May 1945, Quisling makes a run for it...
- Thread starter Cryptic
- Start date
usertron2020
Donor
I only meant that German victory in Norway WAS a VERY near run thing, and ANY sabotage done to the Norwegian war effort would be devastating, even if on a seemingly small scale (in the grand scheme of things).
And he was a traitor, so any little bit more on the list of charges against him will help.
Very good point.
Why not? It's not like the Germans ever thought much of Quisling to begin with. OTOH, Doenitz IS a fervent Nazi. OTOH again, Doenitz escaped the gallows by the skin of his teeth (Nimitz's testimony is what really saved him), but still got 21 years in Spandau Prison.
Hope it didn't seem like I was pro-Quisling or anything. I know he was a traitor though he thought he was doing the right thing.And he was a traitor, so any little bit more on the list of charges against him will help.
Keep in mind the Germans burning down the towns of Finnmark to deny cover for the Soviet armies who occupied the area. Whites would probably want to keep away from them.
I dont think so. Doenitz had sense of honor. With the possible exception of blatant Einsatzgruppen or Mengele types, I dont think Doenitz would give up anybody for his personal gain. He would sacrifice one person to help Germany as a whole, but the allies would need to offer something huge.
Thanks for the tip.
Agreed. Some other top German leaders might have been less scrupulous, but Karl Dönitz wouldn't unless he felt he had a good reason for it.
May 24- August 01, 1945
Trouble in Paradise, and new subjective fears for Quisling in his new home...:
Quisling heart started to hammer, the entire German provisional government had been arrested, just days after he arrived at the refugee encampment. Those arrested undoubtably included Admiral Doenitz and perhaps even the Kapitan Zur See who escorted him to the refugee camp.
Quisling’s first impulse was to flee – but where to and how? And objectively Why? In all probably, neither Doenitz not the Kapitan would reveal his identity. The encampment’s impoverished inhabitants (nothing to trade) and traumatized East Prussian women kept bored and loitering off duty British soldiers away. To discourage entry for any reason by either British troops or enterprising local Germans, all deceased, regardless of actual cause, were labeled as “infectious” and trundled out past the British check point. The real and imaginary infectious diseases together with the mud kept British patrols to a minimum- and the men in these patrols rarely left their jeeps.
- To flee or not to flee, Quisling makes a decision....
Quisling stayed, at least for now. He was assigned as a medical orderly to the infectious disease tents (real reclusive). The other medical staff did not have “inquiring minds” and Quisling threw himself into his work – even hacking through German medical texts books in his free time.
June 03 – August 03, 1945
Colonel Bjorn Aaberg's fishing in Sweden and Germany is snagged by red tape:
Colonel Aaberg's proposal of a special liasion to Sweden and the deployment of Norweigan teams to Germany was greeted with loud enthusiasm - everybody wanted Quisling and the other fleeing fascists found. But when wanting to find Quisling needed to turn into actually trying to find him, red tape suddenly appeared. The Red Tape dispensers insisted that Swedish possibilities be exhausted first – but how does one prove a negative? The Swedes guarded their sovereignty zealously. No foreigners could interrogate or be present during interrogations of detained Swedish fascists or Norweigans. No foreigners could direct or oversee the arrests of even non Swedes, let alone Swedes. No foreigners could review internal Swedish files for possible leads... .
Fishing in Sweden comes to a close...
- Sufficiently exhausting Swedish possibilities took 8 long slow weeks. It would have taken even longer had not Colonel Aaberg employed a Swedish private security firm that “nudged” reluctant fascists to volunteer information by threats of exposure or blackmail regarding infidelities, tax evasions etc.
Trouble in Paradise, and new subjective fears for Quisling in his new home...:
Quisling heart started to hammer, the entire German provisional government had been arrested, just days after he arrived at the refugee encampment. Those arrested undoubtably included Admiral Doenitz and perhaps even the Kapitan Zur See who escorted him to the refugee camp.
