Vidkun Quisling

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I mentioned on a
recent behind the scenes that we were going to get
to a Norway topic but it wouldn't be great, And

(00:23):
here we are today. Yep. Did you learn about vidcn
Quizzling growing up? I really don't think so. I don't
recall hearing about him ever in class. I literally learned
about him from an Elvis Costello song, which is actually
how I've learned about the names of a lot of
history people, because if you listen to a lot of
Elvis Costello, he references a lot of history, and specifically

(00:46):
a lot of World War II history, which is pretty interesting.
And it's an older song, it's from like the seventies,
but I remember hearing it and being like, I don't
know what that word even means. I'm going to look
it up. And that's how I learned about Vidcan Quizzling. Ye,
so we are going to talk about him today. I'm
sure for people in Europe they probably learned about it,

(01:07):
but we didn't really in the States, at least not
by the seventies eighties time period when Tracy and I
would have been taking history classes. So I imagine probably
people younger than us haven't heard a ton about him either.
He is one of those cases of someone who forever
to the end of his life claimed that he was

(01:29):
doing what he was doing for the good of his country,
but pretty obviously was doing a lot of bad things
for his country. So that's what we're going to unpick
today during World War Two. So Vidken Abraham Lawretz Johnson
Quizzling was born July eighteenth, eighteen eighty seven in Fidisdal, Norway,

(01:54):
in the County of Telemark. His father, Jon Lawretz Quizzling,
was a biologist and a Lutheran minister, and his mother,
Anna Caroline Bang was from a pretty wealthy family. Also
was much younger than her husband. She had been one
of Jan's students when he was teaching in Grimstad, which

(02:14):
is where she grew up and was a teenager. They
did not marry until sixteen years later. Though Vidcn was
the oldest of four children, he had a sister and
two brothers. The family moved around pretty frequently as Jan's
parish appointments changed friends of Vidkn in the early years
described him as incredibly smart, a little shy, and very

(02:37):
much an idealist. Vidcn was particularly close to his brother Jurgen,
and they remained very close for their whole lives. In
nineteen oh five, at the age of eighteen, Quizlly enrolled
in the Norwegian War College in Oslo. He scored higher
than any of his two hundred and forty nine classmates
on the entrance exams, which had a reputation for being

(02:58):
just incredibly difficult. His academic achievement followed on his impressive
exam scores. He graduated from the War College in nineteen
oh six and moved on to the Norwegian Military Academy,
and he graduated from there in nineteen eleven with the
highest grades of anyone to ever attend the institution in
its nearly one hundred year history at that point. Because

(03:20):
of this, he was invited to meet the King of
Norway Hawk in the seventh thanks to his high scores.
In nineteen eleven, Quisling joined the Norwegian Army in a
general staff position that meant he was destined for administrative work.
In his time with the military, which lasted almost two decades,
he served in a variety of diplomatic and humanitarian roles.

(03:43):
Norway's neutral stance in World War One was something that
Quisling was very unhappy about. He served as a military
attache at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd from March nineteen
eighteen to December nineteen eighteen, after which he became the
Norwegian military's expert on Russia. He had been studying Russian
for five years before he was sent there, and then

(04:06):
following his work in Petrograd, Quisling was assigned to Helsinki
as an attache, where he worked until nineteen twenty one.
In nineteen twenty two, he was sent to Ukraine to
work with the League of Nations on relief efforts in
the region. Quisling was the head of the office in Kharkiv.
Near the end of the humanitarian mission, Quisling got married

(04:27):
to Alexandra Andreevna Voronina and brought her back to Norway.
Alexandra was only seventeen and their relationship. The nature of
this relationship it seems a little bit odd. Quisling's colleagues
were totally befuddled because this did not seem to be
much of a match. There's some insinuation in the reactions

(04:47):
of the men that he worked alongside in Kharkiv that
Alexandra might have been a sex worker. But in Norway,
friends and family believed, you know, once they'd spent time
with this couple, that there was no sort of sexual
relationship between the two of them. It seems like Quizzling
might have married her in an attempts to rescue her,

