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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-04115-7 - Quisling: A Study in Treachery Hans Fredrik Dahl Excerpt More information

PROLOGUE Innocent?

`I am innocent!' On the fortress rampart, these words were barely audible in the night wind. Vidkun Quisling had been fetched from his cell at 2 o'clock in the morning and was standing up against a wall inside the open wooden enclosure which had been erected against the gun tower of Akershus fortress. Wearing plus-fours and a grey woollen sweater, the condemned man was blindfolded and his arms tied to the planks behind him. A piece of white paper had been pinned to his heart so that the ten marksmen could get a better aim. Everything happened very quickly. Beyond the command to open ®re, nothing was heard during the execution, nothing except Quisling's protestations of innocence. The innocence Quisling felt at this point was something more than his usual protest that the legal system had misconstrued his motives and had misunderstood his mission. Indeed, he had protested his innocence both to the High Court in August and in the Supreme Court in the second week of October 1945. He tirelessly maintained that his coup of 9 April 1940, his leadership of the Norwegian Nazi party Nasjonal Samling ± National Union ± and his functioning as Minister President for German-occupied Norway had all been in the best interests of the nation. But with the death sentence, which had been delivered unanimously in both the higher courts, there rose in him the sense of another, higher kind of innocence. What was about to happen was not simply the conclusion of an unjust sentence: `There must be some deeper meaning to this,' he wrote to his brother from prison. `In fact I am dying a martyr's death.' The agony he had suffered during the days leading up to his death became a necessary part of his martyrdom in bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to earth in the ful®lment of a divine plan. He had, of course, made mistakes, even expensive ones. He had believed in German National Socialism as a

Innocent?2

world power in the service of God and had made common cause with it for ®ve dif®cult years. In his prison cell, he had to admit that National Socialism was clearly ¯awed in respect of its teachings on race among other things. For Quisling it was nevertheless a force that would, when the time came, prepare the way for God's kingdom on earth. He was to be punished by death for his convictions, but he was by no means the ®rst: Christ himself and, in Norway, Olav Haraldsson in 1030 had both died for the same cause. Jesus, St Olav, Quisling. As a link in such a chain, his execution acquired meaning. High-¯own prison meditations such as these stood in sharp contrast to the unassuming and modest manner which had always, even during the last few days of his life, been his way. In fact, both modesty and megalomania were traits in Quisling's public character. He was a religious politician, and a party leader who prided himself on a historical consciousness which enabled him to judge when to stand on the sidelines of events, when to intervene, and when to let things be. This hubris prevailed in what he said and wrote in con®nement in his cell, but had also coloured his entire leadership: he felt that he had been chosen. His inner convictions in this respect were strong, despite being manifested in shy, hesitant, even clumsy outward behaviour. Certainly he was not like other political leaders. For his followers, the outstanding spiritual strength underlying Quisling's shy and inward character compensated for his lack of such conventional political qualities as adaptability, shrewdness or cynicism. His political in¯uence, however, owed more to an extraordinary series of coincidences than anything else. As a party leader in the 1930s, he was an obvious failure. But sheer chance led him to Hitler's study in Berlin on 14 and 18 December 1939, ®fteen weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. What followed from the conversations here drew him into the maelstrom of world history. Was he a traitor? In the eyes of the world, clearly he was. In his own view, being branded a traitor was the price he had to pay for his insight into the ways of God. It amazed him that so few Norwegians had taken his insights seriously, and now on the fortress rampart it was as though the majority of the population was lining up to execute him. Nine bullets penetrated the white paper pinned to his heart. After the lieutenant in charge of the platoon had pulled the trigger and delivered the coup de graÃce to the temple of the prostrate ®gure, the police

Quisling 3

coroner certi®ed Quisling dead at 2.40 on the morning of 24 October 1945.1

1 Account based on the of®cial police report and on interviews with several participants and witnesses to the execution, 24 October 1945; interview with Kjell Juell in the daily VG 29 September 1978; `Jeg skjùt Quisling': interview with members of the platoon, Dagbladet 12 March 1988; report from Copenhagen chief of police Aage Seidenfaden, autumn 1945, Dagbladet 23 October 1985; various prison letters from Quisling to his family in UBO MS fol. 3920.

