Post War
The post-war authorities banned the party and prosecuted its members as collaborators. Nearly 50,000 were brought to trial, approximately half of whom received jail penalties. The authorities executed Quisling for treason as well as a few other high-profile NS members, and prominent German officials in Norway, for war crimes. The sentences' legality has been questioned, however, as Norway did not have peacetime capital punishment, and the Norwegian constitution at the time stipulated that capital punishment for war crimes had to be carried out during actual wartime.
Another issue of post-war treatment has been the ongoing Hamsun debate in Norway. The internationally renowned author Knut Hamsun, though never a member, was a well-known sympathiser. After the war Hamsun was, however, deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, and many feel that the issue of his links to the party has never been properly resolved. Hamsun's status as a Nobel Prize laureate and probably the best-known Norwegian author next to Henrik Ibsen, also results in his ties to NS being a touchy subject, as many feel the valuation of Hamsun's literature should not be marred by constant debate about whether or not he was a fascist.
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Read more about this topic: Nasjonal Samling
Famous quotes containing the words post and/or war:
“To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a “home” might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation.”
—Emily Post (1873–1960)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)