With moral clarity

The film “NR 24” and the moral obligation of resistance

The Norwegian film NR 24 dramatizes the remarkable story of a Nazi resistance fighter, Gunnar Sønsteby (code name “Number 24,” which is the film’s English-language title).

Sønsteby led resistance operations starting from Germany’s occupation of Norway in 1940 until the end of the war. Along the way, he joined the secret British military unit called Special Operations Executive and led many spectacular feats of espionage: smuggling currency plates in order to print Norwegian kroner to help fund the resistance, blowing up a building to prevent the Germans from sending Norwegian men to fight on the Eastern Front, blowing up German ships, destroying a munitions factory used by the Nazis.

He and others in his command also killed many Norwegians who collaborated with the Nazis, some of them highly placed in the German military command in Norway. Despite his high profile in the resistance, Sønsteby was never captured by the Gestapo, who were unable to even identify him until late in the war. The film paints a portrait of Sønsteby as singularly disciplined and meticulous in detail, characteristics to which he attributed his ability to escape detection. Norway awarded him its highest military decoration, the only person to receive Norway’s War Cross with three swords.

In its narrative frame, the film depicts Sønsteby speaking to a group of students late in his long life.¹ His story unfolds in the late-life reflection of a deeply principled man who brings precision and objectivity to his own life.

He starts tentatively: “Let’s talk about, uh… values.” Later, when he’s taking questions from the audience, a student raises his hand.

Student: I’ve heard that the resistance movement occasionally had to decide upon the lives of other Norwegian men.

Sønsteby: Um…. Yes.

Student: Uh, have you done it?

Sønsteby: Um, have you experienced war?

Student: No, I have not. But, uh, my parents have.

Sønsteby: Then I think that your parents will very likely understand what I’m talking about. And to all of you, I want to say that I hope you never have to understand it, so long as you live. Because what happens in war is that subtle differences just disappear, and things become black and white. And all at once, completely different rules apply.

His response sets the film’s moral fulcrum. War deprived citizens of the peacetime luxury of moral relativism. Sønsteby received his orders and executed them faithfully, without question.

A young woman in the audience tries to pin him down about the resistance’s execution of a man in her family (a character named Karl Erling Øhrn Solheim) who had snitched to the Nazis. She asks Sønsteby if he killed Norwegians during the war.

Sønsteby: We took particular individuals who were committed Nazis. And those who were about to do something that would ensure Norway was unable to be free again.

Questioner: Uh, there was no mercy at all then?

Sønsteby: No.

He recalls that after he assassinated Karl Marthinsen, the Norwegian Nazi police commander, the Germans had retaliated by killing 28 Norwegians, some of them in the resistance and some of them completely uninvolved.

Questioner: Was it worth it?

Sønsteby: There’s no way to answer that. What is freedom worth?

Sønsteby publicly denies knowledge of Solheim, which the movie has shown to be a lie. In a flashback, he’d sworn silence “to the grave” about the executions of Norwegian citizens. Given his fastidious nature, Sønsteby’s denial could have simply honored that oath. And yet, the film depicts his discomfort about the lie. He admits to the students that he was involved in killing more than 80 Norwegians during the war. He didn’t dodge personal culpability. He did, however, compartmentalize facts in order to cope.

“I have five drawers in my mind.

The three top drawers I open all the time.

The fourth, less often.

I closed the bottom drawer May 8th, 1945

and haven’t opened it since.”

-Gunnar Sønsteby

His refusal to acknowledge Solheim is the lock on the fifth drawer. The student is pressing him to open it.

Sønsteby and Solheim had lived near each other and had been friends before the war. Sønsteby knows Solheim to have only a superficial awareness about politics and the war. Solheim’s family was anti-Nazi; Solheim himself might have been apolitical. He was out of a job and needed money. The Nazis were paying for information on resistance members, and Solheim knew that Sønsteby worked for the resistance. His crime was to write a letter to the Nazis, offering up the name of Sønsteby and two other resistance fighters. The letter was intercepted at the post office. He had attempted to snitch but had been prevented.

