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 | | Quisling: A Study in Treachery by Hans Fredrik Dahl, Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife (Translator) ISBN-10: 9780521496971 ISBN-10: 0-521-49697-7 ISBN-13: 9780521496971 ISBN-13: 978-0-521-49697-1 Hardcover 1999-06-28 Cambridge University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description The word "Quisling" has been used as a synonym for "traitor" or "treachery." The original Vidkun Quisling (1887-1945) was a gifted Norwegian army officer who sided with the Nazis on the first day of Norway's entry into the Second World War. Dahl's biography is the first to use a complete range of source material from Nordic, German, Italian and Russian archives, and family archives now in the United States tracing Quisling's career through to the drama of his trial and execution for high treason in 1945. | ||
Book Description The word 'Quisling' is used all over the world as a synonym for 'traitor' or 'treachery'. The original Vidkun Quisling (1887 1945) was a gifted Norwegian army officer who sided with the Nazis on the first day of Norway's entry into the Second World War. Dahl's biography is the first to use a complete range of source material from Nordic, German, Italian and Russian archives, and of family archives now in the USA, tracing Quisling's career through to the drama of his trial and execution for high treason in 1945. | ||
Reviews | ||
Quisling was more than an arch collaborator. Because the name Quisling has passed into everyday language, there is a danger we sloganize the historical character. As Dahl makes clear in this scholarly but most readable biography, Quisling was not simply a nazi yes man. His own ideas owed much to Christian fundamentalism and a home grown philosophy called Universalism. He collaborated with Hitler, whom he met far more frequently than the head of any other conquered country, in the hope that he could re-establish Norwegian independence after the war. His dawning realization that this was impossible produced personal hopelessness and made him detested in Norway. He had backed the wrong horse. Dahl is excellent in showing up both the tensions in Quisling himself and in the ruling NS party, itself by no means united. The minister president's own often tortuous dealings with Terboven, the Reich's commissioner in Norway, are particularly well described. Once he realized he would be executed, Quisling put forward the thesis that he would be far more dangerous after his death than during his life. He was wrong about that too. Outside Norway, the family name lives on only in a US medical clinic which his relatives once founded. The name Quisling still means in Madison, Wisconsin good health and well being. This masterly book is a first rate insight into the politics of absolute failure. | ||