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Their best friend who helped them but three weeks before the war ended Hannie was executed. She was a dropped out university student as she didn't signed the pledge of loyalty to Germany. Last words were “I’m a better shot”

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Oversteegan sisters joined forced with Hannie Schaft in 1943.

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Her, her sister Truus, and a woman named Hannie Schaft- lured and killed German Nazi and Dutch collaberators.

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Recent picture of Freddie before she died

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Recent picture of Freddie before she died

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Picture of the sisters receiving their medals for their achievement

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Picture of the sisters receiving their medals for their achievement

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 She joined the Dutch resistance at a young age, during WWII.

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Picture of Freddie Oversteegan in her 14s 

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Picture of Freddie Oversteegan in her 14s 

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- Tom boy, puts hair under cap when biking
- Has mannerism like a guy
* legs open and take up most of the space on the couch

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- Huns least suspect and expect women to be fighters, and less likely to suspect younger women to fight.

- Taught to use a pistol, throw grenades, and detonate bombs.

- Distributed the Trouw, an underground and illegal newspaper on the transgressions of their German occupiers

- After the German invasion of Russia, the girls placed a large banner over a wall by the side of a government announcement, as a tribute to the Brave RussianPeople.

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Sisters shot and killed many people but never revealed how many - If people asked who they were, they would tell them they’re soldiers

This Teenager Killed Nazis With Her Sister During WWII

Freddie Oversteegan joined the Dutch resistance at age 14

Hannie Schaft dropped out of universities because she didn’t want to sign a pledge of loyalty to Germany.

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Freddie and Truus grew up with a single mother in Haarlem. Their mother was a communist; she taught them how to fight for justice.

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In 1941, a commander from the Dutch collaborators recruited the sisters.

Taught them how to shoot, was tasked to sabotage bridges and railway line, seduced an SS officer into the woods so they can kill them

Killed Nazis, Dutch collaborators

Dutch collaborators arrested or endangered Jewish refugees and resistance members

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The Nazi's Greatest Threat, A 14-year-old Female Assassin

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Caused them insomnia

Freddie had impulses of wanting to help someone she shot as they fell to the ground

“It never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals.”

Netherlands doesn’t put much attention or recognition towards these women’s name for their achievements

Received an award in 2014 for their service called the “War Mobilization Cross.”

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“learned that if you have to help somebody, like refugees, you have to make sacrifices for yourself”

“There were a lot of women involved in the resistance in the Netherlands but not so much in the way these girls were. There are not that many examples of women who actually shot collaborators themselves.”

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When she came across a Nazi killing an infant by repeatedly swinging its tiny body against a brick wall, Truus Oversteegen didn't flinch.

The freckle-faced teenager, who was just three months shy of her 17th birthday when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, was a newly minted member of the Dutch resistance. She had been mostly assigned to hide Jewish children, political dissidents and homosexuals in various safe houses throughout Haarlem, her hometown, which was about 12 miles west of Amsterdam.

But what she saw now forced her to act with a sudden, brutal energy.

"He grabbed the baby and hit it against the wall," Truus recalled years later of the horrifying scene. "The father and sister had to watch. They were obviously hysterical. The child was dead."

Truus quietly pointed her gun in the direction of the Nazi and shot him dead.

"That wasn't an assignment," she said. "But I don't regret it . . . We were dealing with cancerous tumors in our society that you had to cut out like a surgeon."

Truus, her younger sister, Freddie, and law student Hannie Schaft were among a handful of young women who took on clandestine roles to destabilize Nazis during the Second World War. While women's resistance work was largely confined to spying, code-breaking and typing, few actively dared to take on the work of the Dutch trio - as underground assassins.

That's the theme of the recently published " Seducing and Killing Nazis: Hannie, Truus and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of World War II " (SWW Press), which documents the exploits of the three young Dutch resistance fighters whose dangerous work set them apart.

"These women never saw themselves as heroines," writes the book's author Sophie Poldermans, who is also a human-rights activist in the Netherlands. "They were extremely dedicated and believed they had no other option but to join the resistance. They never regretted what they did during the war."

Although their roles in the underground were at first confined to stealing Dutch identity documents to help persecuted Jews, the girls quickly graduated to more ruthless duties.

Freddie, who was just 14 when she began to work for the resistance, was often mistaken for a schoolgirl and was dispatched as a courier delivering important messages during the occupation. But later, all three young women worked to seduce Nazis: applying makeup and bright red lipstick to pick up soldiers at bars and lure them to their deaths.

We were dealing with cancerous tumors in our society that you had to cut out like a surgeon.
- Assassin Truus Oversteegen on why she killed a Nazi point-blank

"Ha Heinz, come here," they would call, often pretending to be drunk when they struck up conversations with their targets.

