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| Sunday, 9 October 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Famous
trials that shook the world -
Trial of Vidkun Quisling by Lionel Wijesiri
Vidkun Quisling was born on July, 1887 and was the son of a Lutheran minister and well-known genealogist Jon Lauritz Quisling and both of his parents belonged to two of the oldest and most distinguished families. He joined the Army in 1911 and became the country's best ever war academy cadet upon graduation. He had a relatively successful background, having achieved the rank of Major in the Norwegian army. Representing British interests He served as military attache in Petrograd (St. Petersburg - 1918-19) and in Helsinki (1919-21). He assisted in relief work in Russia under the famous Arctic explorer and humanitarian Fridtof Nansen and later for the League of Nations, In the absence of diplomatic relations between Britain and Soviet Russia, he represented British interests at the Norwegian legation in Moscow (1927-29). By the time he left the Soviet Union, in 1929, with his exposure to Russian economy, he had come to view the Bolshevik regime as a threat to Norway. From 1931-1933, Quisling served as Minister of Defence. As Minister of Defence in an agrarian Government (1931-33), he gained notoriety for repressing a strike by hydro-electrical workers. He resigned from the Government in early 1933 and on May 17 same year, the Norwegian national day, Quisling and State Attorney Johan Bernhard Hjort formed Nasjonal Samling (National Unity), the Norwegian national-socialist party. The following year, he formed the Hird, (storm troopers) to act as his bodyguards Nasjonal Samling had an anti-democratic 'leader' -oriented political structure, and Quisling was to be that leader, much like Adolf Hitler was for the NSDAP in Germany. The party went on to have modest successes in the election of 1933, four months after the party was formed. It garnered 27850 votes, following support from the Norwegian Farmers' Aid Association, with which Quisling had connections from his time as a member of the Agrarian Government. However, as the party line changed from a religiously rooted one to a more pro-German and anti-Semitic hardline policy from 1935 onwards, the support from the Church waned, and in the 1936 elections, the party got only 50 000 votes. The party became increasingly extremist, and party membership dwindled to an estimated 2000 members after the German invasion. Contact with German Nazis As early as 1930, Quisling had sought contact with German Nazis. His ideology, advocated need of strong leadership elite to protect individual rights; the Hird was to be the spearhead of this new elite. The Jews, in his view, were impure, and their existence was a threat to the country. Quisling's life dramatically changed with the German invasion of Norway on April 09 1940. German naval and land forces struck in full force with an armada of 370 ships, 107,000 troops, 20,000 vehicles and 109,000 tons of supplies-all of them transported from Germany over a period of no more than 12 days. Quisling had met with Hilter in Berlin 3 days before, confiding strategic information to the Fuhrer when told that Norway's occupation was imminent. Ad hoc government Amidst the confusion of the attack and the flight Northward of the king Haakon and the Government, Quisling declared over the Radio an ad hoc government headed by him hoping that the Germans would support it. This coup met Norwegian resistance, and did not entirely satisfy the Germans, who sideline Quisling favour of Josef Treboven, the German administrator who would govern Norway brutally throughout the war. He would report directly to Hitler. The relationship between Quisling and Terboven was tense, although Terboven, presumably seeing and advantage in having a Norwegian in a position of power to reduce resentment in the population, named Quisling to the post of "Minister President' (as opposed to Prime Minister) in 1942, the position the self appointed "Fuhrer" assumed in 1943, on February 1. Serving German interests At the same time. Quisling served some German interests; for example, he recruited Norwegian troops for the German military. Quisling also supported the subsequent deportation of Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz. However, Quisling had no administrative talents and proved an embarrassment to the Nazis on many occasions. Brutally suppressing all apposition, the Minister-President assumed King Haakon's chair in the palace and drove around in the bullet-proof limousine presented him by Hitler. He surrounded himself with luxuries, occupying a bombproof, 46-room villa on an island near Oslo, where the walls were hung with priceless paintings from the national museum and he ate from gold dishes. So paranoid did he become that 150 bodyguards accompanied him at all times and every scrap of food he ate was sampled by someone else first, but this did not prevent him from becoming one of history's greatest megalomaniacs. He gave himself authority to make any document legal, issued postage stamps bearing his portrait, ordered pictures of himself hung everywhere. The Nazification attempt aroused strong resistance, however. Initially, this took the form of passive resistance and general strikes, which the Germans countered with martial law and death sentences. Once the resistance movement became more firmly organised, its members undertook large-scale industrial sabotage, of which the most important was that against the production of heavy water in Rjukan in southern Norway. Ttrials of collaborators At the end of the war the German troops in Norway capitulated without offering resistance. The liberation was followed by trials of collaborators. Quisling was charged with treason, theft, and murder, specifically the deaths of 1,000 Jews, whom he had ordered deported. Found guilty on all counts, Quisling was shot by a firing squad on October 24, 1945, Norway changing its long-standing law against capital punishment for this purpose. If Quisling's usefulness was marginal, his notoriety was both immediate and enduring. "To writers, the word 'quisling' is a gift from the gods," wrote the Times of London. "If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters." The term "quisling" became a synonym in many European languages for traitor. So infamous today is Quisling that one Swedish Secondary college history book has Quisling's name mentioned with Judas and Brutus. Maria Vasilijevna, Quisling's Russian wife, lived in Oslo until her death in 1980. They had no children. |
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