(05:08):
and that's something that is reflected in a novella that
he wrote around the same time about an older foreigner
in a city taking a teenage girl under his wing.
This sort of arrangement was actually not that unusual. A
number of foreigners who were on aid missions married young
women and girls to get them passports that would enable

(05:29):
them to leave. Yeah, he was not the only one
that did this, although this was an especially odd version
of it to most people's eyes. After just a few
months back in Norway, Quizzling was once again sent to
Ukraine on an extension of that relief mission, and Alexandra
traveled with him. They returned to Kharkiv in February of
nineteen twenty three. That summer, he met Maria Varsilneva, puzzaged

(05:54):
Nikova and they fell deeply in love. Maria was a
twenty three year old Ukrainian woman, and it seems that
she must have known about Quisling's marital status, but the
way events unfold from there is kind of confusing. It
has never really been sorted out by historians with any
sort of certainty. Vidkin and Maria had a wedding ceremony

(06:16):
in Kharkov while Alexandra was traveling. There's no paper to
confirm this as a legal marriage, and there's no documentation
of a divorce from Alexandra. But from nineteen twenty three
on vid and Maria lived as a couple, and Alexandra
lived and traveled with them as well. They told people
she was their daughter. This was all obviously sort of

(06:41):
confusing to the people who knew them, and some of
Quisling's family was just absolutely scandalized. There were rumors that
all three of them might have some kind of romantic triangle,
but that's really not reflected in any of Vidkn's writings.
Maria traveled wherever Quisling did, and Alexandra eventually left to
live with an ant and ultimately moved to the United States. Yeah,

(07:04):
she kind of stepped out of their lives. Eventually, in
nineteen twenty nine, Quisling returned to Norway permanently after twelve
years of almost continuous travel and living abroad. At that
point he had been in Moscow for a while. Maria
was with him, and they had brought a significant art collection,
more than two hundred pieces back from Moscow. That art

(07:26):
collection is going to come up again later. They settled
into a flat and Vincn was planning actually to start
a career as an art dealer, kind of on the side.
Not long after they arrived in Oslo, though, Quisling was
called to his father's deathbed, and Yon died on February
twenty ninth. Throughout the years that he lived outside of Norway,

(07:47):
Quisling worked on a political and philosophical ideology concept that
he called universism. The term universism is not one that
Quisling invented. He was using a word that had been
coined by Dutch religion historian and Chinese culture scholar Johannes
Yakubus Maria de Grout in his nineteen twelve book Religion
in China. Universism the Key to the Study of Daoism

(08:10):
and Confucianism Dgrut defines Universism as an umbrella for Daoism, Confucianism,
and Buddhism, writing in the book, quote Universism, as I
will henceforth call it, is the one religion of China.
As these three religions are its three integrant parts, every
Chinese can feel himself equally at home in each without

(08:31):
being offended or shocked by conflicting and mutually exclusive dogmatic principles.
It seems that the main takeaway that Quisling had from
Dugruz's text was this idea of uniting multiple ideas under
one label. His idea, which he laid out in a
seven hundred page book that he published in nineteen twenty nine,
was to create a new global religion that combined physics

(08:55):
and spirituality. He included a lot of world religions in
his book, but in ways that they all square up
into versions of Christianity, rather than retaining their own unique philosophies.
He envisioned Universism almost as a philosophical pyramid scheme where
a consciousness would be passed from individuals to their families

(09:16):
and then to their countries, etc. This almost sounds sort
of nice in terms of unity but rest assured it
was not. Quisling's rhetoric is laced through with anti Semitism
and the belief that the Nordic race, which is a
concept that is now obsolete, should lead this unification because
of its inherent superiority. In companion with his philosophy was

(09:37):
Quisling's plan for what he called Norsk Action, a campaign
based on the way the Soviet Communist Party worked, which
was an interesting choice because he was anti Communist, but
he had been struck by the efficiency and organization of
the Communist Party while he was in Moscow. He envisioned
a government that was run a lot like a military