Solheim was a threat. However, he wasn’t a perpetrator of war crimes, as were the other Norwegians selected for execution by the Allies. Could the threat Solheim posed have been dealt with differently, allowing him to live? Sønsteby, who’s shown to be deeply affected by the hit on his former friend, relies on his oath for moral clarity: the dualism of right vs. wrong. Yet he’s troubled by it, almost 70 years later. Can there be moral ambiguity during war?

The moral absolutism of war

This question is neither idle speculation nor academic theorizing. Today, conflict consumes lives and threatens state sovereignty around the world. Although dispersed—contrasting with the global alignment in WWII, Allied vs Axis powers—every major power has stakes in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and in those nations experiencing upheaval, like South Korea and Syria. Russia’s attempted Anschluss of Ukraine, with Putin refusing to call it a war at first, was an attempt to repeat the Third Reich’s trek toward world dominion.

The US is not currently at war, but as it prepares for the upcoming inauguration, the president-elect spends his days commenting on his desire to annex or take control of the sovereign nations of Mexico, Canada, and Panama, as well as the autonomy of Greenland, a territory of Denmark. He will take an oath “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” despite having called for a termination of the Constitution and campaigning on a promise to be a dictator ‘for one day.’

The film NR 24 marks several likenesses with current events in the US: the banning of books before a fascist takeover; the press’ failure to cover resistance victories in order to align with fascist interests. Having established its modern relevance, the film calls us to consider, as Sønsteby states, our values. What is right, and what is wrong?

Today’s domestic terrorists claim martyrdom and pose as loyal patriots. Matthew Livelsberger, the Green Beret who killed himself by gunshot in a firework-filled Cybertruck in front of the Las Vegas Trump hotel on New Year’s Day, left a so-called manifesto containing claims that Chinese and US technologies represent unique threats to national security.² In his vision, the imminent collapse of his country called him to take extreme action.

Do different rules apply now? There’s not much daylight between appeasing the leader of a violent base and compliance with a fascist regime. Senator Joe McCarthy, in a speech delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia, invoked a new war in 1950:

Five years after a world war has been won, men’s hearts should anticipate a long peace—and men’s minds should be free from the heavy weight that comes with war. But this is not such a period—for this is not a period of peace. This is a time of “the cold war.” This is a time when all the world is split into two vast, increasingly hostile armed camps—a time of a great armament race.

Today we can almost physically hear the mutterings and rumblings of an invigorated god of war. You can see it, feel it, and hear it all the way from the Indochina hills, from the shores of Formosa, right over into the very heart of Europe itself.

[….]

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.

[….]

Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the Communist world has said the time is now? . . . that this is the time for the show-down between the democratic Christian world and the communistic atheistic world?

Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that must be paid by those who wait too long.

[….]

I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. . . .

As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason. . . .

He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of honesty and decency in government.

-Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950

McCarthy manufactured a conflict with domestic and international ‘communists’ who he claimed threatened American democracy. He tested the theory that an actual war isn’t necessary to suspend constitutional and judicial rights. The men and women named on his list lost their livelihoods for decades, and some died prematurely from the stress. They were not provided judicial process. The penumbra cast over them by a powerful politician was enough for the industries they worked in to disavow them.

McCarthy was a junior senator from Wisconsin, and yet for a time he wielded power that could destroy individuals simply by association.

Democracies with a balance of powers impose a judicial process that protects the accused as much as it protects the interests of the state. When a democratic nation goes to war, it allows extrajudicial killings under the provisions of international wartime laws such as the Geneva Conventions. Whether in military battle or resistance operations, “different rules apply.” Defense of country allows acts that would normally be illegal as well as immoral.

But who defines whether an act is in defense of country? Many of the January 6 defendants claimed insurrection was patriotic, despite being convicted and sentenced.