Quisling’s first impulse was to flee – but where to and how? And objectively Why? In all probably, neither Doenitz not the Kapitan would reveal his identity. The encampment’s impoverished inhabitants (nothing to trade) and traumatized East Prussian women kept bored and loitering off duty British soldiers away. To discourage entry for any reason by either British troops or enterprising local Germans, all deceased, regardless of actual cause, were labeled as “infectious” and trundled out past the British check point. The real and imaginary infectious diseases together with the mud kept British patrols to a minimum- and the men in these patrols rarely left their jeeps.
- To flee or not to flee, Quisling makes a decision....
Quisling stayed, at least for now. He was assigned as a medical orderly to the infectious disease tents (real reclusive). The other medical staff did not have “inquiring minds” and Quisling threw himself into his work – even hacking through German medical texts books in his free time.
June 03 – August 03, 1945
Colonel Bjorn Aaberg's fishing in Sweden and Germany is snagged by red tape:
Colonel Aaberg's proposal of a special liasion to Sweden and the deployment of Norweigan teams to Germany was greeted with loud enthusiasm - everybody wanted Quisling and the other fleeing fascists found. But when wanting to find Quisling needed to turn into actually trying to find him, red tape suddenly appeared. The Red Tape dispensers insisted that Swedish possibilities be exhausted first – but how does one prove a negative? The Swedes guarded their sovereignty zealously. No foreigners could interrogate or be present during interrogations of detained Swedish fascists or Norweigans. No foreigners could direct or oversee the arrests of even non Swedes, let alone Swedes. No foreigners could review internal Swedish files for possible leads... .
Fishing in Sweden comes to a close...
- Sufficiently exhausting Swedish possibilities took 8 long slow weeks. It would have taken even longer had not Colonel Aaberg employed a Swedish private security firm that “nudged” reluctant fascists to volunteer information by threats of exposure or blackmail regarding infidelities, tax evasions etc.
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I'm really starting to like this Colonel Aaberg a lot. He's being hindered by the bureaucracy, but he's still managing to produce results.
Ireland might be a good place to hide.
The Second World War and the Holocaust are very much alive, even 60 years after the end of the war. Cathal O’Shannon joined the RAF as a teenager towards the end of the war, joining tens of thousands of Irish men and women who, for a variety of reasons, chose to leave neutral Ireland and join the war effort. O’Shannon, the son of a Labour politician, is obviously one of the many for whom membership of the British armed services was a way of joining the fight against Nazism. In this film he recalled his annoyance at the fact that he was forbidden to wear his uniform when home on leave in Dublin. While accepting neutrality as a fact, O’Shannon, like many of his contemporaries, was and remains rather uneasy about the political and moral compromise involved in this studious maintenance of an official policy of even-handedness. Beyond the legalistic attitude maintained by de Valera’s wartime government lay an altogether more unpalatable truth, which O’Shannon, with all the panache of an investigative journalist, revealed in two one-hour films exploring the way in which Irish neutrality left a post-war legacy, as large numbers of European fascists, some of them notorious war criminals, were able to find permanent or temporary refuge in post-war Ireland. The controversial nature of the revelations even at this remove was shown by the efforts of the widow of Albert Folens, one of the subjects of the film, to prevent it from being broadcast.
The main theme of Ireland’s Nazis is the use of Ireland as a safe haven or refuge for a number of fugitive Nazis in the immediate post-war era, but some attention is paid
Oliver J. Flanagan—when an initiative was mooted in 1943 to accept 500 Jewish children from France, de Valera denied that they were Jewish when challanged by Flanagan. (RTÉ Stills Library)
to the development of attitudes towards war crimes and the Holocaust in Irish official circles before the end of the war. Brian Girvan and Bryan Fanning gave important insights into Irish political attitudes in this area. By the later stages of the war, news of the genocidal conduct of the Germans and their Continental allies towards Jews and other ethnic communities was becoming widely known across Europe. Something of this lay behind an initiative in 1943 to accept 500 Jewish children from France, as German pressure on French Jews increased. It is a testimony to the existence of a deep-rooted, if probably semi-conscious, anti-Semitism in Irish society that de Valera, when challenged by Oliver J. Flanagan in the Dáil, denied that the children were Jewish. The delay caused by the political sensitivities on this question meant that nothing was done to rescue the children. A similar failure of nerve even before the war ensured that Ireland provided refuge for only a very small number of European Jews. One of the most interesting details in the film was the revelation of anti-Semitic attitudes in officialdom. Charles Bewley in the Department of External Affairs was probably the most outspoken, but more effective was the way in which Peter Berry succeeded in quietly sabotaging efforts to accept Jewish refugees, despite his friendship with the Jewish TD Bob Briscoe—and indeed his assurances to Briscoe that he was doing his best to have the Jews admitted.
