Vidkun Quisling: Minister of Defence (1931-1933), Fører of the Nasjonal Samling (1933-1945) and Minister President of Norway (1942-1945)

•  SPEECHES OF VIDKUN QUISLING
• ARTICLES OF VIDKUN QUISLING
• MESSAGES OF VIDKUN QUISLING

Vidkun Quisling first came to international prominence as a close collaborator of the explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and through organising humanitarian relief during the Russian famine of 1921 in Povolzhye. He was posted as a Norwegian diplomat to the Soviet Union and for some time also managed British diplomatic affairs there. He returned to Norway in 1929 and served as minister of defence in the governments of Peder Kolstad (1931–32) and Jens Hundseid (1932–33) in representing the Farmers' Party.

In 1933, Quisling left the Farmers' Party and founded the fascist Nasjonal Samling (National Gathering). Although he gained some popularity after his attacks on the political left, his party failed to win any seats in the Storting. After the underwhelming election results, Quisling's attitude to negotiation and compromise hardened. A final attempt to form a coalition of the right in March 1934 came to nothing, and from late 1933, Quisling's Nasjonal Samling began to carve out its own form of national socialism. With no leader in Parliament, however, the party struggled to introduce the constitutional reform bill needed to achieve its lofty ambitions. When Quisling tried to introduce the bill directly, it was swiftly rejected, and the party went into decline. In the summer of 1935, headlines quoted Quisling telling opponents that "heads [would] roll" as soon as he achieved power. The threat irreparably damaged the image of his party, and over the following few months several high-ranking members resigned, including Kai Fjell and Quisling's brother Jørgen.

Vidkun Quisling & Alfred Rosenberg.

Quisling began to familiarise himself with the international fascist movement, attending the 1934 Montreux Fascist conference in December. For his party, the association with Italian fascism could not have come at a worse time, so soon after headlines of illegal Italian incursions into Abyssinia. On his return trip from Montreux, he met National Socialist ideologue and foreign policy theorist Alfred Rosenberg, and though he preferred to see his own policies as a synthesis of Italian fascism and German National Socialism, by the time of the 1936 elections, Quisling had in part become the "Norwegian Hitler" that his opponents had long accused him of being.

In 1939, Quisling turned his attention towards Norway's preparations for the anticipated European war, which he believed involved a drastic increase in the country's defence spending to guarantee its neutrality. Meanwhile, Quisling presented lectures entitled "The Jewish problem in Norway" and supported Adolf Hitler in what appeared to be growing future conflict. Despite condemning Kristallnacht, he sent the German leader a fiftieth-birthday greeting thanking him for "saving Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination". Quisling also contended that should an Anglo-Russian alliance make neutrality impossible, Norway would have "to go with Germany." Invited to the country in the summer of 1939, he began a tour of a number of German and Danish cities. He was received particularly well in Germany, which promised funds to boost Nasjonal Samling's standing in Norway, and hence spread pro-National-Socialist sentiment. When war broke out on 1 September 1939, Quisling felt vindicated by both the event and the immediate superiority displayed by the German army. He remained outwardly confident that, despite its size, his party would soon become the centre of political attention.

On 9 April 1940, with the German invasion of Norway in progress, he attempted to seize power in the world's first radio-broadcast coup d'état but failed since the Germans sought to convince the recognized Norwegian government to legitimize the German occupation, as had been done in Denmark during the simultaneous invasion there, instead of recognizing Quisling. In the afternoon, German liaison-person Hans-Wilhelm Scheidt told Quisling that should he set up a government, it would have Hitler's personal approval. Quisling drew up a list of ministers and, although the legitimate government had merely relocated some 150 kilometres (93 mi) to Elverum, accused it of having "fled". Meanwhile, the Germans occupied Oslo and at 17:30 Norwegian radio (NRK) ceased broadcasting at the request of the occupying forces. With German support, at approximately 19:30, Quisling entered the NRK studios in Oslo and proclaimed the formation of a new government with himself as prime minister. He also revoked an earlier order to mobilise against the German invasion. He still lacked legitimacy. Two of his orders—the first to his friend Colonel Hans Sommerfeldt Hiorth, the commanding officer of the army regiment at Elverum, to arrest the government, and the second to Kristian Welhaven, Oslo's chief of police—were both ignored. At 22:00, Quisling resumed broadcasting, repeating his earlier message and reading out a list of new ministers. Hitler lent his support as promised, and recognised the new Norwegian government under Quisling within 24 hours. Norwegian batteries were still firing on the German invasion force, and at 03:00 on 10 April, Quisling acceded to a German request to halt the resistance of the Bolærne fortress. As a result of actions such as these, it was claimed at the time that Quisling's seizure of power in a government had been part of the German plan all along.

Vidkun Quisling & Heinrich Himmler.

On 5 December 1940, Quisling flew to Berlin to negotiate the future of Norway's independence. By the time he returned on 13 December, he had agreed to raise volunteers to fight with the German Schutzstaffel (SS). In January, SS head Heinrich Himmler travelled to Norway to oversee preparations. Quisling clearly believed that if Norway supported National Socialist Germany on the battlefield, there would be no reason for Germany to annex it. To this end, he opposed plans to have a German SS brigade loyal only to Hitler installed in Norway. 

