The Osvald Group is responsible for the first, active event of anti-Nazi resistance in Norway, to protest the inauguration of Vidkun Quisling.
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssn Quisling (, Norwegian: [vdkn kvsl] (listen); 18 July 1887 24 October 1945) was a Norwegian military officer, politician and Nazi collaborator who nominally headed the government of Norway during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.
He first came to international prominence as a close collaborator of the explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and through organising humanitarian relief during the Russian famine of 1921 in Povolzhye. He was posted as a Norwegian diplomat to the Soviet Union and for some time also managed British diplomatic affairs there. He returned to Norway in 1929 and served as Minister of Defence in the governments of Peder Kolstad (193132) and Jens Hundseid (193233) in representing the Farmers' Party.
In 1933, Quisling left the Farmers' Party and founded the fascist Nasjonal Samling (National Union). Although he gained some popularity after his attacks on the political left, his party failed to win any seats in the Storting, and by 1940, it was still little more than peripheral. On 9 April 1940, with the German invasion of Norway in progress, he attempted to seize power in the world's first radio-broadcast coup d'tat but failed since the Germans refused to support his government. From 1942 to 1945, he served as Prime Minister of Norway and headed the Norwegian state administration jointly with the German civilian administrator, Josef Terboven. His pro-Nazi puppet government, known as the Quisling regime, was dominated by ministers from Nasjonal Samling. The collaborationist government participated in Germany's Final Solution, a genocidal program targeting Jews.
Quisling was put on trial during the legal purge in Norway after World War II. He was found guilty of charges including embezzlement, murder and high treason against the Norwegian state, and was sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, on 24 October 1945.
The term "quisling" has become a byword for "collaborator" or "traitor" in several languages and reflects the contempt with which Quisling's conduct has been regarded both at the time and later.
The Osvald Group was a Norwegian organisation that was the most active World War II resistance group in Norway from 1941 to the summer of 1944. Numbering more than 200 members, it committed at least 110 acts of sabotage against Nazi occupying forces and the collaborationist government of Vidkun Quisling. The organisation is perhaps best known for conducting the first act of resistance against the German occupation of Norway, when on 2 February 1942 it detonated a bomb at Oslo East Station in protest against Quisling's inauguration as Minister-President.
The Osvald Group was originally the Norwegian branch of the "Organisation Against Fascism and in Support of the USSR", better known as the Wollweber League, an anti-fascist group founded in 1936 by German communist Ernst Wollweber, with the support and direction of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Norwegian communist Martin Rasmussen Hjelmen was its first leader, whose pseudonym Osvald became the group's namesake. Following Hjelmen's arrest in 1938 by Swedish authorities, Asbjørn Sunde, who used Osvald as a cover name, led the group through the end of the German occupation. The Osvald Group became independent in 1940 after the Wollweber League dissolved, following Wollweber's arrest.