war. They were never able to catch him. His obituary in Aftenposten attributed his ability to elude capture to "resourcefulness, luck, intuition," and "such an entirely ordinary appearance that he was hardly noticed when he rode his bicycle through Oslo's streets." Sønsteby himself explained his ability to get through the war without capture on his ability to carry out many of his actions himself and on his ability to arrange for his own ID papers. He had 20 to 30 places where he spent the night, many for only one night at a time, and never used any of them for more than a couple months. To avoid detection, he moved from flat to flat almost daily. One of his hideaways was above a bakery. "When I came to the 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," Sønsteby later said. Aftenposten described him as having "nerves of steel" and he himself said that he had inherited a strong psychological makeup from his parents. "I was so cold," he once said, "that some time I didn't react the way I should have." During the last six months of the war he carried a hand grenade at all times, so that he could commit suicide if he was arrested. Not until the very end of the war, he explained, did he begin to experience anxiety. Sønsteby was a "master forger who could replicate the signature of Nazi police chief Karl Marthinsen." As a punishment for Sønsteby's activities, his father was arrested by the Gestapo and held as a hostage for almost two years, from February 1943 to December 1944. Assassinations of informants When Sønsteby was 80 years old, he said "Of course wrong decisions were made, also by the Resistance Movement. But one must remember that war was going on. It did happen that we had to kill without being sure that the person concerned was an informant. But the decisions were correct—there and then." Post-war activities The Nazis withdrew from Norway on 8 May, and on 13 May Sønsteby led the cortege when Crown Prince Olav, the first member of the royal family to return from exile in London, arrived in Oslo. On 7 June, Sønsteby served as bodyguard for the Crown Prince and his family at the homecoming of the