Gunnar Sonsteby one of the top Norwegian SOE Agents died on May 10th. Gunnar was awarded a DSO for his exploits during WWII. His memoir was titled Report from Number 24 a member of the Oslo Gang his exploits were legendary. He was also the only recipient of Norway's War Cross with Three Swords America awarded him the Medal of Freedom with a Silver Palm Gunnar Sonsteby DSO 11 January 1918 – 10 May 2012
Gunnar Sonsteby Gunnar Sonsteby, who has died aged 94, was Norway’s most decorated war hero, chief of operations for the underground resistance and sole surviving member of a team of saboteurs helmed by Max Manus, the daring leader of several numerous missions against targets in Nazi-occupied Norway. Image 1 of 2 Gunnar Sonsteby Photo: NORWAY MUSEUM OF RESISTANCE 6:06PM BST 10 May 2012 Sonsteby spent five years fighting the Nazi occupation. “When your country is taken over by 100,000 Germans,” he noted, “you get angry.” In 1942 he became agent 24 in the Special Operations Executive. After saboteur training in Britain in 1943, he became the contact for all SOE agents in eastern Norway and head of the Norwegian Independent Company 1 group in Oslo. This group performed several spectacular acts of sabotage; among them smuggling out plates for the printing of Norwegian kroner from the Norwegian Central Bank, and blowing up the office for Norwegian forced labour, a strike that wrecked the Nazis’ plan of sending young Norwegian men to the Eastern Front. In 1945 he was awarded the DSO. As well as the attack on the labour office, Sonsteby’s citation records the theft of 75,000 ration books, which put pressure on the authorities, stopping a threatened cut in rations; the destruction of sulphuric acid manufacturing facilities in Lysaker; and destroying or seriously damaging more than 40 aircraft under repair at a tram company depot in Korsvoll. He was also credited with the destruction of a railway locomotive under repair at Skabo; a number of Bofors guns; a field gun and vital machine tools at the Kongsberg arms factory; and with starting a large fire in a storage depot at Oslo harbour which destroyed large quantities of lubricating oils. Operating in occupied territory, and ranked high on the Gestapo list of wanted men, Sonsteby became a master of disguise. He operated under 30 or 40 different names and identities, and the Germans did not learn his real name until near the end of the war. They were never able to catch him. As a young man, Sonsteby’s long face led to him being nicknamed “Kjakan” (“The Chin”). A British journalist who interviewed him in the spring of 2011 still found him “a fine reed of a man, thin, poised and dignified, like a Nordic Giacometti”. At 93 he retained a keen intellect, a charismatic and considered delivery, and an erect, military bearing; he would grip a stranger’s hand like a steel vice. Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sonsteby was born on January 11 1918, growing up in the same Oslo neighbourhood as Manus – though the two did not meet until July 1940, when they worked together on an underground newspaper to counter Nazi propaganda. At the time of the German invasion in April that year, Sonsteby had been a student working in a motorbike shop in German-occupied Oslo. “Oh, the humiliation of seeing those green-uniformed creatures tramping our streets,” he recalled in his memoirs, Report from Number 24. Even more galling were the hated Norwegian Nazis, or Quislings. Then he met Manus, 25, who organised the rag-tag group known as the Oslo Gang that made some early efforts to sabotage Nazi assets. Initially progress was slow. “The first year, very little,” said Sonsteby. “Second, more. In 1941 I knew it would last.” Apart from Manus, an expert saboteur, the Gang’s inner circle included Gregers Gram, who ran propaganda campaigns. Sonsteby’s field was intelligence: “To find out how the Germans built up their power.” As the Gang began to dent the Nazi machine in Norway, Sonsteby was extracted to receive specialist training with SOE in the wilds of Scotland. But he reacted badly to British military discipline. A potshot at Highland sheep almost got him thrown out. But his record and character were defended by Colonel JS Wilson, chief of the Scandinavian section of the SOE and later the head of the World Scout Bureau. Wilson sent him back to active service in Oslo, Sonsteby parachuting in during a night-time RAF drop. “It was very special to come over Norway,” Sonsteby remembered. “Seeing the whole country in moonshine, landing on the snow in the mountains with our skis. It was just wonderful.” He targeted munitions factories and troop ships during the occupation. Crucially, after D-Day, he set his sights on the Norwegian railways, preventing German reinforcements moving back to the front line. Throughout, he had a simple, but strict, process of using various names and forged documents, moving from flat to flat almost daily. One refuge was above a bakery. “When I came to that baker’s shop I always looked at the girl selling bread. If she gave a special face I would know the Germans were there,” he remembered. “I would turn around.” It was easy for Sonsteby to slip into fresh identities as he made all his false papers himself. With