Vidkun Quisling

Vidkun Quisling proclaimed himself prime minister of Norway on the radio on the evening the Germans invaded, was pushed aside by them within a week, was made their Minister-President two years later, and was shot at Akershus fortress in October 1945; his name was a common noun in English within months of the invasion and is in every dictionary. He was born in 1887 in Telemark, the son of a pastor, passed out of the military academy with the highest marks in its history, and spent the 1920s in Russia and Ukraine as a military attaché and as Nansen's assistant in the famine relief, for which the Soviets decorated him. He came home an anti-communist with a theory of everything he called Universism. He was minister of defence in the Agrarian government of 1931 to 1933, and in 1933 founded Nasjonal Samling, the National Union, a fascist party with a St Olav's cross for a symbol that never won a seat. In December 1939 he went to Berlin, met Hitler through Rosenberg and Raeder, and told him Norway could be taken with the help of his followers; the German plan was already being made for other reasons. On 9 April 1940, with the government fleeing, he walked into the Oslo broadcasting house and announced a government of his own. Nobody obeyed it, the king refused to appoint it, and Hitler dropped him on 15 April for an administrative council and then for Josef Terboven as Reichskommissar, who despised him. Terboven made him Minister-President in February 1942 in a ceremony at Akershus, with a cabinet of party men under German orders. He tried to make the church, the teachers and the sports clubs join his corporations and every one of them refused, and his police helped round up the Jews of Norway for Auschwitz in November 1942. He surrendered on 9 May 1945, was tried in August for treason, murder and theft, defended himself for weeks as a patriot misunderstood, and was executed by firing squad on 24 October. The word was Churchill's before it was the Times's.

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