Hannie, barely 20 when the Netherlands was invaded, made a point of teaching herself German for the work. Lithe and striking, with red hair and milky white skin, she became an expert at starting seemingly casual conversations with Dutch Nazis and German soldiers. Suggesting that they accompany her on romantic walks to the woods, they would often be shot dead by her male comrades who were lying in wait.

While the three young women often relied on the men of the resistance for the ambush and shooting, they were not shy about using guns themselves and became expert at shooting targets from their bikes. In addition to German soldiers, they also went after Dutch collaborators, Poldermans said.

"They were killers, but they also tried hard to remain human," said Poldermans, 38. "They tried to shoot their targets from the back so that they didn't know they were going to die."

After the war, when the sisters - Truus and Freddie - were asked how many people they had gunned down, they refused to give a specific number, said Poldermans.

"You never ask a soldier how many people he's killed" was the response the Oversteegen sisters often gave to curious people they lectured on their wartime work.

Poldermans said she was close to the sisters for 20 years before writing her book, having met them when she was a 16-year-old high-school student working on a history project on the late Hannie Schaft, who is considered one of the greatest wartime heroines in the Netherlands. Through a family friend, Poldermans met and interviewed the Oversteegens, prying out more information about their roles in the war than they had ever told their own families.

"After the war, they had post-traumatic stress and nightmares," Poldermans told The Post, adding that the sisters were also ostracized because they had worked closely with the Communist Party in a country that became virulently anti-Soviet after the war. The Oversteegens didn't receive a pension for their wartime work until well into the 1960s, she said.

For many years, they suffered from depression and would wake up screaming from nightmares, especially during the anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands by Allied troops.

"I wasn't born to kill," Truus told Poldermans. "Do you know what that does to your soul?" After each attack, Truus recalled, she often fainted or broke down in tears.

When Poldermans completed her high-school paper, the Oversteegen sisters asked her to present her work at the annual conference they organized for Hannie. They were so impressed that they later asked her to join the board of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation, a Netherlands-based nonprofit they founded in 1996. The organization works to sponsor an annual lecture on human rights and promotes the memory of Hannie.

In addition to killing Nazis, Hannie also worked to sabotage German military installations, bombing power lines and munitions shipments. The Oversteegens worked closely with Hannie, part of an underground cell of seven committed and fierce fighters.

They were a formidable fighting force, although they refused to target the children of high-ranking Nazis, Poldermans said. When they were ordered by their resistance commanders to kidnap the three children of Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the women refused.

"Resistance fighters do not kill children," Truus told Poldermans. "We only fight against real fascists, not against children."

Still, they caused so much damage and killed so many Nazis that Hannie became an important wartime target - "the girl with the red hair." Her capture was deemed a high priority, ordered by Adolf Hitler himself.

A marked woman, she went into hiding, dying her hair black and borrowing glasses. Even when the Nazis jailed her parents in order to pressure her to give herself up, Hannie refused. Her family was eventually released when it became clear they had no information about their militant daughter.

Hannie was later captured on March 1945, picked up after a routine check and taken to the Amsterdam House of Detention, where she was tortured by the Nazis. She was also placed in solitary confinement, with a sign on her door that labeled her "morderin" or murderer.

Hannie was executed on April 17, 1945, just 18 days before the liberation of the Netherlands.

After the war, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower awarded Hannie a posthumous Medal of Freedom.

Truus was honored by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for her work in protecting Jews, and she and Freddie were awarded the Mobilization War Cross by the Dutch prime minister in 2014.

Truus passed away in 2016 at the age of 92, and Freddie passed away two years later, at the same age.

Before their deaths, the sisters told Poldermans that Hannie was defiant until the end, and they liked to repeat the story of her execution - which has become the stuff of legend in the Netherlands, based on several police reports and witness statements.

When the first bullet missed its mark, Hannie fixed the soldiers sent to kill her with a steady gaze.

"Idiots," she said. "I shoot better than you."

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Meet the Dutch girls who seduced Nazis - and lured them to their deaths

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When she came across a Nazi killing an infant by repeatedly swinging its tiny body against a brick wall, Truus Oversteegen didn't flinch. The freckle-faced teenager, who was just three months shy of her 17th birthday when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, was a newly minted member of the Dutch resistance.

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Freddie Oversteegen was only 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance during World War II, and only a couple of years older when she became one of its armed assassins. Together with her sister-and later, a young woman named Hannie Schaft-the trio lured, ambushed and killed German Nazis and their Dutch collaborators.

Sabotage and Assassination Missions against Nazis and Collaborators

Freddie and her sister Truus, who was two years older, grew up in the city of Haarlem with a single, working-class mother. Their mother considered herself a communist and taught her daughters the importance of fighting injustice. When Europe was on the brink of war in 1939, she took Jewish refugees into their homes.