1 Back in Norway

I think that things in Norway seem extremely dif®cult with regard to the general situation . . . we shall not emerge from this business without some kind of major upheaval. At such times a Norwegian ought to be in Norway. Quisling, Moscow, November 1926 1

A few days before Christmas 1929, a tall, well-built man in a fur coat and a Russian hat got off the Stockholm train at Oslo's East Station with his wife. The large number of suitcases, baskets, trunks and boxes piled up on the platform indicated that former legation secretary and General Staff of®cer Captain Vidkun Quisling had returned to Norway for good.2 Nearly twelve years had passed since he had ®rst left. He had lived abroad for nine years: ®ve and a half in Moscow; nearly two and a half in Finland; one in the Balkans, Armenia and Paris, as well as short stays in London, Geneva and Berlin. He had crossed the Soviet border twelve times on various missions: on behalf of the Norwegian Ministries of Defence and of Foreign Affairs, the League of Nations, Fridtjof Nansen's High Commission for Refugees and also for a Russian±Norwegian timber company. By contemporary standards it was a rare cosmopolitan who was now returning to Norway. The Quislings brought with them a large collection of paintings and antiques which they had bought in Moscow. Vidkun Quisling also carried with him schemes for a new organisation and plans for political action in Norway. While he had been abroad, he had also spent time on serious studies in the natural sciences, philosophy and history, and in compiling copious notes for a self-made philosophical system which he called `Univer- sism'. The system had not been completely worked out, however. Over the previous few years its author had been increasingly plagued by the feeling that now was the time to act, not to interpret the world but to change it. He had, however, been delayed in Moscow for two years before he was able to wind up his affairs. When he eventually did so, it was with a feeling of

1 Quisling in a letter to his parents 25 November 1926, UBO MS fol. 4096 I, 29. 2 The Quislings left Moscow on 14 December and arrived in Oslo on 19 December 1929. He gave his ®rst interview to the Norwegian press in Tidens Tegn (TT) on 20 December 1929.

Quisling 5

intense homesickness and an ambitious `and perhaps even all-consuming interest in politics'.3 His ideas were based solely on theory. On his arrival, Quisling had no experience whatsoever of public life. He had never belonged to any political party, scarcely set foot in any organisation apart from of®cers' clubs, and was completely unknown to the Norwegian public. Still, he considered himself quali®ed to intervene in the domestic situation. This was due not only to the political ideas that he had developed but also to the under- standing of organisation and social systems which he had acquired as a General Staff of®cer. It was a soldier who was coming home, a soldier with a head full of politics.

the officer It was no ordinary programme the budding politician had returned with. The plans for Norwegian Action (Norsk Aktion) were laid out on a large, military-style campaign map with national, regional and local units sketched on it in columns and rows like an army. The lowest unit in the organisation was to recruit members according to the model of the Soviet Communist Party. Apart from this, Norsk Aktion was clearly inspired by l'Action FrancËaise, the militant wing of the French right and a core organisation of French fascism. Its purpose was, like the French model, to bring about a fundamental change in the Constitution. Quisling planned to transform the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, into a bicameral organisation, whereby the existing parliament would constitute one chamber, while the other would consist of corporate elected representatives from the working population ± just like the Soviet councils.4 Many Norwegians at that time were attracted by the idea of strengthening the government and reducing the in¯uence of the parliament so as to get rid of the ceaseless and unpleasant cabinet crises of the day. The idea of using a Soviet model in this context was, however, quite original. Quisling always maintained that his main political ideas had taken shape during his ®rst year in Russia; the papers he brought back with him in 1929, however, show that most of his work on plans for both the Constitution and the new party had been carried out between 1925 and 1927, that is, in the latter part of his stay

3 Quisling, in Studentene fra 1905 (1930). 4 The main sources are notebook III, UBO MS fol. 3920 VII, 28±43, and various undated MS pages on parliamentary reforms, author's archives.*

Back in Norway6

in Russia. However, of greater interest than this is the conceptual structure of Quisling's ®rst comprehensive political plans. The plans were thought out in a clear, military way. It is the orderliness and the mentality of a staff of®cer which characterises them, rather than the practical experience of a soldier of the line. To understand them, one has to take into account the entire career of their author. Quisling always used to say that he had become an of®cer on the crest of the national euphoria of 1905, which was the year of his matriculation and also the summer of Norway's secession from the hundred-year-long union with Sweden. Becoming an of®cer was, moreover, the career move that afforded him the best opportunity to develop his interests, as the gifted young student from Skien in Telemark had a talent both for the humanities and for the natural sciences but no clear idea of how these talents could be channelled in any one academic direction. The generalist nature of military education at that time made the career of an of®cer a natural choice. His ®rst step was to enrol as a cadet in the War College (Krigsskolen) in Kristiania (later Oslo). In those days, competition was stiff and excellent grades were essential. His examination marks were the highest of the 250 candidates. His cadetship coincided with the national crisis of 1905. The plebiscite on 13 August gave overwhelming support for secession, but the subsequent negotiations between Norway and Sweden over the dissolution of the Union revealed that the King and government in Stockholm were not going to accept Norway's exit on her own terms. Tensions rose from week to week. The cadets therefore felt that there was a chance that they would be needed in a regular war with Sweden, as is shown by the young Quisling's letters to his parents that summer. `People shouted Hurrah in wild excitement.'5 But the crisis blew over. His remaining time at the Academy was uneventful. In the late autumn of 1905 he stood guard when the new royal family ± the Danish prince Carl and his wife Maud, daughter of Edward VII, together with their two-year-old son Alexander ± were cheered into the town as King Haakon, Queen Maud and Crown Prince Olaf. `The new royal family gives a very favourable impression and will certainly win us all over in love and affection,' he told his parents. The young prince in particular `has already waved his hand and stolen the hearts of all ladies and probably the men's too'.6 In the summer of 1906, the cadets went their

