NORWAY: Traitor’s Day

Abraham Vidkun Quisling had provided the name for so many other base men that somehow he seemed almost to have lost personality. At the end of the first day of his trial last week in Oslo, only 21 hard-eyed Norwegians turned out to watch him as he was led back to his fortress-prison for the night.

By day, the man whose name had become a word for venal treachery faced nine judges (five of them laymen) in an old Oslo lodge hall. There was no shred of dignity in his defense, only a trace of defiance in his demeanor. He sat lumpily in the prisoner’s box, his reddish, thinning hair unkempt, his neck shrunken in an oversize collar, his blue eyes beady in a suet face.

In sullen silence he listened while Special Prosecutor Annaeus SchjÖdt read the charge—a catalog of shame reaching to high treason and murder.

Careful Case. “What have you to say for yourself, Herr Quisling?” asked the Presiding Judge when cross-examination began. Quisling started from sodden composure, looked out across the heads of the intent, silent courtroom crowd.

“I am Norway’s martyr,” he thundered. The court smiled.

Quisling’s voice dropped to a whisper and there was a glint of cunning in his eyes. He had only wanted, he said, to save Norway from a British attack.

The trial wore on, and a carefully planned case was laid before the judges. Vidkun Quisling was not getting the kangaroo court he richly deserved; this was an orderly procedure with full respect for evidence and the rights of the accused. The judges heard and read diaries, reports, letters, depositions by Nazi leaders now in Allied hands. The man who betrayed Nor way tried to answer them, when there were no answers.

What about his letter to Adolf Hitler urging “a great Germanic community, with Norway’s voluntary affiliation to the Greater German Reich?” he was asked. A forgery, muttered Quisling, the work of “an enemy.”

What about Major Quisling’s refusal to serve in the Norwegian Army at the time of invasion? Quisling’s answer: he could not serve a government he disapproved.

Social Call. What about his visit to Grand Admiral Raeder—when, according to Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, he had offered a plan for Norway’s invasion? Stuttered Quisling: “A social call—a misunderstanding.”

Quisling made a determined effort to keep himself wrapped in the noisome rags of his old preeminence. When he heard testimony that he had left the Royal Palace a rat-ravaged, bottle-strewn shambles, he replied stiffly: “I took care of the Palace very well indeed—you are trying to besmirch my good name.”

More often he was nervous, and his shifty eyes rolled in tears. His bulky chin trembled, his hands twitched and he blushed when he caught the eyes of the judges.

Even Norwegian patience was strained when again & again Quisling said that he did not remember (he did not even remember forming his traitorous government). But that shabby device failed him when he heard his own voice, in a recording of his “inauguration speech,” grating through the courtroom. Said he when the record scratched to an end: “It’s me, all right.”

It was Quisling all right, and nobody pitied him.