Berry’s duplicity and the attitudes of the likes of Bewley and Flanagan must form part of the context that permitted Ireland to serve as an escape route for the German, Breton, Belgian and Croatian fascists who featured in the film. What is also clear, however, is that wartime neutrality extended into Ireland’s attitude to the post-war world. As Girvan pointed out, Irish officialdom remained narrowly focused on a legalistic view of the war that seemed to lack any real sense of moral outrage at the revelations of war crimes that quickly emerged after 1945. In this context, as well as in the inevitable chaos of post-war Europe, some quite serious war criminals, along with smaller fry, were able to use Ireland to escape retribution. The worst, and also the most intriguing, case was the escape to Ireland of Andrija Artukovic. As minister of the interior in the pro-Axis Ustase regime in Croatia during the war, Artukovic organised genocidal killings, chiefly of Orthodox Serbs, involving horrific barbarity. Despite being captured by the British in 1945, he was released and reached Switzerlad via Salzburg in 1946, probably through contacts in the Catholic Church, which had provided important support in Croatia to the Ustase regime. In Berne Artukovic, under an assumed name, was given papers by the Irish consulate and arrived in Dublin in July 1947. He was able to live quietly in Rathgar for a year, before moving to the USA, where he lived until he was finally extradited to Yugoslavia in 1985. The file on Artukovic in the Department of Foreign Affairs is still classified. If there is a hidden history here, then we are still a long way from an explanation. At this point the film might well have recalled the long involvement of Hubert Butler with this and other Croatian matters (‘Yugoslav papers: the church and its opponents’ (1947); ‘The sub-prefect should have held his tongue’ (1956); ‘The Artukovitch file’ (1970), in Independent spirit: essays (New York, 1996)). Butler raised important questions about the church’s role in wartime Croatia, which earned him considerable vilification in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.
Otto Skorzeny, the man who sprung Mussolini from Allied captivity, one of the lesser Nazis who found refuge in Ireland. (National Archives, UK)
The case of Artukovic is the most important one dealt with by the film, but O’Shannon exposed other quite serious cases, including that of Pieter Menten, who, as well as organising a massacre in eastern Poland, organised the murder of his Jewish friends to facilitate his looting of their property. Menten was able to maintain a peaceful country retreat in County Waterford, stuffed with valuable works of art, until his arrest in Switzerland in 1986. The Breton nationalist Celestin Laine, who commanded a Breton militia, the Bezen Perrot, which operated as an auxiliary unit of the SS and was particularly effective against the Resistance in Britanny, may have been in touch with the Irish consulate in Paris before his arrival in Ireland in 1947. Laine, an admirer of the IRA, was able to live quite freely in Ireland, and some interesting archive footage survives from the 1970s.
Apart from these cases, O’Shannon’s film produces a number of lesser figures who variously managed to find an escape hatch in Ireland after the war. Two of them—Albert Folens, the schoolbook publisher, and Albert Luykx, the sinister businessman who was involved the arms trial crisis of 1969–70—were Belgian collaborators. Folens was sentenced to ten years in prison for SS activities, while Luykx was sentenced to death, but both managed to get to Ireland using an escape route organised by Trappist monks in Belgium. Some of those who featured, such as Helmut Clissmann, Otto Skorzeny and Staf Van Welthoven, seem rather harmless, or even attractive, by comparison with the likes of Artukovic and Menten. Perhaps the journalist’s desire to tell a good story won out over the maintenance of proportion in the latter stages of the film, but there is clearly a lot more to be known about the attitudes and conduct of both church and state in the aftermath of World War II.
