QUISLING TRIAL

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21801, 25 August 1945, Page 5

QUISLING TRIAL

USE OF_MONEYi DEALS WITH HITLER EVIDENCE BY GERMAN \ (10 a.m.) LONDON, Aug. 24. When the trial of Vidkun Quisling was resumed yesterday the judge produced accounts showing that the accused since 1542 had personally used 11,000,000 kroner and had granted his friends and members of the party sums totalling 50,000 000 kroner. The judge asked Quisling what salary he had received. The accused attempted to evade the question, but. when pressed, replied: “About half of what the King received.” Quisling claimed that it was not a salary but money for expenses. He maintained that he had saved Norway hundreds of millions of kroner. For example, by paying the Germans he was able to keep 260,000,000 kroner from getting into their hands. The first witness for the prosecution was a German, who said he had heard that a Nazi political officer had negotiated with Quisling to form a new Government on the first day of the Norwegian invasion. Terboven’s Attitude Witness added that the German Commissar for Norway, Herr Terboven, was so tired of squabbling with Quisling in 1940 that he schemed to be given the post of heading the occupation forces of Britain, conquest of which was scheduled for later in the same year. Terboven hated co-operat-ing with Quisling and told friends in Norway he would be better off without a puppet fuhrer, but Hitler ordered that Quisling be retained in power because of the difficulty of administering Norway without help from a Norwegian Government, also because Hitler felt extreme gratitude to Quisling for persuading him to invade Norway, thus forestalling the Allies. The next witness was a Jewish doctor, who gave evidence about the fate of 1000 Norwegian Jews sent to Germany from which only 12 returned. Quisling, who was pale and agitated, told the court he had never heard about German gas chambers for Jews until the trial began.