Through their mother's example, Freddie and Truus "learned that if you have to help somebody, like refugees, you have to make sacrifices for yourself," says Jeroen Pliester, chair of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation. "I think that was one of the main drivers for them, the high moral principle and preparedness of their mother to act when it really matters."

The Roles of Women in the Dutch Resistance

In May 1940, Nazis invaded the Netherlands, beginning an occupation that lasted until the end of the war. In response, the girls joined their mother in distributing anti-Nazi newspapers and pamphlets for the resistance.

"We also glued warnings across German posters in the street calling men to work in Germany," Freddie later recalled in interviews she and her sister did with anthropologist Ellis Jonker, collected in the book Under Fire: Women and World War II. "And then we'd hurry off, on our bikes."

These acts weren't just subversive, they were also dangerous. If the Nazis or Dutch police caught the sisters, they might have killed them. However, the fact that they were both young girls-and Freddie looked even younger when she wore braids-meant that officials were less likely to suspect them of working for the resistance. This might be one of the reasons why, in 1941, a commander with the Haarlem Resistance Group visited their house to ask their mother if he could recruit Freddie and Truus.

Their mother consented and the sisters' agreed to join. "Only later did he tell us what we'd actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines," Truus told Jonker. "'And learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis,' he added. I remember my sister saying: 'Well, that's something I've never done before!'"

In at least one instance, Truus seduced an SS officer into the woods so that someone from the resistance could shoot him. As the commander who recruited them had said, Freddie and Truus learned to shoot Nazis too, and the sisters began to go on assassination missions by themselves. Later on, they focused on killing Dutch collaborators who arrested or endangered Jewish refugees and resistance members.

"They were unusual, these girls," says Bas von Benda-Beckmann, a former researcher at the Netherlands' Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "There were a lot of women involved in the resistance in the Netherlands but not so much in the way these girls were. There are not that many examples of women who actually shot collaborators themselves."

On these missions, Freddie was especially good at following a target or keeping a lookout during missions since she looked so young and unsuspecting. Both sisters were shot to kill, but they never revealed how many Nazis and Dutch collaborators they assassinated. According to Pliester, Freddie would tell people who asked that she and her sister were soldiers, and soldiers don't say.

Consequently, we don't have too many details about how their "liquidations," as they called them, played out. Benda-Beckmann says that sometimes they would follow a target to his house to kill him or ambush them on their bikes.

Their other duties in the Haarlem Resistance Group included "bringing Jewish [refugees] to a new hiding place, working in the emergency hospital in Enschede... [and] blowing up the railway line between Ijmuiden and Haarlem," writes Jonker. In 1943, they joined forces with another young woman, Hannie Schaft.

Hannie was a former university student who dropped out because she refused to sign a pledge of loyalty to Germany. Together, the three young women formed a sabotage and assassination cell. Hannie became their best friend, and the sisters were devastated when Nazis arrested and killed her in 1945, just three weeks before the war ended in Europe. According to lore, Hannie's last words were, "I'm a better shot," after initially only being wounded by her executioner.

The Aftermath of World War II for the Oversteegen Sisters

After the war, the sisters dealt with the trauma of killing people and losing their best friend. Truus created sculptures and later spoke and wrote about their time in the resistance. Freddie coped "by getting married and having babies," as she told VICE Netherlands in 2016. But the experience of war still caused her insomnia. In another interview, Freddie recalled seeing a person she'd shot fall to the ground and having the human impulse to want to help him.

"We did not feel it suited us," Truss told Jonker of their assassinations. "It never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals."

Both women died at age 92-Truus in 2016, and Freddie on September 5, 2018, one day before she turned 93. Throughout much of their long lives, the Netherlands failed to properly recognize the women's achievements and sidelined them as communists. In 2014, they finally received national recognition for their service to their country by receiving the Mobilisatie-Oorlogskruis, or "War Mobilization Cross."

HISTORY Vault: World War II

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This Teenager Killed Nazis With Her Sister During WWII | HISTORY

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Freddie and Truus Oversteegen sometimes ambushed Nazi officers from their bicycles-and never revealed how many they had assassinated.

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Rachel M. Johnson is a lover of all things pop culture. She's been writing about music and entertainment online for years.
Freddie Oversteegen was just 14-years-old when she and her older sister, Truus, joined the Dutch Resistance in an effort to take down the German Nazis. The sisters and fellow fighter and friend Hannie Schaft ambushed and killed Nazis and Dutch collaborators, and would go on to become unsung heroes of World War II.

