THE NAME OF TREASON VIDKUN QUISLING

Though his name became a byword for treason, this Norwegian Nazi collaborator maintained his innocence right to the end

- TIM WILLIAMSON

Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe. This applies not only to organised states but to all representatives of that vile race of Quislings who make themselves the tools and agents of the Nazi regime against their fellow-countrymen...” Winston Churchill's June 1941 address after the German invasion of the Soviet Union is one of the first instances of a new descriptor: Quisling. Synonymous with treason, the name in fact belonged to Norwegian fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling.

Born in 1887, Quisling grew up during a period of intense change in Norway. In 1905, the nation’s nearly century-old union with Sweden came to an end and it was in that same year that Quisling enrolled in the military academy in Oslo, graduating at the top of his class. After being appointed to the general staff of the Norwegian army, he was later sent to Petrograd to serve as the nation's military attaché. The Russian Revolution had broken out the previous year, and part of Quisling’s role was reporting back to his superiors on the developing situation.

In 1922, Quisling joined a League of Nations humanitarian mission to Russia and Ukraine, which was in the middle of a famine that killed an estimated five million people. The horrors that Quisling experienced would remain with him, and his reports from his mission detail the desperate and tragic situation on the ground.