QUISLING’S CAREER

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 September 1945, Page 8

QUISLING’S CAREER

PRE-WAR ACTIVITIES. J In practically no sense at all is the early story of Vidkun Quisling a story of Norway. It is one of himself of an egocentric who has never been able to overcome or to escape from his own smallness, (writes a “Sydney Morning Herald correspondent). ( Quisling always wanted to uo something big,” but jit was always a great “something”: he never had a clear or durable idea as to what this great thing was, nor about what general good it would bring. It was not until 1925, when he was already 38 years old, that he evinced any interest in politics at all. His entry into Norwegian politics at that time was in the Romanic style. Mussolini, ex-Socialist, had marched on the city of the Caesars. Quisling . would march on Oslo. Policy could be arranged. Quisling tried the Social Democratic Party first, and when they turned down his proposal to put them into power by force he went to the Communists. To the Communists he even promised valuable information which, he said, he could obtain from the Norwegian General Staff, to which he had beCommunists ' recognised his psychological type. The son of Dean Quisling had been sent to a democratic school which he had . considered to be below his social dignity. He was revolting now against the “injustice” which had sent him there. He would turn next upon the masses before whom his pride had been so seriously hurt. That he had worked under Nansen on famine relief in Russia did not impress them, nor did his professed admiration for the Soviet regime—nor did his two Soviet marriages. They suspected he might be a' counter-spy working against the U.S.S.R. . / Later, he founded a society lor “regenerating” the Norwegians. He forgot all about it two months later when the jejune and somewhat simple Agrarian Party, thrust. into minority government, invited him to become Defence Minister, mainly on the strength of his military talent, which was genuine. Unfortunately, this genius used tropps to quell a strike of electro-chemical workers. He also pretended (as it came to appear) that he had been waylaid in a corridor of his Ministry by unknown assailants, and he tried to have the leaders of the Social Democratic Party arraigned for high treason, accusing them of importing arms secretly from Russia. In 1*933 he was turned out of the Cabinet. Quisling now despised democracy. A man who knew him at the time tells me: “I found his mind, so limited that, outside his own professional sphere, the only things he seemed able to understand were violence and treachery. Consequently he saw them everywhere.” A few months later, when Hitler was assuming power in Germany, Quisling founded Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian Nazi Party. Marching, and uniforms, and poetic talk, about gods and “Nordic supermen,” and the staged eclat with which Quisling tried to gate-crash democratic institutions naturally had some immediate effect upon adolescents looking for dynamic leadership rather than for direction. Eut by far the greater part of Norwegian youth was unimpressed. And during the seven years preluding Hitler's attack on Norway, the curiously flamboyant figure of “Quissolini” sank only deeper into general contempt. In 1933 his party had obtained 2.23 per cent, of the total poll, gaining not a single seat, in the Storting. Three years later, despite lavish spending, it polled only* 1.83 per cent. Its extravagance got it into financial difficulties, and thereby it came under German Nazi control.