(09:59):
int of its structure. Coming up, we're going to talk
about Quisling's break with his job with the Norwegian government,
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Several
years after returning to Norway for good, Quisling was in

(10:21):
a high level government position, but then in nineteen thirty
three he abruptly quit that job. This was precipitated by
a break with his political party at the time, the
Agrarian Party. Quisling had not really been a member of
that party before May of nineteen thirty one, when he
was appointed Defense Minister by Prime Minister Peter Coolstad, who

(10:43):
was an Agrarian. This had been kind of an odd appointment,
as he had not been aligned with Colstad either prior
to that job, but he had been recommended to the
Prime minister by the Prime Minister's advisors, and once he
was in that position, Quisling saw what he thought was
an opportunity to gain some power. He wanted to be
the Agrarian Party leader, but the Agrarian Party did not

(11:06):
want that, so he left both the party and his job.
He described this break a little bit differently later, and
we'll talk about that as we get further into the episode.
Later in nineteen thirty three, Quisling founded his own political party,
the Nazunal Somling that's the National Union. This group wanted,

(11:26):
among other things, to end communism and put a stop
to trade unions. He was the de facto leader of
this new party, which promoted the ideas of Norway becoming
economically independent, Christian nationalism, a corporatist mode of government, and
paternalism on the part of the government. And while Quizzling
clearly believed that this was all the best way to

(11:49):
cover Norway, the rest of the country really did not agree.
In the nineteen thirty three election, Quisling's party only got
two point two percent of the vote. He kept trying
to support for universism and the nazunaal Simling, but this
was just fruitless. In Norway's nineteen thirty six election, the
National Union only got one point eight percent of the vote,

(12:12):
and that kept it from holding any kind of power.
Quisling told a friend, quote, A great many of our
erstwhile supporters must have deserted us. So just for a
quick broad strokes explainer there to contextualize. Norway's parliament, known
as the Starting, uses proportional representation, meaning that the number
of representatives in parliament is based on the proportion of

(12:35):
votes that any given party gets through what is sometimes
called an open list system. At least it's an open
list in theory. So at an election, a voter chooses
their party ballot from among all the party options, which
are far more numerous than we have here in the US,
and then on that ballot they select the order of
the candidates based on their preferences. They are also able

(12:58):
to strike candidates they don't feel should be elected at all.
So kind of a vote of no confidence, then if
that party wins enough votes, a proportional number of their
candidates are placed in Parliament based on how they were ranked.
So if your party got enough votes to get four representatives,
the top four people that got the most votes would
be those representatives. This isn't necessarily how it tends to

(13:21):
work in practice, because parties do set their own order
on the ballot and it tends not to shuffle around
per my understanding. So sometimes it's also labeled as a
closed list system, but generally the prime minister is chosen
from the party that holds the largest amount of support
from voters, though there are instances and this has happened
in relatively recent years, where coalitions form to support prime

(13:44):
minister candidates who don't represent the most voted for party.
As of this recording, which is in August of twenty
twenty four, there are currently nine different parties with representation
in the Storting, and the next election will be next
year in twenty twenty five. There is a lot more
complexity to this whole system, but we're explaining all of
this just to say VIDCM Quizzling's party didn't even have

(14:07):
enough votes to have even one representative in the starting
Quizzling at this point had spent a lot of money
trying to gain political power. He had inherited money from
his grandparents on his mother's side, but that money was
running out as he and Maria maintained a lifestyle that
included a full staff at their apartment. He had tried

(14:28):
to make money as a writer, but that had not
yielded the income that he had hoped for. He tried
to sell off pieces from his art collection to keep
things going, but ran into trouble when a lot of them,
which he had acquired while in Russia, turned out to
be fakes. He had thought, for example, that he had
original goyas, Sisans, Rembrandts, and Van Dykes, and these all

