Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling was a Norwegian military officer and politician who nominally headed the government of Norway after the country was occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Background
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling was born on 18 July 1887 in Fyresdal, in the Norwegian county of Telemark. He was the son of Church of Norway pastor and genealogist Jon Lauritz Qvisling (1844–1930) and his wife Anna Caroline Bang (1860–1941), the daughter of Jorgen Bang, ship-owner and at the time the richest man of the town Grimstad in South Norway.
The elder Quisling had lectured in Grimstad in the 1870s; one of his pupils was Bang, whom he married on 28 May 1886, following a long engagement. The newly-wed couple promptly moved to Fyresdal, where Vidkun and his younger siblings were born.
Education
He chose the army as a career and attended the Norwegian war college, from which he graduated in 1911.
Career
He became minister of defense in the Karlstad cabinet in 1931, and at this time bitterly denounced the Labor Party as Communistic. After he set his office ablaze in imitation of the Reichstag fire he was forced to resign.
He formed the Nasjonal Samling (National Union) in 1933, but the party never elected a member to the Storting (Parliament).
Visits to Germany confirmed Quisling's belief in Nazi doctrines, and he associated with Alfred Rosenberg in the Baltic conference at Riga in 1937. At the outbreak of World War II he was a strong admirer of Hitler's New Order.
Three days before the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, Quisling returned from Berlin to play the role of traitor. He assisted the occupation in every way, and his name became synonymous with perfidy and treason.
A Nasjonal Samling ministry was formed, but Quisling received little support from German authorities and went to Berlin to correct the oversight. Josef Terboven, the Reichskommissar, controlled the government of Norway, but a 13-man commission was established, a majority of whose members were Quisling's followers.
The Nasjonal Samling was made the only party in Norway, and the Hird, a counterpart of the Nazi SS, aided in detecting members of the Norwegian underground. When the war ended, Quisling was seized as a traitor, tried, and convicted.
He was shot by a firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, October 24, 1945.
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.
Politics
He formed the Nasjonal Samling (National Union) in 1933, but the party never elected a member to the Storting (Parliament).
Views
Quisling described how his philosophy ". .. followed from the universal theory of relativity, of which the specific and general theories of relativity are special instances. " Quisling wanted universism to be the official state religion of his new Norway, and he said "the positing of such a system depends on the progress of science. "
Personality
To his supporters, Quisling was regarded as a conscientious administrator of the highest order, knowledgeable and with an eye for detail. Balanced and gentle to a fault, they believed he cared deeply about his people and maintained high moral standards throughout.
Post-war interpretations of Quisling's character are similarly mixed. After the war collaborationist behaviour was popularly viewed as a result of mental deficiency, leaving the personality of the clearly more intelligent Quisling an "enigma. " He was instead seen as weak, paranoid, intellectually sterile and power-hungry: ultimately "muddled rather than thoroughly corrupted. "
Quotes from others about the person
The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung described Quisling as a mini-Hitler with a CMT (chosenness-myth-trauma) complex, or alternatively, megalo-paranoia, more often diagnosed in modern times as narcissistic personality disorder. He was "well installed in his personality, " but unable to gain a following among his own people as the population did not provide a mirror for Quisling's ideology. In short, he was "a dictator and a clown on the wrong stage with the wrong script. "
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Quisling was interested in science, Eastern religions and metaphysics, eventually building up a library that included the works of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.