Eamon O’Flaherty lectures in history at University College Dublin.
http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/tv-eye-irelands-nazis/
Nazis In Ireland (Part 1 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHP9ZJ75zyk
Nazis In Ireland (Part 2 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSdJ0WwqP-8
Nazis In Ireland (Part 3 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC2XA3N9cTQ
Nazis In Ireland (Part 4 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-_BiLxhIc
Nazis In Ireland (Part 5 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUsvQMVNKP4
The Second World War and the Holocaust are very much alive, even 60 years after the end of the war. Cathal O’Shannon joined the RAF as a teenager towards the end of the war, joining tens of thousands of Irish men and women who, for a variety of reasons, chose to leave neutral Ireland and join the war effort. O’Shannon, the son of a Labour politician, is obviously one of the many for whom membership of the British armed services was a way of joining the fight against Nazism. In this film he recalled his annoyance at the fact that he was forbidden to wear his uniform when home on leave in Dublin. While accepting neutrality as a fact, O’Shannon, like many of his contemporaries, was and remains rather uneasy about the political and moral compromise involved in this studious maintenance of an official policy of even-handedness. Beyond the legalistic attitude maintained by de Valera’s wartime government lay an altogether more unpalatable truth, which O’Shannon, with all the panache of an investigative journalist, revealed in two one-hour films exploring the way in which Irish neutrality left a post-war legacy, as large numbers of European fascists, some of them notorious war criminals, were able to find permanent or temporary refuge in post-war Ireland. The controversial nature of the revelations even at this remove was shown by the efforts of the widow of Albert Folens, one of the subjects of the film, to prevent it from being broadcast.
The main theme of Ireland’s Nazis is the use of Ireland as a safe haven or refuge for a number of fugitive Nazis in the immediate post-war era, but some attention is paid
to the development of attitudes towards war crimes and the Holocaust in Irish official circles before the end of the war. Brian Girvan and Bryan Fanning gave important insights into Irish political attitudes in this area. By the later stages of the war, news of the genocidal conduct of the Germans and their Continental allies towards Jews and other ethnic communities was becoming widely known across Europe. Something of this lay behind an initiative in 1943 to accept 500 Jewish children from France, as German pressure on French Jews increased. It is a testimony to the existence of a deep-rooted, if probably semi-conscious, anti-Semitism in Irish society that de Valera, when challenged by Oliver J. Flanagan in the Dáil, denied that the children were Jewish. The delay caused by the political sensitivities on this question meant that nothing was done to rescue the children. A similar failure of nerve even before the war ensured that Ireland provided refuge for only a very small number of European Jews. One of the most interesting details in the film was the revelation of anti-Semitic attitudes in officialdom. Charles Bewley in the Department of External Affairs was probably the most outspoken, but more effective was the way in which Peter Berry succeeded in quietly sabotaging efforts to accept Jewish refugees, despite his friendship with the Jewish TD Bob Briscoe—and indeed his assurances to Briscoe that he was doing his best to have the Jews admitted.
Berry’s duplicity and the attitudes of the likes of Bewley and Flanagan must form part of the context that permitted Ireland to serve as an escape route for the German, Breton, Belgian and Croatian fascists who featured in the film. What is also clear, however, is that wartime neutrality extended into Ireland’s attitude to the post-war world. As Girvan pointed out, Irish officialdom remained narrowly focused on a legalistic view of the war that seemed to lack any real sense of moral outrage at the revelations of war crimes that quickly emerged after 1945. In this context, as well as in the inevitable chaos of post-war Europe, some quite serious war criminals, along with smaller fry, were able to use Ireland to escape retribution. The worst, and also the most intriguing, case was the escape to Ireland of Andrija Artukovic. As minister of the interior in the pro-Axis Ustase regime in Croatia during the war, Artukovic organised genocidal killings, chiefly of Orthodox Serbs, involving horrific barbarity. Despite being captured by the British in 1945, he was released and reached Switzerlad via Salzburg in 1946, probably through contacts in the Catholic Church, which had provided important support in Croatia to the Ustase regime. In Berne Artukovic, under an assumed name, was given papers by the Irish consulate and arrived in Dublin in July 1947. He was able to live quietly in Rathgar for a year, before moving to the USA, where he lived until he was finally extradited to Yugoslavia in 1985. The file on Artukovic in the Department of Foreign Affairs is still classified. If there is a hidden history here, then we are still a long way from an explanation. At this point the film might well have recalled the long involvement of Hubert Butler with this and other Croatian matters (‘Yugoslav papers: the church and its opponents’ (1947); ‘The sub-prefect should have held his tongue’ (1956); ‘The Artukovitch file’ (1970), in Independent spirit: essays (New York, 1996)). Butler raised important questions about the church’s role in wartime Croatia, which earned him considerable vilification in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.