(14:50):
turned out to be largely worthless. There was a painting
in his collection that was both a real original and
quite valuable that it was the Franz Hals painting the
Dutch Family. Then its legitimacy was debunked and Quizzling sold
that painting, known at that point as a copy, for

(15:10):
four thousand dollars. This seemed like a minor win for Quizzling,
you know, selling a copy for four thousand dollars, but
then he learned that this painting had made its way
to the United States, where once it was assessed, it
was determined to be the real deal and valued at
one hundred thousand dollars. Quisling's brother, Arna, who worked with

(15:32):
Vidco on art sales, believed that they had been duped
by a ring of art swindlers and tried to get
some legal retribution. They were forced to drop the case
with no real proof. Yeah, they thought that because they
had sold that four thousand dollars painting to someone who
knew that it was a copy, and then that person
had in turn sold it. I think it went through

(15:54):
two more sales, and they thought this was all a
ring of people that was working together to tell people
their paintings were fake, buy them on the cheap, and
then sort them through this system. They had to actually
get them re evaluated at their true value. So although
Quisling already had a lot of notable and potentially problematic
accomplishments on his resume that would have given him notoriety,

(16:17):
it was his association that he cemented in the late
nineteen thirties that sort of labeled Quisling's image forever as
a trader As war loomed in a conflict riddled Europe,
Quisling began writing and delivering anti Semitic lectures. He condemned
Hitler's Night of one Thousand Knives, but he otherwise supported

(16:38):
the German chancellor. He sent Hitler a note on Hitler's
fiftieth birthday that year, thanking him for quote saving Europe
from Jews and Bolshevism. In December of that year, as
part of a tour of Germany, he met with Adolf Hitler,
and during that meeting, Quizzling made it clear that he
would support an occupation of Norway if Germany made that

(16:59):
manch This was all very important to Germany because Norway
was strategically important due to its coastline along the North
Sea and the Norwegian Sea that gave access to the
Atlantic Ocean, and when Quisling met with Hitler, he warned
him that Britain also wanted to move into Norway and
that hastened Hitler's plans to invade Norway and Denmark with

(17:23):
Operation Vesubunk. Germany also promised to give funds to Qwisling's
political party. While the Norwegian was visiting the country, Nazi
general Niklaus von Falkenhurst began the German assault on Norway
and Denmark just a few months later. On April ninth
of nineteen forty, Quisling took advantage of this situation by

(17:44):
proclaiming himself the leader of Norway. This is something he
did over the radio after he bluffed his way into
a broadcast center, making it the first coup de'ttaw By radio,
he told the people of his country that they should
welcome the Germans who were invading. He made this announcement twice,
although the second one, which came a couple of hours
after the first, was more forceful, and he assured that

(18:07):
there would be quote serious consequences for anyone who resisted
the Germans and the new government. Less than a week
after Quizzling proclaimed himself to be ruler of the country,
he was forced out of that self proclaimed leadership role.
That did not mean he was gone at all, though,
because he wasn't overthrown by a resistance group. His effort

(18:31):
just didn't do what the Nazis had wanted, and so
they made him step down on April fifteenth. German forces
led by Kurt Brauer had wanted King hakon the seventh
same one who had invited Quizzling to visit him in
his youth to acknowledge the Quizzling government and seed power,
but the King and government leaders had refused, citing the

(18:51):
fact that no one had faith in Quizzling as a leader.
This is really understandable. He just kind of gotten in
the radio and said I'm in charge now. H And
also like that had just been shown in the two
elections in the nineteen thirties when almost no one voted
for his party. Yeah. So at that point Germany pivoted.
Since their plan to install Quisling had tanked, they decided

(19:13):
to just build a new ruling body for Norway from scratch.
Hakon and Parliament continued to resist for a couple of months,
but then on June nineteenth, nineteen forty, Norway fell to
the Germans and the King went into exile in London,
as did Prime Minister Johann Nygaardswold. As part of Germany's
new government in Norway, Hitler had tapped a man named

(19:35):
Joseph Terboven to be administrator of Norway on April twenty fourth,
well before the King had left the country, and one
of Terboven's acts was to make all of the political
parties of Norway illegal, with the exception of Quisling's National Union.
Quisling was made head of the Cabinet, reporting directly to Terboven.

