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Freddie Oversteegen

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teenager kill nizis with her sister in ww2

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Freddie Oversteegen was a 14 year old girl when she joined the Dutch resistance in World War II, and only a couple of years older when she became one of its armed assassins. With her sister Hannie Schaft.

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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 close to war she took Jewish refugees into their homes.

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Her confession

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She was petite. She had beautiful braids. She was a child seductress who lured Nazi officers to their deaths.

Freddie Oversteegen was one of three young women recruited to a cell of Dutch resistance fighters in the city of Haarlem during World War II.

It was May 1940. The Netherlands had just fallen to Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg (Lightning War).

Freddie was just 14. Her sister, Truus, was 16.

They were soon both to be in the thick of the action.

Freddie was feminine but fierce. Truus was a decisive but pragmatic tomboy.

War up-ended everything.

And Freddie was the first to kill.

"Yes, I've shot a gun myself, and I've seen them fall," she once said in an interview. "And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up!"''

'STAY HUMAN'

At the outbreak of war, the Oversteegen sisters volunteered as nurses in an emergency hospital on the border with Germany. There was a military air base nearby. So the sisters began to record its activities secretly.
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The siblings showed no hesitation in risking their lives to resist the occupation.

The single-parent Oversteegen family had been sheltering Jews fleeing Germany since the mid-1930s. But, with the invasion, these refugees had to be relocated.

"We never heard from them again," Freddie said. "It still moves me dreadfully whenever I talk about it."

A Dutch resistance leader in nearby Haarlem soon heard of the brave young girls' activities.

He saw great potential.

So Frans van der Wiel paid a personal visit to the family. He quickly convinced the girls they would be of greater use to Holland by joining his organisation.

Freddie said her mother gave her blessing - with one condition: "Always stay human."

Keeping that promise was to prove far harder than any of them could conceive.

It was an inhuman war.

"I thought we would be starting a kind of secret army," Freddie told Vice. "The man that came to our door said that we would get military training, and they did teach us a thing or two. Someone taught us to shoot, and we learned to march in the woods."

Truus said: "Only later did he tell us what we'd actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines - and learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis. I remember my sister saying: 'Well, that's something I've never done before!'."

SEDUCTIVE ASSASSINS

The small cell of resistance fighters was joined in 1943 by the slightly older Hannie Schaft. She had been a law student.

Together, the trio formed a specialist assassination squad.

Hannie - who had fiery red hair - was the clever one. She had wanted to be a human rights lawyer.

Freddie was the most determined. She played up the role of a sweet, innocent young girl. She was good at being an unsuspected lookout. And bait. Especially when in braids.

Her older sister, Truus, quickly became their unofficial leader.

Together, they cycled the city, hunting down isolated collaborators and soldiers. Who would ever suspect such sweet, innocent young girls of ride-by shootings?

They sought out desperate Jews, homosexuals and political dissidents. Who would ever accuse such sweet, innocent young girls of harbouring fugitives?

At night, they would put on makeup and visit bars. There, they would seduce German officers and lure them into nearby woods. Who would ever fear such sweet, innocent young girls?

Freddie later said it "was like: 'Want to go for a stroll?' And of course he wanted to. Then they ran into someone - which was made to seem a coincidence, but he was one of ours - and that friend said ... 'Girl, you know you're not supposed to be here.' They apologised, turned around, and walked away. And then shots were fired, so that man never knew what hit him. They had already dug the hole, but we weren't allowed to be there for that part".

TRIAL BY FIRE

Eventually, Oversteegen mother's prophetic command was put to the test.

They were to target the reichkommissar - the senior Nazi commander - of the Netherlands. The idea was to kidnap his children and force a prisoner exchange.

The young women refused.

The risk to the children's lives, they insisted, was too high. And children were innocents.

"Resistance fighters don't murder children," Freddie said in the 2011 book, Women Heroes of World War II.

But Nazi politicians, soldiers and collaborators were fair game.

"We were no terrorists ... We had to do it. It was a necessary evil."

When asked long after the war, Freddie refused to reveal how many men she had killed: "You shouldn't ask a soldier how many people they've shot."

In her mind, she, Truus and Hannie were soldiers. Child soldiers. But soldiers nevertheless.