his forger’s hand, he could replicate the signature of Karl Marthinsen, the notorious leader of the Norwegian Nazi police. Marthinsen was central to the implementation of the Norwegian Holocaust and was “liquidated” on an Oslo street by the resistance in February 1945. In reprisal, nearly 30 Norwegians were executed. The greatest fear for Sonsteby and his team was torture. When one co-fighter, Edvard Tallaksen, was picked up by the Gestapo in a café at Grünerløkka, he committed suicide rather than talk. Manus, too, was captured. Injured during an attempted escape, he was hospitalised under guard, only to escape again, down a rope from a second-floor window. After the liberation of Norway, both the British and Norwegian intelligence services tried to recruit Sonsteby, but he refused. “I didn’t want any more war. I had had enough. I’d lost five years of my life.” Instead, in 1945, he left Norway for America and Harvard. In 1946 Sonsteby became the only Nord to be awarded the War Cross with Three Swords. After Harvard he worked in the oil industry before returning to Norway and a career in private business. Throughout the post-war years and particularly after his retirement, he gave lectures to young Norwegians about the Second World War. In 2008 the wartime biopic Max Manus, Gunnar Sonsteby was played by Knut Joner. The film ignited a fresh debate about how Norway and ordinary Norwegians had responded to the German invasion and subsequent occupation. Sonsteby attended the premiere with his wife, Anne-Karin, and the film became the most successful in Norwegian history, winning six Amanda Awards (Norwegian Oscars), including best picture, best screenplay and best actor. In 2001 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s culture award. In the same year Sonsteby helped defeat a proposal to name a street in Oslo after the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who had welcomed the wartime German occupation of his country and given his Nobel Prize for Literature as a gift to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hamsun later flew to meet Hitler at Hitler’s mountain lair in Bavaria. At the time Sonsteby said Norway should dissolve parliament and declare a dictatorship before so naming a street. But in the end he came to consider that commemorating Hamsun was acceptable, as long as the writer’s literary talent and political affiliation received equal attention. In May 2007 a statue of Sonsteby on Solli Plass in Oslo was unveiled by King Harald of Norway. Sculpted by Per Ung, it portrays a 25-year-old Sonsteby standing next to his bicycle. The King and other members of the Royal family also honoured Sonsteby, on the occasion of his 90th birthday in January 2008, with a reception at Akershus Fortress, the site of the Gestapo’s wartime headquarters and now home to Norway’s Resistance Museum. In 2008 Sonsteby was the first non-American awarded the United States Special Operations Command Medal. Gunnar Sonsteby, born January 11 1918, died May 10 2012 Gunnar Sonsteby - Telegraph
================================================== Gunnar Sonsteby -------------------------------------------------- Times, The (London, England)-May 14, 2012 Audacious saboteur who energised Norway's wartime resistance movement by blowing up cunningly chosen German installations The resistance structure in Germanoccupied Norway, "Milorg" (Military Organisation), focused its attention on preparing for the eventual liberation, rather than on harassing the occupiers or sabotaging their installations. But the Special Operations Executive (SOE) headquarters in London had other priorities, seeking to tie down the maximum number of German troops in Norway - away from the active battle zones - and disable elements of Norwegian industry diverted to the Nazi war effort. Into this scenario stepped Gunnar Sonsteby with a few friends intent on a resistance campaign of their own. Aged 24, Sonsteby's motivation was outrage at the German invasion of his country, cheerfully disregarding the fact it had been provoked by the Royal Navy mining Norwegian waters to block Swedish iron ore being shipped to Germany. On hearing that a Norwegian military unit was forming up in Britain, he made an attempt to reach this country by sea, only to suffer severe frostbite in northern Sweden, and he was obliged to return to Oslo. There he established contact with Milorg but resolved to take a more proactive role after a second visit to Sweden, when he met a representative of SOE at the British Embassy. This and later border crossings were facilitated by a courageous and resourceful Norwegian customs officer, Johan Ostlie, and his wife Tora. Sonsteby's task on return to Norway was to gather information for SOE on German activities, in particular on the construction of a U-boat harbour at Trondheim. When a radio transmitter operated by a colleague for passing information to London broke down, Sonsteby returned to Stockholm for spare parts. The Ostlies again helped him to make the crossing, as they continued to do for him and others until Johan was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943. Even then, his wife persisted with this work. The concentration of Norway's population