(19:56):
Quisling's name immediately became associated with treason as all of
this was playing out. In an article in the Times
of London titled Quizzling is as Quizzling Does is published
in North America in various newspapers as well. This association
is laid out quote to journalists and other writers weary

(20:16):
of racking their brains or raking the well thumbed pages
of roget in search of alternatives. The word quizzling is
a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered
to invent a new word for trader, and given carte
blanche with the alphabet, they could hardly have hit upon
a more brilliant combination of letters. Orally, it contrives to

(20:37):
suggest something at once slippery and torturous. Visually, it has
a supreme merit of beginning with a Q, which, with
one August exception, has long seemed to the British mind
to be a crooked, uncertain and slightly disreputable letter. Quizzling
then be it. We welcome the word as sincerely as

(20:59):
we detest the quality which it connotes. Hitler had overestimated
Quisling's popularity in Norway, thinking that he would have enough
support to pull off his coup d'ettar, And though Quizzling
had failed in that mission and was to some degree
disgraced by that failure, the Furer still thought that he
might be valuable, and that is why, two years into

(21:20):
German occupation, Quizzling was made Minister President of a puppet
government still serving under Treboven the Right Commissioner. Let's put
Quizzling at his highest role as a Nazi collaborator, and
he quickly began to use the power he had, although
he was still always subject to German oversight. In the
summer of nineteen forty two, he attempted to start a

(21:41):
program very similar to that of the Hitler Youth for
the National Union and made it mandatory for all Norwegian children.
Was an effort that galvanized resistance against him. There were
mass resignations in the clergy and education sectors. Yeah, all
of those teachers and religious leaders were like, we are
not going to make kids do this. By May of

(22:04):
nineteen forty two, Quizzling had kind of already dropped like
a stone when it came to German leadership's faith in him.
That was not long after he had become a minister.
President Hitler suspended all peace negotiations between Norway and Germany,
and he essentially issued kind of like an unofficial restraining
order on Quizzling, who was no longer allowed to directly

(22:26):
contact the furor vincom. Quizzling next tried to once again
get in Germany and Hitler's good graces by creating a
volunteer military force that would bolster Germany's numbers. Fifteen thousand
Norwegians volunteered. Six thousand of those men were deployed as
members of the SS. In our next segment, we're going

(22:47):
to talk about Quizzling's part in some of the horrors
of the Nazi regime. And before we get into that
dark subject, let's take a quick break to hear from
our sponsors. As part of his work to once again
become one of Hitler's favorites, Quisling was not just complacent

(23:11):
in Nazi atrocities. He was actively involved. He personally sent
hundreds of Jewish Norwegians to concentration camps. There had only
been a little more than two thousand Jewish people in
Norway in nineteen forty two when Quisling became Minister President.
Sixteen percent of those were people who had fled Germany
and Poland looking for refuge. He first reinstituted a struck

(23:37):
portion of the Norwegian constitution it had been gotten rid
of in the eighteen fifties, which forbade Jewish immigration into
the country. He also started instituting laws that called for
the registration of all Jews, the arrest of all Jewish men,
and the seizure of all property owned by Jews. These
were followed by orders to arrest Jewish women and children

(23:59):
as well. By the end of November, the deportation of
arrested Jews began. They were shipped first to Oslo and
then to Germany, ultimately landing in Auschwitz, where they were
killed in the gas chambers right after arriving. The number
of dead, which was seven hundred and thirty eight, would
have been much larger had it not been for warnings

(24:20):
that had made their way through the underground resistance starting
with the Norwegian police, that enabled almost half the country's
Jewish population to escape to Sweden. Thirty four men who
were shipped from Norway to Auschwitz survived. In nineteen forty three,
the United States Attorney General prepared a message for Quisling,