They were regularly witnessing inhuman scenes.

"Once, I was confronted with an SS soldier, a Dutch SS soldier even, who was killing a small baby by hitting it against a wall," Truus said in the book, Seducing and Killing Nazis.

"The father and sister had to watch ... I shot that guy. Right there and then. That wasn't an assignment, but I don't regret it."

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Demoralising rumours circulated among the invading Nazis about the Dutch angels of death.

Hannie, in particular, became something to fear. Officers and troops were on their guard for a deadly-beautiful "girl with red hair".

Such was her fame. She was declared a Dutch national heroine shortly after the war.

The two Oversteegen sisters survived the conflict.

But their emotional scars never fully healed.

Both had nightmares. They suffered from insomnia and depression. Peace always seemed just out of reach.

These days, it's called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD).

The oldest member of the female hit-squad, Hannie, remained eternally young. She was stopped by the Nazis while riding her bicycle. They found a pistol and documents concealed in her hamper.

Hannie endured three weeks of torture before being executed on April 17, 1945. According to tradition, she taunted her Nazi executioner by declaring "I'm a better shot" after his first attempt failed to kill her.

Just 18 days later, the Netherlands was liberated.

FOREVER WAR

Freddie married an engineer and had three children. A secluded family life, she said, was how she sought to put the horror of her war exploits behind her. She died in 2018, aged 93.

Truus married a fellow former resistance fighter and became an artist. She wrote an autobiography called Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever and lectured about her experiences.

She died in 2016.

Truus toiled all her life to ensure the exploits of their fellow Dutch resistance fighters would never be forgotten. It was only later that the still traumatised Freddie would take up the fight.

But they were both sidelined for their Communist past.

It took until 2014 for their national service to be honoured.

Both endlessly repeated their mother's one steadfast rule: "Always remain human".

The sisters had been killers. But not by choice.

"It was tragic and very difficult, and we cried about it afterwards," Truus said. We did not feel it suited us ... One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life."

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'I was bait': Teen Nazi killer's confession

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She was petite. She had beautiful braids. She was a child seductress who lured Nazi officers to their deaths. Freddie Oversteegen was one of three young women recruited to a cell of Dutch resistance fighters in the city of Haarlem during World War II. It was May 1940.

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The Teenage Girls Who Seduced and Killed Nazis

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When the nazis invaded the Netherlands this was the beginning an occupation that lasted until the end of the war. The girls joined their mother in distributing anti-Nazi newspapers and pamphlets for the resistan 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 them what they would actually have to do which was to sabotage bridges and railway lines And learn to shoot Nazis

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After the war, the sisters dealt with the trauma of killing people and losing their best friends. To help with this truus created sculptures and spoke and wrote about their time in the resistance. Freddie got married and had babies But the experience of war still caused her insomnia.Both women died at age 92—Truus. 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.

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The first thing the Nazis took from Freddie Oversteegen was her bed.

Her mother, Trijn, a communist bringing up her children independently in the Dutch city of Haarlem, sheltered Jews, dissidents and gay people as they fled Germany in the 1930s. Oversteegen, who was seven when Adolf Hitler came to power, bunked in with her big sister Truus to make room.

It was the start of a struggle that would last until she died on 5 September, the day before her 93rd birthday, in a nursing home not far from where, as teenagers, she and Truus carried out a campaign of assassinations and sabotage against Nazi invaders with pistols hidden in their bicycle baskets.

"If you ask me, the war only ended two weeks ago," her son Remi Dekker told the Observer. "In her mind it was still going on, and on, and on. It didn't stop, even until the last day."

Oversteegen's war began one Friday in May 1940 with planes roaring overhead and the smell of smoke. Realising the Nazis had invaded the Netherlands, her family began burning their radical literature. Oversteegen, then 14, and Truus, 16, were already used to smuggling refugees and distributing forbidden texts. It wasn't long before the resistance came to recruit them. Her mother only gave them one rule, Oversteegen once recalled: "Always stay human."

Oversteegen in 1943, when her innocent appearance made her an invaluable resistance fighter.

Oversteegen was petite, and with her twin plaits she easily passed for 12. Her innocent looks made her invaluable as she could slip by Nazi controls unnoticed. The two sisters began as couriers, moving weapons and stealing identity papers to help Jewish people escape.