The case of Artukovic is the most important one dealt with by the film, but O’Shannon exposed other quite serious cases, including that of Pieter Menten, who, as well as organising a massacre in eastern Poland, organised the murder of his Jewish friends to facilitate his looting of their property. Menten was able to maintain a peaceful country retreat in County Waterford, stuffed with valuable works of art, until his arrest in Switzerland in 1986. The Breton nationalist Celestin Laine, who commanded a Breton militia, the Bezen Perrot, which operated as an auxiliary unit of the SS and was particularly effective against the Resistance in Britanny, may have been in touch with the Irish consulate in Paris before his arrival in Ireland in 1947. Laine, an admirer of the IRA, was able to live quite freely in Ireland, and some interesting archive footage survives from the 1970s.
Apart from these cases, O’Shannon’s film produces a number of lesser figures who variously managed to find an escape hatch in Ireland after the war. Two of them—Albert Folens, the schoolbook publisher, and Albert Luykx, the sinister businessman who was involved the arms trial crisis of 1969–70—were Belgian collaborators. Folens was sentenced to ten years in prison for SS activities, while Luykx was sentenced to death, but both managed to get to Ireland using an escape route organised by Trappist monks in Belgium. Some of those who featured, such as Helmut Clissmann, Otto Skorzeny and Staf Van Welthoven, seem rather harmless, or even attractive, by comparison with the likes of Artukovic and Menten. Perhaps the journalist’s desire to tell a good story won out over the maintenance of proportion in the latter stages of the film, but there is clearly a lot more to be known about the attitudes and conduct of both church and state in the aftermath of World War II.
Eamon O’Flaherty lectures in history at University College Dublin.
http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/tv-eye-irelands-nazis/
Nazis In Ireland (Part 1 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHP9ZJ75zyk
Nazis In Ireland (Part 2 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSdJ0WwqP-8
Nazis In Ireland (Part 3 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC2XA3N9cTQ
Nazis In Ireland (Part 4 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-_BiLxhIc
Nazis In Ireland (Part 5 of 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUsvQMVNKP4
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While Ireland was not very friendly to Jewish emigration there was one exception.
In 1939 Erwin Schrödinger received a personal invitation from Ireland's Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, to reside in Ireland and agree to help establish an Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin.[10] He moved to Clontarf, Dublin, became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics in 1940 and remained there for 17 years. He became a naturalized Irish citizen in 1948, but retained his Austrian citizenship. He wrote about 50 further publications on various topics, including his explorations of unified field theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schrödinger
In 1939 Erwin Schrödinger received a personal invitation from Ireland's Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, to reside in Ireland and agree to help establish an Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin.[10] He moved to Clontarf, Dublin, became the Director of the School for Theoretical Physics in 1940 and remained there for 17 years. He became a naturalized Irish citizen in 1948, but retained his Austrian citizenship. He wrote about 50 further publications on various topics, including his explorations of unified field theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schrödinger
It's amazing what this forum does to the mind. Seeing as Otto is the go-to guy when anybody needs an underhand operation which probably drives an armoured train through the Geneva Conventions, I immediately
'd at his name. Then again, his role in the Bulge isn't mentioned.All in all, that's quite a list of the bad and the ugly of Europe...
All, thanks for the continued interest.
August 01- September 01, 1945
Quisling is spotted!…
Two groups of British soldiers rapidly entered the camp and actually dismounted from their jeeps. One group advanced on the camp’s paltry medical area. The second group advanced on the shanty housing the unofficial mayor of the camp and his token staff.