in ports and small towns was a serious obstacle to clandestine operations, as uncustomary behaviour or strangers were immediately noticeable. Sonsteby therefore purported to be working for the collaborationist neo-Nazi Norwegian state police. Using forged papers, he travelled openly by car to gather information SOE required. Ostensibly driven by a gasgenerator on the back, his car was actually using black market petrol. Relations between the Milorg resistance and London came under strain after British commando attacks on targets in Norway that led to German reprisals against the local population and a consequent coolness between Milorg and Sonsteby's group. Shortly after he had borrowed plates for printing Bank of Norway notes (required by SOE) and smuggled them over the frontier to Sweden in the summer of 1942, one of his contacts was arrested by the Gestapo. Recognising the danger to himself, he decided to take temporary refuge in Sweden. There he was persuaded by SOE's contact in Stockholm to go to England for training in sabotage techniques. He was parachuted back into Norway in November 1943 with instructions to return to Oslo, this time using an alias, establish useful contacts and seek sabotage opportunities. The situation in the capital was more dangerous than when he had left: his father had been arrested and imprisoned, many of his former colleagues had disappeared and the underground press had been put out of action. Nevertheless, he set about forming a group to work with the "Home Front" in overall control of resistance co-ordination. The Front's priority at that time was to frustrate plans for the conscription of young Norwegians into the German Army for service against the Russians. A countrywide programme was under preparation to deprive Vidkun Quisling's puppet government of the records needed for the call-up and give heart to the population at large to resist the draft in every conceivable way. Sonsteby's group blew up the Oslo Labour Office containing the bulk of the records and draft card printing machines without loss of life, the staff having been given two minutes to clear the building. A few days later, the same group destroyed the building housing the reserve printing machinery. Messages broadcast from London gave the news of these and similar acts to the population and young Norwegians refused to answer calls to register for service. An underground press service was also re-established to provide reliable news and advice on how to avoid the draft. By his own admission, Sonsteby was so exhilarated by these events that he became less cautious while driving around. He had a narrow escape at a roadblock where a Norwegian policeman actually knew the person whose name he was using as an alias. He escaped by accelerating away at speed. His later sabotage spectaculars included destruction of the Messerschmitt aircraft and aircraft parts storage depot at Korsvoll, the arms factories at Raufoss and Kongsberg and the oil depot in the Oslo dockyard. Despite his exhilaration, each of these operations was planned with meticulous care to avoid loss of life. Two final acts of his group were to collect Quisling - whose name had become synonymous with the word "traitor" - from his office for trial and, after the liberation, to escort King Olav and his family on his triumphant drive through Oslo on his return from England. He was awarded the Norwegian War Cross with two bars, the British DSO and United States Medal of Freedom with silver palm. He left Norway in 1945 to attend the Harvard Business School and then worked for Standard Oil in Panama, New York and Oslo. From 1950 he was personnel director (and later sales director) for the Saugbruksforeningen Paper Mill. He formed a consultancy in 1970 and was general manager of the Getty Oil Company, Norway, from 1979 to 1985. His memoir of his wartime service Report from No. 24 (his number when he began his service with SOE) was first published in 1965 and became a European bestseller. He is survived by his wife Anne-Karin and three daughters. Gunnar Sonsteby, DSO, hero of the Norwegian wartime resistance, was born on January 11, 1918. He died on May 10, 2012, aged 94 He destroyed the office containing records for conscripting Norwegians Sonsteby's heroism was honoured in Norway, the UK and the US and his statue stands in Oslo, top right. Sonsteby, above left, with the customs man Johan Ostlie and his wife Tora, who helped him with his border crossings TROND NORÉN ISAKSEN Edition: 01 - eireSection: FeaturesPage: 42 Record Number: 59842007(c) Times Newspapers Limited 2012 Gunnar Sonsteby
This country has lost its great hero and literally, national icon. Any comment feels inadequate. Incredibly sad as this is, he had accomplished such a lot, and with failing health his time seemed to be up. Only two days before his death, on the national Liberation Day and Veteran's day, a new statue of him with his characteristic bike was unveiled in Rjukan, his birthplace. (Yes, near Vemork, the site for the Telemark sabotage.) Below a less well-known portrait of the young Sonsteby, from before the war, when he served with the Royal Guards: Dear Kjakan, our expressions of gratitude are ever-lasting. Rest In Peace.