One early assignment was arson - the two burned down a Nazi warehouse, flirting with the guards as a distraction. Soon, they were taken to an underground potato shed and taught how to shoot. Their method was the Dutch equivalent of a drive-by. "My mother drove the bicycle, and Freddie sat on the back and was shooting," recalled Truus's daughter, Hannie Menger. "Because they were girls, nobody noticed them."

Some targets were Dutch collaborators who gave the Nazis details of Jewish and dissident families. Others were high-ranking Nazi officers. On one assignment to "liquidate" a member of the SS, the sisters found their target in a restaurant. As Oversteegen kept watch, Truus lured him out by seductively proposing a walk in the forest, where another resistance fighter shot him dead. The sisters regarded the killings as a grim necessity that was secondary to their more important work: rescuing children. The two helped smuggle Jewish children through the Netherlands, sometimes even as bombs fell from Allied aircraft overhead.

Occasionally, they were not successful and children were killed. This caused grief so profound that the sisters' descendants struggle to speak about those operations today.

Their cell expanded to include Hannie Schaft, a law student notorious to Nazi authorities as "the girl with the red hair". Truus, a commanding presence with a level gaze and a throaty laugh, was the leader. The three developed an iron bond.

Oversteegen never forgot the day that Schaft failed to return from an assignment. She had been captured at a checkpoint. Though her hair was dyed black, the red colour of her roots revealed her identity. Aged 24, Schaft was executed in the dunes west of Haarlem, just 18 days before the Netherlands was liberated.

"Hannie was her soulmate friend," said Manon Hoornstra, a filmmaker to whom Oversteegen confided many of her war memories. "Freddie could never understand why the Nazis killed her just before the end of the war. She always took red roses to her grave." The peace was not easy for Oversteegen. As the cold war began and McCarthyism took hold in the United States, communist resistance fighters became so out of favour that in 1951 the Dutch government forcibly tried to prevent the commemoration of Hannie Schaft's death. Oversteegen felt alienated from the country she had fought for, and was embittered to see former Nazi sympathisers not held to account.

German soldiers marching through a town in Holland in May 1940. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

She married Jan Dekker, an engineer at a local steel factory, and threw herself into domestic life, raising three children. Her family tried to protect her from troubling memories of the war, but she struggled with the trauma all her life, particularly around the annual Remembrance of the Dead on 4 May.

"She shot a few people, and these were the real, real bad guys," her son, Remi Dekker, recalled. "But she hated it, and she hated herself for doing it."

Unlike Truus, who married a fellow resistance fighter and was open about her experiences, Oversteegen struggled to speak about the war and sometimes felt overlooked.

She feared the very attributes that served her so well in the war - her tiny stature and sweet voice - made her invisible in peacetime. "She hated her high voice," Dekker said. "She used to say, 'Nobody listens to me!'" The release of a film about Hannie Schaft in 1981 made her famous and helped rehabilitate the sisters in national memory. Eventually in 2014, the Dutch government awarded them medals of military service, in what Mark Rutte, the prime minister, called "an act of historical justice".

The two sisters retained a deep bond until Truus's death two years ago. "One word was enough for them to understand each other," recalled Menger, Truus's daughter. "They had relied on each other completely during the war. Their lives were in each other's hands."

Towards the end of her life, Freddie began to speak about her war experiences, opening up to the documentary makers Hoornstra and Thijs Zeeman for their 2016 film Two Sisters in the Resistance. After much persuading, she returned to the woods where Truus had led the SS officer to his death and where, Freddie believed, he is still buried.

"On the way there in the car, we could see that she was very vulnerable because she started singing," Hoornstra recalled. "It was a song that the members of the resistance group always sang when they were afraid."

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'Her war never stopped': the Dutch teenager who resisted the Nazis

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The first thing the Nazis took from Freddie Oversteegen was her bed. Her mother, Trijn, a communist bringing up her children independently in the Dutch city of Haarlem, sheltered Jews, dissidents and gay people as they fled Germany in the 1930s.

