Speech in Oslo, October 17, 1943: With a determined heart and a clear head we shall fight

Minutes of the Leader's speech during the Hirdmønstringen in Oslo on 17 October 1943.

By Vidkun Quisling.

Hirdmen!

— We must all have clear to us and burning in our hearts the understanding and feeling of the great responsibility that rests on us, a responsibility that we cannot throw away, but which we must carry until victory is won or until death. Those who attempt to jump off are jumping off a speeding express train.

The fight we are waging is therefore not just a fight for Norway's freedom and national existence and for Europe at a decisive historical turning point. Nor is it just a link in the decisive world struggle between Judaism and our race. But it is also part of the struggle that runs through all world life, the struggle that constitutes the real history of the world — the struggle between the men who fight for the real content and values of things and those who fight for sham and false forms.

Hirdmen!

Is not our cause just and true? And if it is just and true, isn't it what we should fight for and realize?

The war that is now taking place is a total war. Fighting is no longer only at the fronts and on the actual theaters of war. Everything has become a theater of war.

The civilian population in the home country runs the same dangers. as, the soldier in the front line. Our enemies have taken the full consequences of this civilization's development. King Håkon and his allies bomb peaceful ships along our coast and murder innocent women and children in the most gruesome manner. Yes, they systematically extend the fronts into civil society itself, organize illegal combat organizations and terrorist groups, work with boycotts, sabotage and explosives, with lies and with poison.

Our opponents here at home, whether they are more or less actively involved in this traitorous and criminal front, think that this is all right. There is apparently only one thing that can bring them to the realization of the truth, namely that we let them feel for themselves what total war means, led to its practical consequences.

It is a main task for Hirden to teach our opponents that lesson. Those who will not allow our cause to prosper and grow, but who do the business of our international enemies, they should not only be silenced. They must be rendered completely harmless. If not by conviction, then by the law of the stronger.

Hirdmen!

My appeal to you today and my demand is therefore:

1. that you recruit new members and new hirdmen,
2. that you constantly develop and improve Hirden as a political and paramilitary fighting organisation,
3. that you clearly and consciously preserve the movement's basic outlook on life,
4. that you take up an uncompromising fight with our internal enemies,
5. that it awakens and keeps burning the right revolutionary spirit.

This is, after all, what is primarily needed today.

We will continue with all our strength to support Europe's defense and freedom struggle. We will continue to do our best to create a new national and social Norway, bigger and happier than the old Norway, a Norway that can take its rightful place in the Nordic countries and the new Europe, a place that is also assured by Germany's Leader, now most recently by an official declaration on 23 September. With resolute heart and clear head we shall fight and press on, through hardships and difficulties and all other tribulations that the future may bring us, — on and on, until the cause has at last triumphed, until all our once fearful foes are swept away, and the gleam of hope and faith has become the shining day of victory and safety.