(24:41):
which was given to the Royal Norwegian Information Service, and
it was read on a radio broadcast that was aired
throughout Norway and in some surrounding countries. The text of
that message was also published in US papers, and it
read quote to a modern judas, when for the love
of a man attempts to sell the dignity of his

(25:02):
own people vidcom quizzling, he sells nothing but his own soul.
For a brief moment he wields the sword, but it
is a lonely, meaningless gesture vidcom quizzling, and the command
meets only the silence of a contemptuous world. Borrowed armor
is a deadly thing vidcom quizzling. It is no firmer
than the source from which it came. It falls apart

(25:25):
and leaves him who has worn it against his own
people naked alone, unready for the wrath of men whose
freedom and dignity are beyond price. The source from which
you borrowed strength is waning vidcom quizzling. Already there are
cracks in the armor, and the contempt of the world,
the wrath of men is unabated. You are ruling Vidcom

(25:46):
quizzling past the hour. You are living Vidcom quizzling on
borrowed time. You have spent Vidcom quizzling the last of
the thirty pieces of silver. In the late stages of
World War Two, Quizling seems to be just ceaselessly maneuvering
to regain Hitler's favor, but he did not seem to
realize that the German Nazi movement was kind of done

(26:09):
with him. He tried to force members of the paramilitary
group Herden into military service, and that caused both outrage
and a huge exodus of group members who really had
no interest in serving under German command. He also tried
to negotiate a treaty deal with Hitler in January of
nineteen forty five, hoping that in exchange for Norway's support,

(26:32):
he could secure an end to German occupation for his country,
and that did not work. Instead, Nazi forces started executing
any Norwegian citizens who were even perceived as resisting. After
German authorities gunned down a group of Norwegian resistance fighters
and trendom Forest. Quizzling visited the site. There's a photo

(26:54):
of him standing in his suit and hat as he
looks over the mass grave where the bodies of the
killed Norwegians were dumped. When Terboven asked Quizzling to sign
an order that would make these executions an authorized act
of the Quisling government, Vidcan Quizzling refused. That really sealed
his fate with Terboven, who was outraged and with the

(27:18):
Nazi Party. Norway was liberated from German occupation in May
nineteen forty five. King Hawk on the seventh and Prime
Minister Johann Ninguardswold returned from their exile, and Quisling, who
did turn himself in, was arrested and charged with a
lengthy list of crimes treason, of course, both military and civil,

(27:39):
but also embezzlement, sixteen counts of murder, aiding a foreign government,
and receiving stolen property. Part of the case against him
included the accusation that he had received forty thousand dollars
from Germany in exchange for betraying his country. When the
trial began on August twentieth, nineteen forty five. It was
covered by news outlets around the world, carefully noting Quisling's

(28:03):
behavior and demeanor throughout. Quizling is often noted in reports
as looking pale and being evasive in his answers. Maria
wanted to be in the courtroom for the proceedings, but
she was not allowed. Quizzling pleaded not guilty on all
the charges against him, claiming always that his actions were
in service to what he thought was the best course

(28:24):
for Norway. The judge in the case, Eric Solom, was
very clearly biased against Quisling and tended to behave in
a way that really tested the limits of propriety in
his role. He often interrupted Quisling when he tried to speak,
and the two men got into a couple of really
odd exchanges where they were generally quite combative with one another.