5 Quisling, letter to his parents 18 September 1905, in Collection Jon Qvisling.* 6 Letter to his parents 27 November 1905, ibid. His ®rst impression of King Haakon was very favourable. Later, when he met the King during his visits to the Military Academy, he

Quisling 7

separate ways. Quisling chose to pursue his career in the army and joined the most senior training level at the Military Academy (Den militñre Hùyskole), which took two years to complete. Instruction took place on the Academy's premises at the Akershus fortress. In the ®nal examination, Quisling averaged 1.18 ± the Academy's best result since its establishment in 1817. To mark the occasion, he was given an audience with the King.7 On 1 November 1911 he was assigned to the General Staff as a junior member (aspirant) aged twenty-four. There, he had to serve in all the various divisions, eventually arriving in Intelligence. With his talents and his diligence, in the normal course of events Quisling would have risen steadily through the ranks of the military hierarchy and certainly have been made a general during the 1940s. His way of thinking was greatly in¯uenced by the operational methods of the Staff. Throughout his life, he believed that anything was possible provided there was a good plan that had been elaborated in a Staff headquarters. With a good plan, a Staff plan, a plan based on a military model, even political missions could be carried out successfully. His experiences from the Soviet Union no doubt reinforced his martial view of politics. Even though Quisling was critical of Bolshevik policies, he held their organisational skills in the highest regard, regularly cutting out articles, pictures and maps from the Soviet press showing how the Bolsheviks dealt with various challenges, and pasting them into his bulging notebooks. Consequently, he planned to build his party, Norwegian Action, along the lines of a state-run organisation, complete with military codes and designa- tions and led by a central staff with the various services organised in stellar formation around the leadership.8 Other baggage that Quisling brought with him from Russia con®rms that his skills were organisational and staff-bound rather than executive and creative and that his talents lay more in planning than they did in practical matters. This is particularly the case with the manuscript of his great philosophical project, Universism.

modi®ed his enthusiasm. Still, he found the monarch `very kind indeed'. Letter 4 April 1906, ibid. 7 Various testimonies in UBO MS fol. 3920 I. Letter to his parents 1909, in Collection Jon Qvisling.* Memoirs of fellow cadet Kahrs Budde in FF 18 July 1942; J. Schiùtz, Den militñre Hùiskole 1817±1917 (1917) pp. 208f; Militñrkalender for den Norske armeÂ og marinen 1909±1920. Also Odd Melsom, Boken om Quisling (1941) pp. 32ff; Straffesak p. 329. 8 UBO MS fol. 3920 VIII.

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universism Presumably, there are more people than we imagine who spend their spare time trying to explain the world according to some system. Just how many of Quisling's generation or class did so is a matter of conjecture. What was special about his system was that it aimed at an explanation of the entire universe, based on a fusion of Christianity (which he considered to be the most highly developed religion so far) and the most recent discoveries in the natural sciences, especially in the ®eld of physics. Quisling was extremely well-read and studied both ancient and more modern philosophers in great detail: Spinoza and Kant were of particular interest to him, as was Hegel. Among religious thinkers, Swedenborg was one of his favourites. Of the more modern philosophers, he particularly admired Schopenhauer. Quisling seems to have been attracted to aphoristic writers and adopted the mode himself in his own writings, not without a measure of success, though Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were less attractive to him than the heavier and sterner Schopenhauer. But with the great German thinkers of the nineteenth century his interest seems to have stopped. His library suggests that he had no philosophical interests in any professional sense. Nor did he follow the main currents of twentieth-century thought: Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, Husserl. What was new in contemporary philosophy simply passed him by. Quisling had developed the rudiments of his `philosophy' while he was still at school. In the course of his studies it grew into a planned lifework. When he was thirty, his manuscript was said to be two thousand pages long, but it was later revised and shortened. However, it was by no means a ®nished work: only scattered passages are in any sense complete. The 700- page version we know today in fact dates from the end of the 1920s.9 But if his interest in philosophy was strictly speaking that of the layman, he did have a certain talent for the natural sciences and kept up with developments in the ®eld of quantum physics. In the spring of 1929 he brought himself up to date with Niels Bohr and the theory of complemen- tarity. He was also familiar with Einstein and the general theory of relativity. In fact, his philosophising impulse took contemporary physics as its starting point and it was this that led him to the idea of a universal explanation. In a passage about Einstein, Quisling wrote that `the Universistic theory follows

9 UBO MS fol. 3920 IV, in which the typed pages are organised into and paginated in three series A, B and C. As for the history of the script, see Frederik Prytz in TT 24 June 1936 and FF 25 June 1936.