In January 1942, Terboven announced the German administration would be wound down. Soon afterwards he told Quisling that Hitler had approved the transfer of power, scheduled for 30 January. On 1 February 1942, he formed a second government, approved by the Germans, and served as minister president and headed the Norwegian state administration jointly with the German civilian administrator, Josef Terboven. His pro-National-Socialist government, known as the Quisling regime, was dominated by ministers from Nasjonal Samling. 

On 20 January 1945, Quisling made what would be his final trip to visit Hitler. He promised Norwegian support in the final phase of the war if Germany agreed to a peace deal that would remove Norway's affairs from German intervention. This proposal grew out of a fear that as German forces retreated southwards through Norway, the occupation government would have to struggle to keep control in northern Norway. To the horror of the Quisling regime, the National Socialists instead decided on a scorched earth policy in northern Norway, going so far as to shoot Norwegian civilians who refused to evacuate the region. The period was also marked by increasing civilian casualties from Allied air raids, and mounting resistance to the government within occupied Norway. The meeting with the German leader proved unsuccessful and upon being asked to sign the execution order of thousands of Norwegian "saboteurs," Quisling refused, an act of defiance that so enraged Terboven, acting on Hitler's orders, that he stormed out of the negotiations. On recounting the events of the trip to a friend, Quisling broke down in tears, convinced the National Socialist refusal to sign a peace agreement would seal his reputation as a traitor.

Vidkun Quisling executed at Akershus Fortress.

Quisling spent the last months of the war trying to prevent Norwegian deaths in the showdown that was developing between German and Allied forces in Norway. The regime worked for the safe repatriation of Norwegians held in German prisoner-of-war camps. Privately, Quisling had long accepted that National Socialism would be defeated. Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945 left him free to pursue publicly his chosen end-game, a naïve offer of a transition to a power-sharing government with the government-in-exile.

Quisling was put on trial during the legal purge in Norway after World War II. He was found guilty of charges including embezzlement, murder and high treason against the Norwegian state, and was sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, on 24 October 1945.

Personality

To his supporters, Quisling was regarded as a conscientious administrator of the highest order, knowledgeable and with an eye for detail. He was believed to care deeply about his people and maintained high moral standards throughout. To his opponents, Quisling was unstable and undisciplined, abrupt, even threatening. Quite possibly he was both, at ease among friends and under pressure when confronted with his political opponents, and generally shy and retiring with both. During formal dinners he often said nothing at all except for the occasional cascade of dramatic rhetoric. Indeed, he did not react well to pressure and would often let slip over-dramatic sentiments when put on the spot. Normally open to criticism, he was prone to assuming larger groups were conspiratorial.

During his time in office, Quisling arose early, often having completed several hours of work before arriving at the office between 9:30 and 10:00. He liked to intervene in virtually all government matters, reading all letters addressed to him or his chancellery personally and marking a surprising number for action. Quisling was independent minded, made several key decisions on the spot and, unlike his German counterpart, he liked to follow procedure to ensure that government remained "a dignified and civilised" affair throughout. He took a personal interest in the administration of Fyresdal, where he was born.

He rejected German racial supremacy and instead saw the Norwegian race as the progenitor of Northern Europe, tracing his own family tree in his spare time. Party members did not receive preferential treatment, though Quisling did not himself share in the wartime hardships of his fellow Norwegians. Nevertheless, many gifts went unused and he did not live extravagantly.

Religious and philosophical views

Quisling was interested in science, eastern religions and metaphysics, eventually building up a library that included the works of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer. He kept up with developments in the realm of quantum physics, but did not keep up with more current philosophical ideas. He blended philosophy and science into what he called Universism, or Universalism, which was a unified explanation of everything. His original writings stretched to a claimed two thousand pages. He rejected the basic teachings of orthodox Christianity and established a new theory of life, which he called Universism, a term borrowed from a textbook which Jan Jakob Maria de Groot had written on Chinese philosophy. De Groot's book argued that Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism were all part of a world religion that De Groot called Universism. Quisling described how his philosophy "... followed from the universal theory of relativity, of which the specific and general theories of relativity are special instances."

His magnum opus was divided into four parts: an introduction, a description of mankind's apparent progression from individual to increasing complex consciousnesses, a section on his tenets of morality and law, and a final section on science, art, politics, history, race and religion. The conclusion was to be titled The World's Organic Classification and Organisation, but the work remained unfinished. Generally, Quisling worked on it infrequently during his time in politics. The biographer Hans Fredrik Dahl describes this as "fortunate" since Quisling would "never have won recognition" as a philosopher.

During his trial and particularly after being sentenced, Quisling became interested once more in Universism. He saw the events of the war as part of the move towards the establishment of God's kingdom on earth and justified his actions in those terms. During the first week of October, he wrote a fifty-page document titled Universistic Aphorisms, which represented "...an almost ecstatic revelation of truth and the light to come, which bore the mark of nothing less than a prophet." The document was also notable for its attack on the materialism of National Socialism. In addition, he simultaneously worked on a sermon, Eternal Justice, which reiterated his key beliefs, including reincarnation.