rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

THE CONQUEST OF DENMARK AND NORWAY 607on the excuse of maintaining communications, to completely cut off Germany’ssupply of Swedish iron ore. ∗ Moreover, the Western Allies would outflank theReich on the north. Admiral Raeder was not backward in reminding Hitler ofthese threats.The chief of the German Navy had now found in Norway itself a valuableally for his designs in the person of Major Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Quisling,whose name would soon become a synonym in almost all languages for a traitor.THE EMERGENCE OF VIDKUN QUISLINGQuisling had begun life honorably enough. Bom in 1887 of peasant stock, hehad graduated first in his class at the Norwegian Military Academy and whilestill in his twenties had been sent to Petrograd as military attache. For hisservices in looking after British interests after diplomatic relations were brokenwith the Bolshevik government, Great Britain awarded him the C.B.E. At thistime he was both pro-British and pro-Bolshevik. He remained in Soviet Russiafor some time as assistant to Fridtjof Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer andhumanitarian, in Russian relief work.So impressed had the young Norwegian Army officer been by the success ofthe Communists in Russia that when he returned to Oslo he offered his servicesto the Labor Party, which at that time was a member of the Comintern, Heproposed that he establish a ”Red Guard,” but the Labor Party was suspiciousof him and his project and turned him down, He then veered to the oppositeextreme. After serving as Minister of Defense from 1931 to 1933, he founded inMay of the latter year a fascist party called Nasjonal Samling – National Union –appropriating the ideology and tactics of the Nazis, who had just come to powerin Germany. But Nazism did not thrive in the fertile democratic soil of Norway.Quisling was unable even to get himself elected to Parliament. Defeated at thepolls by his own people, he turned to Nazi Germany.There he established contact with Alfred Rosenberg, the befuddled officialphilosopher of the Nazi movement, among whose jobs was that of chief of theparty’s Office for Foreign Affairs. This Baltic dolt, one of Hitler’s earliest mentors,thought he saw possibilities in the Norwegian officer, for one of Rosenberg’spet fantasies was the establishment of a great Nordic Empire from which theJews and other ”impure” races would be excluded and which eventually woulddominate the world under Nazi German leadership. From 1933 on, he kept intouch with Quisling and heaped on him his nonsensical philosophy and propaganda.In June 1939, as the war clouds gathered over Europe, Quisling took theoccasion of his attendance at a convention of the Nordic Society at Luebeckto ask Rosenberg for something more than ideological support. According tothe latter’s confidential reports, which were produced at Nuremberg, Quislingwarned Rosenberg of the danger of Britain’s getting control of Norway in the∗ It was a correct assumption. It is now known that the Allied Supreme War Council,meeting in Paris on February 5, 1940, decided that in sending an expeditionary force toFinland the Swedish iron fields should be occupied by troops landed at Narvik, which wasbut a short distance from the mines. (See the author’s The Challenge of Scandinavia, pp.115-16n.) Churchill remarks that at the meeting it was decided ”incidentally to get control ofthe Gullivare ore-field.” (The Gathering Storm, p. 560.)