Invoking an imagined war to suspend shared values

If war justifies extrajudicial retaliation, who’s to say when a nation is at war? Declaring a war on drugs, as Richard Nixon did 53 years ago, resulted in the mass incarceration of citizens who also happened to be poor and Black. John Ehrlichman, a top aide to Nixon who was found guilty in the Watergate trials, admitted the White House used Nixon’s war on drugs to target political enemies:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

-John Ehrlichman, 1994 interview published in 2016 by Harper’s Magazine, article by Dan Baum

We should take note when people use the term ‘war’ to advance their interests. President George W. Bush announced a “global war on terror” and made a case to respond to the 9/11 terror attacks militarily rather than judicially. This was novel even for the US: after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, it prosecuted and convicted the men responsible for the attack. Escalating the rhetoric to ‘war’ led the country into long-lasting, brutal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were costly, in every sense, and deeply unpopular at home.³

The fact that the word ‘war’ applied to non-military engagement is now commonplace—an incipient civil war, class war, culture war, a war on Christianity and so forth—should give you pause. Why use this incendiary word? What permission is it granting, and to whom? What transgressions are about to be normalized under its auspice?

What do you value?

Unlike the Nazis who used the superior orders defense (“I was just following orders”) at their Nuremberg trials, Sønsteby took ownership of his decisions and actions during the war. He was a principled man who insisted on performing the first execution of a Nazi collaborator even though he was offered the option to delegate it. He could not expect any of his men to do something he himself was unwilling to do. Although Sønsteby attempted to dodge the questions of Solheim’s family member, the movie shows him privately meeting with the young woman after the speech. We can only imagine what he admitted to her, but we’re left with the impression that he responded to her distress and attempted to alleviate her concerns if possible.

The tentativeness of his questioners and Sønsteby’s own hesitation in response, manifest in the script’s use of filler words (‘um…’; ‘uh…’) and the pauses in line delivery, testify to the difficulty we have in confronting the necessary suspension of our usual social rules. It should be difficult to talk about killing, currency theft, and demolishing buildings. It should be hard to ask an older gentleman about his wartime culpability more than half a century earlier, and it should be hard to express one’s rationale for taking another’s life. In those pauses is the recognition that norms were broken, norms that a society relies upon to sustain its values. We should beware those who speak easily of breaking norms in the guise of national freedom and security. By this they prove their own malignancy.

Sønsteby’s self-defense didn’t rely on the fact that his was the lesser of two evils, that the enemy was doing much worse.⁴ He based his defense on values, and he valued Norway’s freedom. He did what was necessary to preserve freedom, so that later in life he could talk with young people who were generations removed from wartime experience.

In contrast, Solheim’s crime was to care too little for fellow countrymen and too much for himself. He removed himself from politics, having little interest in events affecting others. When Nazis banned books in 1937, he was unbothered. German concentration camps? He shrugs it off: they’re just for communists.

Down on his luck late in the war, he thinks only of the price on his friend’s head when he offers to betray him to the Nazis. Solheim had little power, unlike the collaborators who were sending thousands to their deaths, but he used what little he did have to his own advantage. Such were his values.

On 20 January 2025, less than two weeks as I write this, the United States will be placed under authoritarian power. This is not conjecture; it’s the stated intent of the incoming president. Both houses of Congress will be led by his loyalists, as is the third branch of US government, the Supreme Court. Every department of the US bureaucracy will be led by people whose first loyalty is to the president, not the US Constitution nor their department’s mission. The corporate press and largest social media companies—on whom most US citizens rely for civic information—have demonstrated their fealty to the new leader, and have abandoned their former commitments to objectivity and constitutionally protected free speech.

“Let’s talk about, uh… values.”

Ellie’s Corner

Dressed for the holidays

Our little Canadian Christmas moose. The jumper is so tacky it’s adorable. This picture is from the first time she wore it. I’ll leave you with it, to end with a chuckle.

Thanks for reading,

1. He died at the age of 94.

2. The text known as the manifesto maintains that his intention isn’t terrorism but rather a wake-up call. He also said he didn’t intend to kill himself. He was also a supporter of Trump, despite using a rented Tesla Cybertruck to blow up in front of a Trump property. Only one thing is clear and that’s that he suffered from PTSD attributed to his military service.

3. Twenty years later, 62% of the American public thought the war not worth fighting: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/

4. The film has one of the Norwegian collaborators torture a resistance fighter by pouring boiling oil into the man’s rectum. Armed with this knowledge and also fearing to give up information on his colleagues, Sønsteby carries grenades by the end of the war, prepared to blow himself up if captured.