(28:45):
Whether it would have been possible to find another judge
who would not have been biased in this case is
kind of a matter of debate. Quisling also hurt his
own case by saying things in court that were demonstrably untrue,
specifically things about meeting certain people at certain times and
claiming to not know that the National Union was benefiting
financially from the relationship with Germany. Alfred Rosenberg, the high

(29:09):
ranking Nazi official who's credited with connecting Quizzling with Hitler,
provided information that was used in the trial against Quisling.
He verified the authenticity of a lot of documents which
were used in the Quizzling trial, beginning with ones that
tied Vidcan Quizzling to Germany's plan to invade Norway. A
document read aloud in court stated that Quisling had given

(29:33):
detailed information about the Norwegian coastline to Grand Admiral Eric Raider,
head of the German Navy, as well as two other
German military officers, Field Marshal Wilhelm Kaitel and Colonel General
Alfred Yodel. When Quisling was asked about his treason in
the context of his former position in the Royal Norwegian Army,

(29:54):
the defendant stated, quote, certainly, I had certain obligations, but
I resigned as an offer in nineteen thirty three in
protest against the defense policy of the government. Neither in
peace nor in war could I serve as an officer
under such a defense policy. The failure of that policy,
in Quisling's view, was that no one wanted to bolster

(30:15):
the country's military forces enough. When questioned about the coup attempt,
Quisling was adamant that he had never planned one, and
claimed the whole thing quote must have arisen from either
some misunderstanding or from the wrongful use of my name,
even though he had broadcast his takeover of the country
on the radio twice. When he was charged with the

(30:37):
murder of Norwegian resistance leader Vigohanstein Vidcan, Quizzling is said
to have sobbed as he claimed his innocence. He told
the prosecutor aneas Schucht, I never asked the Germans to
kill Hanstein, only to remove him. He was making things
difficult for me. Quisling also claimed not to have known
what was happening in the concentration camps. During questioning about them,

(31:01):
he stated, quote, it may sound strange, but in spite
of thousands of appeals to me from people in jail,
I never had a single report of torture. If I had,
I would have done something. After he made that statement,
the prosecution asked him if he had ever listened to
radio broadcasts from London, and Quizzling never replied, yeah, that

(31:22):
was obviously Germaine because those broadcasts were being very forthright
about the things that were going on in concentration camps.
On the third day of the trial, Quisling had an outburst.
Newspaper reports described him as hysterical. After questioning regarding whether
he intended for Norway to become part of the German Reich.

(31:42):
A letter had been presented to the court which was
written from Quizzling to Hitler, noting that he had not
received money he had been promised for doing his part
in the occupation and discussing ways that Norway might roll
up under Germany. Quisling claimed someone else had written that letter.
When presented with a second document, a memorandum again written

(32:02):
by Quizzling, about Norway adopting the German flag and currency,
he stated that he had done so to protect Norway.
When the prosecutor noted then that Quizzling acknowledged that the
document was one he had written. In response, the defendant
shouted quote, I did it to save my country. The
last four years had been a nightmare for me because
I had to fight both sides. At that point, the judge,

(32:26):
Eric Solom, who we mentioned did not like Quizzling, told
the defendant to calm down. Many witnesses were called to testify.
There were people going back to before the Second World
War describing Quizzling as working against the Norwegian government. One
of the most damning testimonies came from doctor Leo Eiitinger,
who was one of the Jewish men sent to Auschwitz

(32:48):
after being arrested under Quisling's orders. He described the process
people faced from arrest to arrival at the concentration camp,
and how they were sorted into groups of people healthy
enough to work and survive for at least a little while,
and those deemed useless who were immediately sent to the
gas chambers. He described the horrors of the camps, and

(33:09):
he placed the glame for so many squarely on Quizzling.
Witnesses from the German forces, including the Gestapo, stated that
they had been told that what they did in Norway
was that the direction of Quisling's government. Maria had wanted
to testify on her husband's behalf, but Vidcan forbade it.
The character witnesses that were called to help Quisling's case

(33:32):
were mostly people from his life before he became entangled
with the Nazi war effort. They spoke about how he
had been a smart and kind person in his youth,
impossible to reconcile with all the crimes that he was
accused of. There was an undercurrent suggesting that there might
be some sort of psychological mechanism in play that had
caused his change in personality in thinking. At the end

(33:55):
of the trial, Quisling, who had been ill during his incarceration,
had to give his own defense speech. He talked about
his childhood and how he had felt called to serve
his country as a young man. But as his story
progressed through his life, his presentation faltered. He started to
repeat himself, and to ramble, and to appear to have

