Do the ends really justify the means?

I picked up The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff after it was recommended by some people who enjoyed another book I really liked, The Polish Woman. The Kommandant's Girl tells the story of a young jewish woman living in Krakow at the time of the liquidation of the ghetto there. She managed to hide the fact that she was jewish and get a job as personal assistant to a powerful man in the German army. The girl was relatively newly married to a man who was a leader in the jewish resistance movement.

Other members of the resistance movement encouraged her to use her connections and her good looks to get information that might help their cause. They encouraged her to have an affair with the man she worked for, in hopes that he might whisper crucial secrets. They convinced her that whatever vows she broke were less important than the lives she might save with the information she could learn.

The book was a fairly typical look at the question of whether the ends justify the means. The girl in the book really believed that she was saving her husband by having an affair with this powerful man. She really believed that the usual moral guidelines were not in effect during a time of war. The arguement of the book was very powerful, as moral relativism usually is. Still, I wasn't convinced. I would rather die faithful to my vows than break them and be forced to live a lie. This was a good and thought provoking book, I just didn't agree with its conclusions.