Both the “mayor” and the German physicians were interrogated. A British medical team, with the German physicians in tow, inspected the medical area noting shortcomings. A panicked Quisling barely had time to don a gauze mask. Fortunatly, the British medical officer was a doctor, and like most doctors, had little professional interest in people who were not. He walked up to a shanty and glanced in at the makeshift beds, noting the smell, the coughing inhabitants, and the busy orderly. A German doctor explained the shanty’s use. He then moved on to another while announcing that future inspections would be made.
Meanwhile, the “mayor” was informed that British troops would register all male adults. Those with valuable skills: masons, carpenters and electricians would be fed and assigned to work details in other towns clearing rubble and rehabilitating damaged housing.
Nets are cast in Germany, but the sea is so big….
Col Aaberg was finally permitted to send teams to Germany. But where to fish, and what gear to use? For Aaberg, that depended on how the fish got to Germany, and then whether or not he swam alone (in all probability, the fish had direct assistance from somebody), and whether he continued to swim, or went to ground.
Aaberg obtained a map of Germany. He would pursue both possibilities. Norweigan teams would liaison with British occupation forces in Hamburg, Frensburg, Bremerhaven and Kiel. They would look for Quisling and try to identify is escape method and those who assisted him. Other teams would be deployed to German towns bordering Switzerland and Italy. Aaberg himself would then explore possibilities of hiring local “private investigators”.
Quisling hits the road…
Finally, the Western allies had allowed limited official movement of refugee Germans between occupation zones. This was done out of humanitarian concerns and practical fears of desperate Germans doing desperate things with weapons post surrender. Quisling knew he had to leave and the camp Physician ensured he was able to. Quisling’s group of two thousand refugees with relatives in the American Zone was to march to a collection point, join a larger group and then board trains.
A changed Battalion
As all volunteers, they had once been comprised of Canada’s best. Since June 1944, they had performed accordingly, fighting from the beaches, into the hedgerows and with huge effort, through an eerie division of brainwashed teenagers indoctrinated towards sociopathy. Then came the brutal and physically exhausting Battle of the Sheldt.
By 1945, most of the original men were dead or wounded and the number of genuine volunteers trickled down as most Canadians interested in overseas service were already overseas. The shortage of replacements triggered a minor political / copnscription crisis back home. The solution to the conscription issue was that a growing number “volunteers”- coerced jailbirds, Walter Mittys, and similar ilk were sent to Europe.
The result was two understrength Canadian infantry companies comprised of a small number of veterans, and a growing number of new arrivals with discipline / motivation problems assigned to screen refugee trains for wanted criminals. There were just too many refugees for the companies – even if they had been full strength and fully motivated. As an older man after the big Nurenburg fish had been caught, Quisling was not even glanced at as he climbed into a box car.
August 01- September 01, 1945
Quisling is spotted!…
Two groups of British soldiers rapidly entered the camp and actually dismounted from their jeeps. One group advanced on the camp’s paltry medical area. The second group advanced on the shanty housing the unofficial mayor of the camp and his token staff.
Both the “mayor” and the German physicians were interrogated. A British medical team, with the German physicians in tow, inspected the medical area noting shortcomings. A panicked Quisling barely had time to don a gauze mask. Fortunatly, the British medical officer was a doctor, and like most doctors, had little professional interest in people who were not. He walked up to a shanty and glanced in at the makeshift beds, noting the smell, the coughing inhabitants, and the busy orderly. A German doctor explained the shanty’s use. He then moved on to another while announcing that future inspections would be made.
Meanwhile, the “mayor” was informed that British troops would register all male adults. Those with valuable skills: masons, carpenters and electricians would be fed and assigned to work details in other towns clearing rubble and rehabilitating damaged housing.
Nets are cast in Germany, but the sea is so big….
Col Aaberg was finally permitted to send teams to Germany. But where to fish, and what gear to use? For Aaberg, that depended on how the fish got to Germany, and then whether or not he swam alone (in all probability, the fish had direct assistance from somebody), and whether he continued to swim, or went to ground.
Aaberg obtained a map of Germany. He would pursue both possibilities. Norweigan teams would liaison with British occupation forces in Hamburg, Frensburg, Bremerhaven and Kiel. They would look for Quisling and try to identify is escape method and those who assisted him. Other teams would be deployed to German towns bordering Switzerland and Italy. Aaberg himself would then explore possibilities of hiring local “private investigators”.
