On October 24, 1945, Vidkun Quisling was executed by firing squad at Akershus fortress in Oslo, ten days after a court had convicted him of treason and other offences committed during the German occupation of Norway. He had been the head of the government that the Germans installed, and he had been arrested in May 1945, when the German forces in Norway surrendered. He was 58 years old. His name is still used.
He had founded a small party in 1933, and it won very few votes before the war, and he met the German leadership and asked for support. After the German invasion in April 1940 he proclaimed himself head of state, and although the Germans at first preferred to rule through an administrative council, he was made minister president in 1942 and held the post until 1945. His government helped to recruit Norwegian volunteers for the German forces and to carry out the deportation of the Jewish population of Norway.
He was tried in the summer of 1945 in a case that lasted several weeks, and the court heard evidence about the deportations, the executions and the collaborators who had served under him, and he was found guilty and sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out. The court also dealt with the leaders of the Norwegian Nazi party and their aides. Other members of the party were tried in a large series of cases after the war, and many received prison terms.
His surname became a common noun in several languages for a traitor or a person who cooperates with an occupying power, and the word was in use in Britain and the United States before the war had ended. The word stuck. Historians describe him as a man whose movement had little popular support and whose importance came from the German occupation rather than from his own following.