Quisling 9

from the universal theory of relativity, of which the speci®c and general theories of relativity are special instances'. The term `Universism' was borrowed from a textbook by De Groot on Chinese philosophy which argued that the three strands of Chinese thought from Tao, Confucius and Buddha, were all branches of the same Universism, `the world religion'. Quisling's magnum opus was to be divided into four parts, the ®rst of which was intended to introduce the basic concepts of Universism with the title `On Consciousness as a Starting Point for the Elucidation of Existence'. After a series of subsidiary chapters on the organising principle of his method ± contrast, individuality, space, time, matter, `the number' and development ± would follow the second part, entitled `The Universe'. Here Quisling wanted to prove that the history of the universe can be seen as a development of consciousness of an ever higher order: the individual consciousness ®rst develops through the family to the clan, the race and the nation. A collective consciousness is the next stage, even though this can be primitive: the masses have no real intelligence, only an instinct for self- preservation, but on the other hand, this can be developed if intelligence assumes higher forms and embraces a consciousness of the whole world. In the third part of the work, entitled `Mankind', he envisaged chapters on the character of human life, immortality, man and woman, the will and the law. The fourth and ®nal part was to be called `The World' and was to consist of chapters on science, art, politics, history, race and religion. For the conclusion he had in mind an overview, `The World's Organic Classi®cation and Organisation'. It is certainly fortunate for Quisling that this project remained un®nished: as a philosopher he would never have won recognition. A recent study of the un®nished drafts writes him off completely in this respect.10 He himself took his speculations so seriously that he painstakingly wrote down and ®led away all his fantasies, where others consign such stuff to the wastepaper basket. In his political schemes for Norwegian Action he not only talked of establishing Norway as the homeland of the Nordic race, but also of making the country the centre of Universism, `the new world religion'. Indeed, the party's domestic goals ranged from `the restoration of authority and discipline' to `the introduction of Universism as the of®cial state religion'. High priest, metropolitan, archbishop ± Quisling wanted to be at the helm of something which can best be described as a combination of the United Nations and the Catholic Church.

10 Else M. Barth, `Gud, det er meg'. Vidkun Quisling som politisk ®losof (1996).

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Was this madness or merely innocent fantasy? With hindsight, the psychiatrist Professor Gabriel Langfeldt, in 1969, was unequivocal in his conclusion that the idea of providing a `uni®ed explanation of existence' which `would completely satisfy the demands of human thinking' in itself ®tted the classic psychiatric description of the paranoid megalomaniac more exactly than any other case he had ever encountered.11 What little of his manuscript Quisling did publish is, however, much more tentative and modest than the notes he left lying in his drawers. `The positing of such a system depends on the progress of science; and science still has a long way to go . . . Neither can one man alone master all its results,' reads one of his published manuscripts. This might go some way towards modifying Lang- feldt's diagnosis.12 Independently of how one views Quisling's project, what is clear is that his cosmological speculations, his dream of organising the world and his urge to redeem humankind were all manifest in the private papers contained in the large suitcases that he carried from the train that December day in 1929, complete with a political vision of a new Norwegian constitution and plans for a complete overhaul of the political organisation of the country. Indeed, Quisling had come home. From now on, action was to take precedence over thought.

the art collector As soon as he settled in his ¯at, Quisling paid a visit to the Foreign Ministry in Victoria Terrasse. Ingeborg Flood, who was then an administrative assistant, recalled how he came storming into the of®ce in his tall Russian fur hat, left a parcel with the diplomatic courier post on the table and disappeared without saying a word.13 Then he set off to see his old friend and colleague Frederik Prytz. Prytz's wife Caroline later wrote of the episode in the notes she kept for her grandchildren: `On 22 December 1929 he came to see us. With a shy smile he handed me a parcel, and told Grandpa with perhaps an even more bashful smile, ``I'm back, and now we can resume the work we began in Leningrad in 1918.'' ' The two gentlemen shut themselves up in the study immediately. Mrs Prytz opened the parcel: it was a large box of

11 G. Langfeldt, GaÊten Vidkun Quisling (1969). 12 Foreword to `Universism', as printed in Straffesak p. 280. 13 Ingeborg Flood, 1986.