Gunnar Soensteby Published on 16 May 2012 Resistance hero; Born: January 11. 1918 ; Died: May 10, 2012. Gunnar Soensteby, who has died aged 94, was a Second World War resistance fighter who earned Norway's highest military decoration for daring raids against the Nazis. Soensteby was a member of Kompani Linge, a group of volunteers trained in Scotland for secret missions during the 1940 to 1945 Nazi occupation of Norway. The group, led by Max Manus, carried out spectacular sabotage raids against factories, railways and fuel supplies to hamper the German war effort. Soensteby also led the smuggling of money printing plates from Norway's central bank to the exiled government in London. In 1946 he received the War Cross with three swords for his bravery. No other Norwegian has received that decoration. A year earlier he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order by the UK and the US Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm. Known also as Kjakan (The Chin) and Agent 24 by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) he was living in Oslo when ther Germans invaded in the late spring of 1940. After saboteur training in 1943 in the Highlands, where he was reprimanded for taking a potshot at a sheep, he became the contact for all SOE agents in eastern Norway and head of the Norwegian Independent Company 1 group in Oslo. This group performed several spectacular acts of sabotage; among them smuggling out plates for the printing of Norwegian kroner from the Norwegian Central Bank and blowing up the office for Norwegian forced labour, ruining a Nazi plan of sending young Norwegian men to the Eastern Front. After the war he moved to the United States where he enrolled in Harvard Business School. He also worked in the oil business before returning to Norway where he continued a career in business. Throughout the post-war years and particularly after reaching retirement age he worked tirelessly to pass on the lessons of the war to future generations. In May 2007, a statue of him was erected in Osloand unveiled by King Harald. In 2008 he was the first non-American to be awarded the United States Special Operations Command Medal. He is survived by his wife, Anne-Karin Gunnar Soensteby | Herald Scotland
Gunnar Sonsteby is to be given a State Funeral in Norway on 25th May - I'm sure we will see Stormbird in attendance.
What an amazing man. Norway was lucky to have him. Indeed. Extremely lucky to have him - and /or lucky to breed him ? (Who is going to ask me what my signature translates to ??)
The man who works right next to me in this office knew him, and Manus as well. He says Sonsteby was a very nice man, as well as brave.