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Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and quickly overpowered the country's small forces. Nazis arrested and deported Jews, created forced labor, strictly rationed food, and banned all non-Nazi organizations. "Almost every Dutch person was affected by the consequences of the occupation," the Verzets Resistance Museum writes. "The choices and dilemmas facing the population became more far reaching." Often those choices were stark: Collaborate and live? Or resist and willingly put oneself at risk of prison or death?

Two sisters, Freddie and Truus Oversteegen, 14 and 16 years old during the German invasion, chose the latter course of action. Along with 19-year-old Hannie Schaft, a Dutch national hero the Nazis called "the girl with the red hair," they did things they certainly never imagined they would, killing soldiers and collaborators in order to save lives. The sisters learned their first resistance lessons at home. They were raised in the city of Haarlem by their working-class, communist mother, Trijn, who "taught the girls compassion for those less fortunate," writes Jake Rossen at Mental Floss.

The family sheltered Jews, dissidents, and gays fleeing Germany in the 1930s. "When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands," Rossen notes, "Freddie and Truus handed out pamphlets opposing the occupation and plastered warnings over propaganda posters." The Dutch resistance asked the girls to join them, and their mother agreed, knowing little of what lay in store.

Freddie and Truus were, for a time, the only two women in the seven-person rebellion dubbed the Haarlem Council of Resistance. After being recruited by commander Frans van der Wiel in 1941, the two learned the basics of sabotage, picking up tricks like how to rig railways and bridges with dynamite so travel paths would be cut off; how to fire a weapon; and how to roam undetected through an area peppered with Nazi soldiers. The latter ability was a result of their appearance. With her hair in braids, Freddie was said to have looked as young as 12 years old. Few soldiers took notice of the two girls as they rode bicycles through occupied territory, though they were secretly acting as couriers, transporting paperwork and weapons for the resistance. The duo burned down a Nazi warehouse undetected. They escorted small children and refugees to hiding spots and secured false identification for them, which they considered of paramount importance even as Allied bombs went off overhead.

The sisters lured SS officers into deathtraps, acting as lookouts while fighters killed the Germans. They soon "graduated to eliminating their own targets, which Freddie would later describe as 'liquidations,'" gunning down Nazis from their bicycles. "Sometimes, Freddie said, she would shoot a man and then feel a strange compulsion to try to help him up." It's a chilling image of a resistance fighter who is also a child soldier in a war she cannot avoid.

"There were a lot of women involved in the resistance in the Netherlands," says Bas von Benda-Beckmann, a former researcher at the Netherlands' Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, "but not so much in the way these girls were. There are not that many examples of women who actually shot collaborators." The women never revealed how many people they "liquidated." When asked in interviews, History.com notes, "Freddie would tell people...she and her sister were soldiers, and soldiers don't say."

Hannie was eventually captured and executed. The Oversteegen sisters survived the war and lived into their 90s, passing away within two years of each other: Truus in 2016 and Freddie in 2018. The traumatic toll these events took on Freddie was evident to the end of her life. "If you ask me," her son Remi Dekker said after her death, "In her mind [the war] was still going on, and on. It didn't stop, even until the last day."

The Oversteegen sisters were part of a handful of Dutch resistance fighters who lived into the 21st century. Another resistance hero, Selma van de Perre, is still alive at 97 and has published a book about her experience and the many other Jewish resistance fighters in the Netherlands during the war. The country "spawned one of Europe's most formidable anti-Nazi networks," the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle points out, thanks to the bravery of young fighters like Schaft, the Oversteegan sisters, and van de Perre. Learn more at the Verzets Resistance Museum.
via Mental Floss Related Content: The Secret Student Group Who Took on the Nazis: An Introduction to "The White Rose" How Jazz-Loving Teenagers-the Swingjugend-Fought the Hitler Youth and Resisted Conformity in Nazi Germany Albert Camus, Editor of the French Resistance Newspaper Combat, Writes Movingly About Life, Politics & War (1944-47) is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Two Teenage Dutch Sisters Ended Up Joining the Resistance and Assassinating Nazis During World War II

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Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and quickly overpowered the country's small forces. Nazis arrested and deported Jews, created forced labor, strictly rationed food, and banned all non-Nazi organizations. "Almost every Dutch person was affected by the consequences of the occupation," the Verzets Resistance Museum writes.