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
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