Quisling hits the road…
Finally, the Western allies had allowed limited official movement of refugee Germans between occupation zones. This was done out of humanitarian concerns and practical fears of desperate Germans doing desperate things with weapons post surrender. Quisling knew he had to leave and the camp Physician ensured he was able to. Quisling’s group of two thousand refugees with relatives in the American Zone was to march to a collection point, join a larger group and then board trains.
A changed Battalion
As all volunteers, they had once been comprised of Canada’s best. Since June 1944, they had performed accordingly, fighting from the beaches, into the hedgerows and with huge effort, through an eerie division of brainwashed teenagers indoctrinated towards sociopathy. Then came the brutal and physically exhausting Battle of the Sheldt.
By 1945, most of the original men were dead or wounded and the number of genuine volunteers trickled down as most Canadians interested in overseas service were already overseas. The shortage of replacements triggered a minor political / copnscription crisis back home. The solution to the conscription issue was that a growing number “volunteers”- coerced jailbirds, Walter Mittys, and similar ilk were sent to Europe.
The result was two understrength Canadian infantry companies comprised of a small number of veterans, and a growing number of new arrivals with discipline / motivation problems assigned to screen refugee trains for wanted criminals. There were just too many refugees for the companies – even if they had been full strength and fully motivated. As an older man after the big Nurenburg fish had been caught, Quisling was not even glanced at as he climbed into a box car.
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No matter what, if he gets caught anywhere that will extradite him, the very best fate he can then expect is that he does get extradited to Norway, and the Norwegians give him the fair trial they did OTL and then execute him. The alternative is that he might get roped in with the Nuremberg defendants instead and then--he might live longer as the trials dragged on some years and he'd be nowhere near the top of the list; but he could hardly expect a more objective trial or sentence there than in Norway. Just a delayed one.
Delay may help him a bit--rather it might if he were lower on the ladder of the collaborationist setup; from what I read there was controversy in Norway that continues to this day about whether the justice meted out to the collaborators was really up to Norwegian standards, he might benefit, if he were some subaltern, from this sentiment after the major wave of prosecutions had happened.
But he wasn't some subaltern. He was the traitor in chief. That's my understanding of his basic crime anyway, that he willfully betrayed Norway to Nazi dictatorship--he betrayed his king, he betrayed the legitimate government, and he betrayed the Norwegian people. His OTL defense at the trial he got was that he did his best to mitigate Nazi extremism and sought the best outcome for Norway. But that argument is compromised by the fact that he betrayed the nation in the first place because he believed Norway should be a version of Nazi Germany. He didn't care for all Norwegians, only those he considered suitably "Nordic" in background and behavior, and disregarded the fact that his Norwegian fascist movement never came close to commanding the respect of most Norwegians. What he was saying there was that a small authoritarian clique could overrule both the solid majority of Norwegians and their established royal authority--in the name of the same insane and cruel vision that had enslaved first Germany and then for a harrowing time the whole continent.
So the fact that he was in fact a pathetic puppet who could accomplish nothing without Nazi approval was a secondary thing; had he got his own way, a Norwegian Hitler is what he would have been anyway. Unlike Hitler he didn't even have the power to accomplish that.
As Nazis go, I think it's fair to say he wasn't the worst of them. As collaborators go, there were uglier ones than him. In a room full of Nazis and their lackeys from all over Europe, he does look rather relatively less vicious--more Scandinavian one might say!
As Nazis go. As Norwegians of the war years went, as they demonstrated in their many great and small acts of courage and forbearance--he was a damn Nazi, who proposed to "cleanse" his people of what they had most to be proud of.
So delay in getting caught, for him, is just an unjustified, stolen stay of execution. Ten or twenty years later, I imagine he'd still be brought to stand trial in Oslo, and there the court would sentence him as severely as it could. It might be that by then the nation would have renounced the death penalty that they revived solely for the purpose of punishing Quisling's most egregious followers, and would not have applied it, leaving him instead to hard time in prison for the rest of his life.
And so it might be, if he were caught later, that his captors might not deliver him to Norwegian justice. Just imagine what a Soviet court might have made of his case, or conceivably an Israeli one.
