Hitler and then also had a longer and mainly conciliatory conversation with Heinrich Himmler in Rastenburg.

During the legal purge in Norway after World War II, Fuglesang was sentenced to life imprisonment with forced labour for treason. He narrowly avoided execution when four out of seven judges voted for a life sentence. Fuglesang was released from prison in 1956. After serving his sentence, Fuglesang worked as a businessman in Oslo. He appeared publicly again for the first time in NRK's radio program Ukeslutt June 1983