================================================== Guardian Unlimited: Gunnar Sønsteby obituary -------------------------------------------------- Guardian Unlimited (England)-May 22, 2012 The most highly decorated hero of the Norwegian resistance in the second world war, Gunnar Sønsteby, who has died aged 94, became a master of disguise, forgery and espionage to sustain a prolonged sabotage campaign against the Nazi occupiers of his country. He had taken the invasion personally, resenting "the humiliation of seeing those green-uniformed creatures tramping our streets," as he recalled in his memoirs. The Germans were certain to seize neutral Norway once the "phoney war" ended in spring 1940. They were heavily dependent on Swedish iron ore, which went by rail to Norwegian Atlantic ports when the direct route through Sweden and across the Baltic was closed by ice. It was then shipped to Germany via the complex waterways between the mainland and offshore islands. Most of this route was inside Norwegian waters and therefore legally sacrosanct. Meanwhile the SS Altmark, former supply vessel for the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, scuttled after the battle of the River Plate in December 1939, sailed undetected from South America to the North Cape, where she entered Norwegian waters. British destroyers illegally forced her into a fjord south of Stavanger in mid-February. When they boarded, British sailors were amazed to find 299 British prisoners on board, from ships sunk by the Graf Spee ? a handy excuse for breaching Norwegian neutrality. In response, however, the Germans in early April invaded Norway, which fell in two months, regardless of stubborn local resistance and a generally inept Anglo-French intervention. Sønsteby resolved to get to Britain in a small boat to join a fledgling resistance unit, but frostbite in northern Sweden on his way to the coast forced him to return to Oslo. He volunteered for the initially cautious Milorg (military organisation) resistance movement but, impatient for significant action against the occupiers, began to gather intelligence by brazenly offering his services to the pro-Nazi Norwegian state police, giving him excuses to travel and gather information. He was able to cross the long and often remote mountain border into neutral Sweden several times, making his way to the British embassy in Stockholm, where he contacted the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the agency set up to organise sabotage in occupied territories. He became SOE agent number 24. One of his first assignments was to gather information about the new U-boat and port facilities the Germans were building at Trondheim, in the far north. When his colleague's radio transmitter broke down, Sønsteby crossed into Sweden again to obtain spare parts. To facilitate his travels within Norway he taught himself how to forge an array of German documents. His many disguises enabled him to evade the Gestapo. In summer 1942 he stole banknote-printing plates of the Norwegian state bank to help the SOE fund operations in Norway, smuggling them over the Swedish border. One of his accomplices in this escapade was arrested by the Gestapo, prompting Sønsteby to lie low in Sweden. While there he was persuaded by SOE to go to Britain for special training. Returning to the Oslo area by parachute in November 1943, he found the capital a much more threatening place than it had been. His father and a number of resistance colleagues had been imprisoned. Tension between Milorg and SOE had risen as a result of British pinprick commando raids on Norwegian targets, which prompted brutal Nazi retaliation. Sønsteby now took a co-ordinating role covering the greater part of Norway, including the bulk of the country's long Atlantic coastline and the principal ports. As a captain, he commanded "Norwegian Independent Company 1", later known as the Linge Company in honour of its executed first leader. A long list of subsequent bold sabotage operations included some strategic coups, such as destroying official records the Germans were using to round up young Norwegians for the Russian front or forced labour. Arms plants and artillery batteries, chemical works and German aircraft were blown up and merchant ships sunk. He organised the destruction of 75,000 ration books, which frustrated a German plan to reduce the already meagre official ration. When the allies invaded Normandy in June 1944, the Norwegian resistance sabotaged the railways, preventing the Wehrmacht from sending reinforcements southwards. Sønsteby, born in Rjukan, south Norway, was a student in 1940. After the war he went to Harvard to complete his studies and worked in the oil industry abroad and at home. Uniquely he was awarded the War Cross with three swords, the highest decoration ever conferred by Norway, as well as the British DSO and the US Medal of Freedom. A grateful nation and royal family honoured his heroism throughout his long postwar life. His wife, Anne-Karin, and three daughters survive him. ? Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sønsteby, Norwegian resistance fighter, born 11 January 1918; died 10 May 2012
RIP Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sønsteby DSO I am currently in Oslo for a few days and whilst have a wander around the streets came across a funeral, at a small city church. It was clearly someone special, due to the guard of honour, so aked around and it was the funeral (state funeral) for Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sønsteby DSO Gunnar Sønsteby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Phil, It must have been fate that you stumbled upon the funeral. Thank you for posting the information. Regards Tom
Lo, gjør der jeg ser min far. Lo, gjør der jeg ser min mor, mine søstre og mine brødre. Lo, gjør der jeg ser ledningen av mitt folk tilbake til å begynne. Lo, de kaller til meg. De byr meg tar mitt sted på Asgard i hallene av Valhalla, Hvor den modige kan leve for evig. Lo, there do I see my father. Lo, there do I see my mother, my sisters and my brothers. Lo, there do I see the line of my people back to the beginning. Lo, they do call to me. They bid me take my place on Asgard in the halls of Valhalla, Where the brave may live forever. Respectfully, Ned.
Thank you for this fine tribute to a brave soul. Arguably, it was men and women such as this who kept the flame of freedom alive when all hope seemed lost. May he long be remembered, not only for his wartime exploits but also as a fine example for all humanity in standing up to tyranny. Gunnar Sønsteby R.I.P.
