"Quisling was just doing things the way he saw fit, right?"

Well, of course he was, Bruce. He figured, no doubt, that the Germans had the winning ticket and were ushering in a "new era", and he decided it was time to get on board. So did hundreds of thousands of willing Ukranians, Lithuanians, French, Danes, Dutch, Estonians, Latvians, Belgians....and MILLIONS of Hungarians, Rumanians, Finns, Bulgarians, Croatians, Italians, and God knows who else who joined up with the Wehrmacht, or the SS, or became allies with the Germans in World War II.

Do you really think they did not, at the time, think they were doing "the right thing"?

If their side had won, they would never have doubted it, in light of the successful outcome. That's what wars are like. The winners sanitize their own record, and damn that of the losers.

I am not saying Quisling did the right thing. I am saying that he, with his own limited and pragmatic view of the situation in 1940, most likely thought he was doing the right thing.

By the way, Churchill was also planning to invade Norway in 1940. Both the Germans and the British had already decided that a neutral Norway was simply too dangerous and inconvenient to their cause, and that Norway had to be occupied and utilized as a base to control access to and from the Baltic and into the North Sea. The British plan to invade Norway was in an advanced stage and the Germans knew it, but the Germans beat them to the punch by invading first. If Hitler had been a little slower off the mark, someone like Mr Quisling (maybe even Mr Quisling himself!) would have been cooperating with the British occupation forces, and would now be remembered as a very good guy in our history books.

Do you know that Vichy France very nearly declared war on Great Britain in 1940 after the Royal Navy bombarded the French fleet in Oran on July 3rd 1940, sinking some battleships and killing over a thousand French sailors? Mainland France would then have been at war with England and allied with Germany. How would that play back now?

Would that, Bruce, have made the French instantly and overnight evil people to their core? No. It would have made them emotional people, reacting to an extremely bad situation as emotional people do...and doing what they thought was "right".

You cannot get so hung up on the incredible awfulness of Nazis that you fall into the trap of assuming that everyone was ever associated with them in any way must have been automatically satanic or something like that. Life just isn't that simple.