Author's Response

Abstract

Sir,Thank you for the opportunity to reply to Passalacqua, Zejdlik, and De La Paz's (1) comments on our article about identification of missing Norwegian soldiers (2).We are very pleased that our article has been read, and we agree with the commenting authors' intent to design such projects as a multidisciplinary task. This is exactly what we have done in the project, as stated at the beginning of our paper. We are still of the opinion that even though we did not have the critics' obvious enormous resources, a small team like ours can perform, and has performed, all that the critics described to perform such a project. We therefore feel that the criticism is unjustified.The critics have no information of how we worked, other than the brief description in the paper. They therefore seem to assume that we did not fulfill the criteria they deem as appropriate for such projects. It seems as if the strongest criticism is that we did not have historians on our team. This comment is repeated over and over again, but we do not understand how they can come to this incorrect conclusion, as two extremely experienced historians were in the group. One of them, the initiator of the project, a professor of comparative politics, has numerous publications on WWII subjects, including a book with details of the battle, and with numerous references in English, German, and Norwegian (3). We did extensive research before the start of the project and are of the opinion that this part of their letter has no basis in reality.Before commenting further on the criticism, we must add that this project was not easy to perform. Originally, the Norwegian authorities would not support the project, due to the status of the victims. It was therefore not possible for the ID-Team in the National Criminal Investigation Service in Norway to perform the examinations, which normally would have been the procedure. We therefore had to put together an ad hoc team of volunteers. Our small team consisted of historians, lawyers, a forensic anthropologist, and a forensic pathologist. In Norway, we feel it is very important to have forensic pathologists on such teams, in contrast to the DPAA. Several forensic odontologists were available for the team, but were not needed due to the lack of ante mortem odontological information. Contrary to the DPAA, we did not have archeologists in the group because of a restricted budget. Therefore, we could not do an extensive excavation of this enormous, remote battlefield which included both land and water. However, a number of locals who knew the battle area very well were included in the team. These well-trained individuals had, after years of searching the area, developed a special sense for detecting small variations in the landscape indicating some possible findings, perhaps better than any archeologist new to the area. In addition, the team's anthropologist has many years of archeological experience with medieval sites.It is also difficult for such an "unofficial" team to do excavation and digging inside a foreign coun...