I followed up watching yesterdays funeral for Gunnar Sosteby with a quick visit to the resistance museum. A very nice little museum
Gunnar Sonsteby: Norway's most decorated war hero MARTIN CHILDS MONDAY 11 JUNE 2012 Gunnar Sonsteby, code-named "Kjakan" ("The Chin"), was one of the most prominent members of the Norwegian resistance movement during the Nazi occupation and responsible for countless spectacular sabotage missions and acts of heroism. A master of disguise, with over 30 identities, he eluded the Gestapo for five years and became Norway's most decorated war hero. Sonsteby often said that he believed his ability to get away had something to do with how ordinary he looked. It was only towards the end of the war that the Gestapo finally learnt his true identity. Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sonsteby was born in the small town of Rjukan on 11 January 1918, but his family moved to Oslo in the 1930s. He studied economics and was working as an auditor when Germany invaded on 9 April 1940. In the wake of the invasion, Sonsteby joined the Norwegian resistance in eastern Norway, where he met Max Manus, another significant figure. Initially, their efforts (they published an underground newspaper to fight German propaganda) were modest; but they had the desired effect. In 1941, Sonsteby was recruited by the secret British military unit the Special Operations Executive (SOE), via its office in Stockholm. He became "Agent 24" in 1942. Following training in Scotland, Sonsteby was parachuted back into Norway. In 1943, he became the contact for all SOE agents in eastern Norway and a key member of the Linge Company, an independent unit of Norwegian commandos under the SOE. Being high on the Gestapo's "most wanted" list, Sonsteby, a master forger who could replicate the signature of Karl Marthinsen, the notorious quisling leader of the Norwegian Nazi police, perfected dozens of identities which allowed him to slip through German checkpoints undetected. To avoid detection, he moved from flat to flat almost daily. One bolthole was above a bakery. "When I came to that baker's shop I always looked at the girl selling bread. If she gave a special face I would know the Germans were there. I would turn around," recalled Sonsteby. In the autumn of 1942, Sonsteby was central to the smuggling of Norges Bank's money-printing plates, for the printing of Norwegian kroner, to the Norwegian government in London. Among their many acts of sabotage, the so-called Oslogjengen (Oslo Gang) were responsible for the assassination of several top Wehrmacht commanders and collaborators; the destruction of the Kongsberg arms factory; the theft of 75,000 ration books from German headquarters, preventing the starvation of thousands; and the destruction of sulphuric acid manufacturing facilities west of Oslo. From the spring of 1944, Sonsteby led the Oslo Gang. They were described by the British historian William Mackenzie as "the best group of saboteurs in Europe". On New Year's Eve 1944, they bombed Victoria Terrasse in Oslo, where the Gestapo had its headquarters. Though it cost the lives of 78 Norwegian civilians, it was viewed as a strike at the heart of the Gestapo's power in Norway. Crucially, after D-Day, Sonsteby set his sights on the Norwegian railways, preventing German reinforcements moving back to the front line. His team later executed the sinking of the German transport ship Donau outside Drobak in 1945 and the bombing of the Employment Office's archives in Oslo, which prevented the Nazis' planned, forced mobilisation of young Norwegians. After the liberation of Norway on 8 May 1945, both the British and Norwegian intelligence services tried to recruit Sonsteby, but he refused. "I didn't want any more war. I had had enough. I'd lost five years of my life." Instead, in 1945, he left Norway for America and Harvard Business School. He then worked in the oil industry before returning to Norway to work in private business. Throughout the post-war years and particularly in retirement, Sonsteby gave lectures to young Norwegians about the Second World War and the need to fight for democratic values. He was also involved in formulating the Norwegian defence and foreign policy, and was known for supporting the Norwegian involvement in Afghanistan. In 1945, Sonsteby was awarded the British Distinguished Service Order and the US Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm. He remains the only Norwegian to receive the War Cross with Three Swords. In 2008, he became the first non-American awarded the US Special Operations Command Medal. In April, he became the first person to receive the Norwegian Defence Cross of Honour. Gunnar Sonsteby, resistance fighter: born Rjukan, Norway 11 January 1918; married Anne-Karin; died Oslo 10 May 2012. Gunnar Sonsteby: Norway's most decorated war hero - Obituaries - News - The Independent