(34:17):
become confused. He spoke for an hour without ever getting
to any events related to the charges he was facing.
He was laying the groundwork to explain why he came
to the decisions he did, and he appeared very sincere.
He spoke for four straight hours, and he concluded by
saying that if he was treasonous, he hoped that quote

(34:38):
a good many of Norway's sons would also be treasonous,
but not imprisoned as he had been. Quisling was found
guilty and was sentenced to death. He was also ordered
to pay more than one million kroner for legal costs.
Quisling was executed by firing squad at two forty am
on October twenty fourth, nineteen forty at Akershu's Fortress, Norway.

(35:02):
He insisted to the very end that he was innocent.
He had written to his brother during his final day's quote,
there must be some deeper meaning to this. In fact,
I am dying a murdyr's death. There was at least
one attempt to shift the perception of Quisling's image in
the years after his death, and that was a book
by Ralph Hewans titled Quizzling Prophet Without Honor, which was

(35:26):
published in nineteen sixty five. That effort did not go
over well. That book was really panned, with review titles
like whitewashing a puppet, an Attempt that Fails, and praise
for Quizzling called false history no doubt. Inspired by Quisling's
name in the news because of the biography, a report
about his widow, Maria ran in papers across Europe and

(35:49):
North America, noting that she lived in the apartment the
two had first shared in nineteen twenty nine alone with
little contact with the outside world her name reportedly called
her Missus Treason. Maria Quisling died in nineteen eighty and
at that time her husband's personal letters, notes, and manuscripts
were left to the University of Oslo. Quisling's mansion, which

(36:13):
he called Gimla, became home of Norway's Holocaust Museum. Yucky
parts of history, uh huh, but important And like I said,
we don't tend to get that story very much in
the US, so at least we didn't when we were
coming up through school. So if they're teaching it now, bravo.

(36:33):
If they're not, now we all know. I'm picking a
fun listener mail because it's about Olympic sports. Okay, we
need lighter stuff now. This is from our listener, Cameron,
who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I've been listening to
your show for years and have wanted to write in,
but never found a good reason until today. I'm a

(36:54):
little behind and listening, but I just caught your episode
about defunct Olympic sports. I know you couldn't possibly have
covered all of them, but I wanted to mention one
of my favorites, ski ballet. This sport was popular in
the nineteen seventies and eighties, but stopped being an Olympic
sport in two thousand. The sport involves singles or sometimes pairs,
performing dance like movements while on skis, sometimes just on

(37:16):
a flat field of snow like an ice rink, and
sometimes actually traveling downhill. But the best part was the outfits.
As it was popular in the seventies and eighties, videos
can be found online of bright, often neon, puffy outfits,
often bedazzled or tasseled, probably taking their cues from figure skating.
Perms and mullets can be appreciated in these videos as well.

(37:38):
Hang on to that perm thought, everybody. Just a little
foreshadowing for future episodes as pet tax, I've included photos
of my two rag doll cats, Aria and Luna, as
well as our hound dog Cusco, who have all listened
to many episodes of your show. We all love listening
to both of you and appreciate your thorough research as
well as you're entertaining and delightful personnel. Cusco doesn't bark

(38:01):
at you as much as he barks at our Google
Home assistant, so he especially thinks you're great. All the best,
Cameron Okay, I'm obsessed with these pet names. Rest of all, Cuzco.
I don't know if you've named it after the historical
one or the Disney character, but now I have Tom
Jones singing in my head about Cusco, and that's never
a bad thing. Cameron, thank you so much. I have

(38:24):
seen and do remember ski Ballet because I am a
child that would have been watching the Olympics during those years,
and I always loved, loved, loved those outfits. I think
we should bring back those styles of streetwear today. You
would like to write to us, you could do so

(38:45):
at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
it is you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(39:08):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Tracy V. Wilson

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