Vidkun Quisling - Arrest, Trial and Legacy

Arrest, Trial and Legacy

The civil leadership of the resistance, represented by lawyer Sven Arntzen, demanded Quisling be treated like any other murder suspect and, on 9 May, Quisling and his ministers had no option but to turn themselves in to police. Quisling was transferred to Cell 12 in Møllergata 19, the main police station in Oslo. The cell was equipped with a tiny table, a sink, and a hole in the wall for a toilet bucket. After ten weeks being constantly watched to prevent suicide attempts in police custody, he was transferred to Akershus Fortress and awaited trial as part of the legal purge. Despite initially losing weight and suffering from polyneuritis, his strong constitution meant that he soon started working hard on his case with Henrik Bergh, a lawyer with a good track record but largely unsympathetic, at least initially, to Quisling's plight. Bergh did, however, believe Quisling's testimony that he had tried to act in the best interests of Norway, and decided to use this as a starting point for the defence. Initially Quisling's charges related to the coup, including his revocation of the mobilisation order, to his time as Nasjonal Samling leader and to his actions as Minister President, such as assisting the enemy and illegally attempting to alter the constitution. Finally, he was accused of Eilifsen's murder. Whilst not contending the key facts, he denied all charges on the grounds that he had always worked for a free and prosperous Norway, and submitted a sixty-page response. On 11 July, a further indictment was brought, adding a raft of new charges, including more murders, theft, embezzlement and, most worrying of all for Quisling, the charge of conspiring with Hitler over the 9 April occupation of Norway.

The trial opened on 20 August 1945. Quisling's defence rested on downplaying his unity with Germany and stressing that he had fought for total independence, something that seemed completely contrary to the recollections of many Norwegians. From that point on, wrote biographer Dahl, Quisling had to tread a "fine line between truth and falsehood", and emerged from it "an elusive and often pitiful figure". He misrepresented the truth on several occasions and the entirely truthful majority of his statements won him few advocates in the country at large, where he remained almost universally hated. In the later days of the trial Quisling's health suffered, largely as a result of the number of medical tests to which he was subjected, and his defence faltered. The prosecution's powerful final speech placed responsibility for the Final Solution being carried out in Norway at the feet of Quisling, using the testimony of German officials. The prosecutor Annæus Schjødt called for the death penalty, using laws that had been introduced by the government-in-exile in October 1941 and January 1942.

Erudite speeches by both Bergh and Quisling himself could not change the outcome, and when the verdict was announced on 10 September, Quisling was convicted of all charges except a handful of minor ones. For the numerous crimes of which he was found guilty, he was sentenced to death. The death penalty itself was justified in particular largely on claims that his design for Norway was to have it at best "a vassal state under Germany". An October appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected. The court process was judged to be "a model of fairness" in a commentary by author Maynard Cohen. After giving testimony in a number of other trials of Nasjonal Samling members, Quisling was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress at 02:40 on 24 October 1945. His last words before being shot were: "I'm convicted unfairly, and I die innocent". After his death his body was cremated, leaving the ashes to be interred in Fyresdal.

His widow Maria lived in Oslo until her death in 1980. They had no children; on her death she donated all their Russian antiques to a charitable fund that operates in Oslo to this day. For most of his later political career Quisling lived in a mansion on Bygdøy in Oslo that he called "Gimle", after the place in Norse mythology where survivors of the great battle of Ragnarok were to live. The house, now called Villa Grande, is today a Holocaust museum. The Nasjonal Samling movement was completely wiped out as a political force in Norway, though Quisling himself has become one of the most written about Norwegians of all time.