He'd better run, if he wants to live, and keep running, and keep his head down.
I can believe that the worst of men can have moral epiphanies, and grow, and no longer be the same villains they once were. If that happens to Vidkun Quisling over the rest of his stolen life--the only thing for him to do would be to turn himself in in Norway, and fully expect a just death sentence to be passed.
But I would not bet on it. Quisling's relative softness, that might look like gentleness-that would be that, for the classes of people he regarded as properly human--was apparently based on a cocoon of denial. If he lacked the brutality of a Himmler or Goebbels, it was because he lacked their twisted and wry realism, and did not follow fully through on the logic of the brutal world-view they all embraced. He embraced it, enough to chill and poison his soul, but at arm's length, perhaps--with a wrinkled nose and eyes averted. That may have saved him from being the worst of Nazis, but I fear it would also prevent him from ever facing full on just what he had done and how much he would have to atone for, if he were given the time to do it.
Delay may help him a bit--rather it might if he were lower on the ladder of the collaborationist setup; from what I read there was controversy in Norway that continues to this day about whether the justice meted out to the collaborators was really up to Norwegian standards, he might benefit, if he were some subaltern, from this sentiment after the major wave of prosecutions had happened.
But he wasn't some subaltern. He was the traitor in chief. That's my understanding of his basic crime anyway, that he willfully betrayed Norway to Nazi dictatorship--he betrayed his king, he betrayed the legitimate government, and he betrayed the Norwegian people. His OTL defense at the trial he got was that he did his best to mitigate Nazi extremism and sought the best outcome for Norway. But that argument is compromised by the fact that he betrayed the nation in the first place because he believed Norway should be a version of Nazi Germany. He didn't care for all Norwegians, only those he considered suitably "Nordic" in background and behavior, and disregarded the fact that his Norwegian fascist movement never came close to commanding the respect of most Norwegians. What he was saying there was that a small authoritarian clique could overrule both the solid majority of Norwegians and their established royal authority--in the name of the same insane and cruel vision that had enslaved first Germany and then for a harrowing time the whole continent.
So the fact that he was in fact a pathetic puppet who could accomplish nothing without Nazi approval was a secondary thing; had he got his own way, a Norwegian Hitler is what he would have been anyway. Unlike Hitler he didn't even have the power to accomplish that.
As Nazis go, I think it's fair to say he wasn't the worst of them. As collaborators go, there were uglier ones than him. In a room full of Nazis and their lackeys from all over Europe, he does look rather relatively less vicious--more Scandinavian one might say!
As Nazis go. As Norwegians of the war years went, as they demonstrated in their many great and small acts of courage and forbearance--he was a damn Nazi, who proposed to "cleanse" his people of what they had most to be proud of.
So delay in getting caught, for him, is just an unjustified, stolen stay of execution. Ten or twenty years later, I imagine he'd still be brought to stand trial in Oslo, and there the court would sentence him as severely as it could. It might be that by then the nation would have renounced the death penalty that they revived solely for the purpose of punishing Quisling's most egregious followers, and would not have applied it, leaving him instead to hard time in prison for the rest of his life.
And so it might be, if he were caught later, that his captors might not deliver him to Norwegian justice. Just imagine what a Soviet court might have made of his case, or conceivably an Israeli one.
He'd better run, if he wants to live, and keep running, and keep his head down.
I can believe that the worst of men can have moral epiphanies, and grow, and no longer be the same villains they once were. If that happens to Vidkun Quisling over the rest of his stolen life--the only thing for him to do would be to turn himself in in Norway, and fully expect a just death sentence to be passed.
But I would not bet on it. Quisling's relative softness, that might look like gentleness-that would be that, for the classes of people he regarded as properly human--was apparently based on a cocoon of denial. If he lacked the brutality of a Himmler or Goebbels, it was because he lacked their twisted and wry realism, and did not follow fully through on the logic of the brutal world-view they all embraced. He embraced it, enough to chill and poison his soul, but at arm's length, perhaps--with a wrinkled nose and eyes averted. That may have saved him from being the worst of Nazis, but I fear it would also prevent him from ever facing full on just what he had done and how much he would have to atone for, if he were given the time to do it.