Early Beginnings

Freddie Oversteegen was born on September 6, 1925 in Schoten, Netherlands. She and her older sister Truus lived with their parents on a barge. The Oversteegen family had harbored people from Lithuania in the hold of their ship, hidden and protected. From a young age, the sisters were taught the importance of fighting injustice, and were brought up in a socially aware household. When their parents divorced, the girls stayed with their mother, Trijn, and were raised in an apartment in the city of Haarlem. Under the guidance of their mother, Freddie and Truus were taught her communist values.

In 1939, when the threat of war was imminent in Europe, their mother hid refugees from Amsterdam and Germany in the family home. 14-year-old Freddie witnessed firsthand the monstrosities of Hitlerism, and vowed to take a stand against the horrors being unleashed. In a 2016 interview, she once reflected, "I remember how people were taken from their homes. The Germans were banging on doors with the butts of their rifles--that made so much noise, you'd hear it in the entire neighborhood. And they would always yell--it was very frightening."

Joining the Resistance

When Freddie was 14 and Truus 16, a commander of the Haarlem Council of Resistance arrived at their home and asked Trijn if the teenagers could join the underground fight against the Nazis. Their mother obliged and granted the girls permission, and the two joined the Dutch resistance fight. No one would suspect such young, beautiful women being capable of deadly skills. The pair soon began training, joining a small group of other young female fighters. Freddie, Truus and fellow fighter and friend Hannie Schaft worked to sabotage the Nazi military presence in the Netherlands. "Someone taught us to shoot and we learned to march into the woods. There were about seven of us then--Hannie wasn't a part of the group yet an we were the only girls."

Freddie was allegedly the first to shoot a "Nazi traitor"; she shot a soldier while riding her bicycle. The young women would also flirt with their targets in bars and ask them to take a walk in the forest, under the pretense of a romantic overture. The girls or fellow resistance fighters would then kill the soldiers once they were alone with them. The resistance worked to sabotage the Nazi military presence in the Netherlands; they would use dynamite to disable railroad tracks and bridges. They also aided Jewish children by smuggling them out of the country and helping them escape concentration camps.

Surviving the War

Freddie, Truus and Hannie were given many risky tasks to complete, and did so impressively. Had they been caught by the Nazis or Dutch police, they would have probably been killed. The fact that they were young girls allowed them to fly under the radar and become silent assassins. Freddie was especially good at following a target because she was young and looked unsuspecting. Though both sisters carried out many kills, they refused to reveal how many Nazis and Dutch collaborators they assassinated. Freddie would tell people that they were soldiers, and soldiers don't say. In 1945, just three weeks before the war in Europe ended, the girls' best friend and fellow fighter Hannie was captured by Nazis; she was later tortured and killed.

The death of Hannie stuck with the sisters, as did the trauma of killing people and surviving the war. Once World War II ended, Freddie went on to live a normal life; she married Jan Dekker and had 3 children. Her sister Truus founded the National Hannie Schaft Foundation in honor of their fallen friend. Freddie served as a board member for the foundation.

Later Years & Life

For many years, the Netherlands failed to acknowledge and recognize the pair's achievements, and labeled them as communists. Freddie and Truus were finally awarded the Mobilisation War Cross by Mark Rutte, Dutch Prime Minister in 2014. The Dutch Medal was given to the Oversteegen girls in honor of their valor during wartime. A street was also named in Freddie's honor in the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. In an interview during her later years, Truus once reflected on their assassinations, saying, "We did not feel it suited us. It never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals."

Freddie threw herself into domestic life in an effort to escape the haunting memories of the war, but she struggled with the trauma all her life. The annual Remembrance of the Dead was a particularly hard time for her. Towards the end of her life, Freddie began to open up more about her war experiences and even appeared in the 2016 documentary Two Sisters in the Resistance. Their bond remained strong their whole lives. According to Truus's daughter, "One word was enough for them to understand each other. They had relied on each other completely during the war. Their lives were in each other's hands." Both sisters passed away at the age of 92; Truus in 2016 and Freddie on September 5, 2018, one day shy of her 93rd birthday.
© 2021 Rachel M Johnson
Rachel M Johnson (author) on May 18, 2021:

@Constant Juma, I couldn't agree more!

Constant Juma on May 18, 2021:

True sisterhood and courage. Amazing

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The Story of Freddie Oversteegen: Teenage Nazi Assassin

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Freddie Oversteegen was just 14-years-old when she and her older sister, Truus, joined the Dutch Resistance in an effort to take down the German Nazis. The sisters and fellow fighter and friend Hannie Schaft ambushed and killed Nazis and Dutch collaborators, and would go on to become unsung heroes.

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THE RESISTANCE Truus and Freddie Oversteegen: What'sHerName Podcast Episode 64

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Truus and Freddie Oversteegen: Sisters & Resistance Fighters

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Like most sisters, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen did not always get along. Truus, as the older of the two, was more assertive and dictatorial, and felt she was entitled to boss Freddie around. Fred…