Nasjonal Samling

• 1. Introduction

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  Nasjonal Samling began with a deliberate provocation. Its founders chose to celebrate the party's birth on the 17th of May, Norway's own national holiday, even though the actual founding took place four days earlier, on the 13th of May 1933. That small act of appropriation tells you almost everything about what the party was reaching for: a claim on Norwegian identity itself. Vidkun Quisling, a former Minister of Defence, was the man behind it. He gathered a group of supporters, among them Johan Bernhard Hjort, who would briefly lead the party's paramilitary wing before walking away in 1937. The party lasted just twelve years. But in those twelve years it left a mark on Norway that outlasted the Second World War. How did a party that never won a single seat in parliament end up as the only legal party in the country? And what happened to the tens of thousands of Norwegians who joined it?

• 2. Before the War

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  Nasjonal Samling never placed a single member in the Storting, Norway's parliament. Its vote share peaked at just 2.5%, and for a party that poured effort into marches, rallies, and Nordic symbolism, that ceiling must have stung. Yet the established parties in Norway took it seriously enough to refuse any cooperation with it whatsoever. They read Nasjonal Samling as a Norwegian edition of the German Nazis, and they kept their distance accordingly.

  The party's public events were a recurring source of friction. Several marches and rallies were banned outright before the war started. When they did go ahead, communists and socialists showed up to clash physically with the Hird, the party's paramilitary wing. The Hird had been led briefly by Hjort before internal tensions drove him out.

  Those internal tensions were a defining feature of the organisation. Members quarrelled over antisemitism, over anti-Masonry, over questions of religion, and over how closely the party should tie itself to Germany and the Nazis. The disagreements ran deep enough to split the membership into factions. By the time Germany invaded Poland and the wider war began, Nasjonal Samling had roughly 2,000 members.

  Ideologically, the party drew on Romantic nationalism and a firm belief in authoritarian government. Its propaganda leaned heavily on Nordic imagery. The party's own symbol, a golden sun cross on a red background, was presented as the ancient mark of St. Olaf, said to have been painted on his shield. The red and gold also matched the colours of the Norwegian coat of arms, a connection the party was careful to advertise.

• 3. The Coup That Failed

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  On the 9th of April 1940, German forces invaded Norway. Later that same day, Quisling walked into the studios of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation in Oslo and read a proclamation over the air. He named himself Prime Minister and ordered every Norwegian to stop resisting the Germans immediately. His argument was that Germany was simply providing Norway with peaceful help after Allied forces had mined Norwegian waters, and that the sitting Prime Minister, Johan Nygaardsvold, had irresponsibly abandoned his post.

  It did not work. King Haakon VII was in unoccupied territory with the Nygaardsvold government, and he made his position plain: he would rather abdicate than appoint any cabinet headed by Quisling. Nygaardsvold's government refused to resign in Quisling's favour and confirmed that armed resistance would continue. With no popular base and no royal endorsement, the German occupation forces quickly pushed Quisling aside.

  The Germans then installed a civilian caretaker government, the Administrasjonsrådet, appointed by the Supreme Court. That arrangement did not last either. Reichskommissar Josef Terboven took control, forming a government of his own design with most of its ministers drawn from Nasjonal Samling's ranks. Quisling himself was too controversial, both among Norwegians and among the occupiers, to be given a formal role straight away. He waited until the 1st of February 1942 before being named minister president of what was called the national government.

• 4. Power Under Occupation

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  Among the ministers Terboven assembled, three stood out. Jonas Lie became minister of police and, from 1941, also headed the Norwegian wing of the SS. Gulbrand Lunde held the portfolio for popular enlightenment and propaganda. The third was Albert Viljam Hagelin, an opera singer by trade, who served as Minister of Home Affairs.

  The NS administration had genuine day-to-day authority over civilian affairs. But the real power rested with Terboven, who answered only to Adolf Hitler. Quisling's government was a layer of Norwegian-facing administration sitting beneath German command.

  Membership in Nasjonal Samling surged during these years. In December 1940 the rolls held 22,000 members. By November 1943 that number had peaked at around 44,000. The party that had struggled to win 2.5% of the vote before the war was now the only legal party in Norway, a status it held from 1942 to 1945.

  Through it all, the 30-point programme that Quisling himself had undersigned on the 15th of February 1934 sat in the background. It called for a national government free from party politics, for equal respect for brain-work and manual labour, for protected private property within a planned economic framework, and for the state to fund pupils with special gifts. Point 25 demanded that the press, theatres, cinemas, and broadcasting serve national interests and that anti-social propaganda be banned. Point 30 called for Norway to seek connections worldwide with peoples related in culture, race, and interests.

• 5. Reckoning After 1945

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  On the 8th of May 1945, the war in Europe ended and Nasjonal Samling was immediately made illegal and disbanded. What followed was one of the largest legal proceedings in Norwegian history. Nearly 50,000 people were brought to trial as collaborators. Roughly half received prison sentences.

  Quilsing was executed for treason, along with a handful of other prominent NS members. Several German officials who had served in Norway were also executed, their sentences tied to war crimes charges. The legal basis for those executions, however, attracted lasting criticism. Norway did not maintain capital punishment in peacetime, and the Norwegian constitution of the time stipulated that the death penalty for war crimes had to be carried out during actual wartime. Whether the executions fell on the right side of that boundary became a contested legal question.

  A separate and equally unresolved controversy attached itself to the author Knut Hamsun. Hamsun had never joined Nasjonal Samling, but he was a well-known sympathiser. After the war, the authorities found him mentally unfit to stand trial, and the question of what he had done and why was never fully examined in a courtroom. Hamsun's status as a Nobel Prize laureate made the subject particularly sensitive. The debate around him continued long after the last NS member had served a sentence, keeping the party's legacy alive in Norwegian cultural life in a way no trial verdict could settle.