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Freddie oversteegen was fourteen when she joined the Dutch resistance. Freddie grew up in the city of Harlem with a single working mother. Freddie's mom took in Jewish refugees into her home in 1939 which left an important impact on Freddie and her sister. The impact there mother left on them helped there confidence and dedication later on in life.

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Freddie Oversteegen before her 93rd birthday

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Freddie Oversteegen before her 93rd birthday

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Freddie oversteegen was said to look two years younger at the age of fourteen. Due to her younger appearance nobody suspected she was carrying firearms in the basket of her bike. The Dutch resistance was widely believed to be a mans effort in a mans war. Hannie Schaft and the two sisters sabotaged bridges and rail lines. The shot Nazis while riding there bikes while sneaking Jewish children across the country. Freddie and her sister went to bars to seduce Nazi soldiers out to the wood where they shot and killed many Nazi soldiers.

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Just like Freddie Truus joined the Dutch resistance at an early age. At just sixteen she was making a difference in peoples lives. Truus, her sister, and Hannie Schaft were a well know trio who caused mass destruction for the nazis. Truus was very skilled in luring enemies but also actively engaged in a range of daring sabotage with the other members of the trio. Truus and her trio made a lasting impact on so many lives that in 2014 Truus won a Mobilization War Cross award a long with her sister.

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Truus and Freddie with there honorary award in 2014

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Truus and Freddie with there honorary award in 2014

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" One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life" - Freddie Oversteegen

" I shoot better than you" - Hannie Schaft

"We had to do it, it was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people"- Truus oversteegen

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After the war the sisters were left to deal with the pain and grief of loosing there best friend ( Hannie Schaft) and the trauma/ guilt of killing people. Even though the sacrifices they made were costly they made a significant difference in so many peoples lives. Thanks to these three strong young women hundreds of Jewish children got to grow up and experience life. There sacrifices are greatly appreciated by many to this day

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The trio ( Hannie Schaft, Truus oversteegen, Freddie Oversteegen)

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The trio ( Hannie Schaft, Truus oversteegen, Freddie Oversteegen)

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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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As a teenager during World War II, Freddie Oversteegen was one of only a few Dutch women to take up arms against the country's Nazi occupiers. (Courtesy of National Hannie Schaft Foundation)

She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years younger.

When she rode her bicycle down the streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the woods, serving as a lookout or seductively leading her SS target to a secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun and was preparing an execution.

The Dutch resistance was widely believed to be a man's effort in a man's war. If women were involved, the thinking went, they were likely doing little more than handing out anti-German pamphlets or newspapers.

Yet Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were rare exceptions - a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch "traitors" on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps.

In perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to "go for a stroll" in the forest - and "liquidated" them, as Ms. Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger.

"We had to do it," she told one interviewer. "It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people." When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill, she demurred: "One should not ask a soldier any of that."

Freddie Oversteegen, the last remaining member of the Netherlands' most famous female resistance cell, died Sept. 5, one day before her 93rd birthday. She was living in a nursing home in Driehuis, five miles from Haarlem, and had suffered several heart attacks in recent years, said Jeroen Pliester, chairman of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation.

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The organization was founded by Ms. Oversteegen's sister in 1996 to promote the legacy of Schaft, who was captured and executed by the Nazis weeks before the end of World War II. "Schaft became the national icon of female resistance," Pliester said, a martyr whose story was taught to schoolchildren across the Netherlands and memorialized in a 1981 movie, "The Girl With the Red Hair," which took its title from her nickname.

Ms. Oversteegen served as a board member in her sister's organization. But she "decided to be a little bit out of the limelight," Pliester said, and was sometimes overshadowed by Schaft and Truus, the group's leader.

"I have always been a little jealous of her because she got so much attention after the war," Ms. Oversteegen told Vice Netherlands in 2016, referring to her sister. "But then I'd just think, 'I was in the resistance as well.' "

It was, she said, a source of pride and of pain - a five-year experience that she never regretted, but that came to haunt her in peacetime. Late at night, unable to fall asleep, she sometimes recalled the words of an old battle song that served as an anthem for her and her sister: "We have carried the best to their graves/ torn and fired at, beaten till the blood ran/ surrounded by the executioners on the scaffold and jail/ but the raging of the enemy doesn't frighten us."

Freddie Nanda Oversteegen was born in the village of Schoten, now part of Haarlem, on Sept. 6, 1925. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and Freddie and Truus were raised primarily by their mother, a communist who instilled a sense of social responsibility in the young girls; she eventually remarried and had a son.

In interviews with anthropologist Ellis Jonker, collected in the 2014 book "Under Fire: Women and World War II," Freddie Oversteegen recalled that their mother encouraged them to make dolls for children suffering in the Spanish Civil War, and beginning in the early 1930s volunteered with International Red Aid, a kind of communist Red Cross for political prisoners around the world.

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Although living in poverty, sleeping on makeshift mattresses stuffed with straw, the family harbored refugees from Germany and Amsterdam, including a Jewish couple and a mother and son who lived in their attic. After German forces invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the couples were moved to another location; Jewish community leaders feared a potential raid, because of the family's well-known political leanings.

"They were all deported and murdered," Ms. Oversteegen told Jonker. "We never heard from them again. It still moves me dreadfully, whenever I talk about it."

Ms. Oversteegen and her sister began their resistance careers by distributing pamphlets ("The Netherlands have to be free!") and hanging anti-Nazi posters ("For every Dutch man working in Germany, a German man will go to the front!"). Their efforts apparently attracted the attention of Frans van der Wiel, commander of the underground Haarlem Council of Resistance, who invited them to join his team - with their mother's permission.

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

By Truus's account, it was Freddie Oversteegen who became the first to shoot and kill someone."It was tragic and very difficult and we cried about it afterwards," Truus said. "We did not feel it suited us - it never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals. . . . One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life."

The Oversteegen sisters were officially part of a seven-person resistance cell, which grew to include an eighth member, Schaft, after she joined in 1943. But the three girls worked primarily as a stand-alone unit, Pliester said, acting on instructions from the Council of Resistance.

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After the war ended in 1945, Truus worked as an artist, making paintings and sculptures inspired by her years with the resistance, and wrote a popular memoir, "Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever." She died in 2016, two years after Prime Minister Mark Rutte awarded the sisters the Mobilization War Cross, a military honor for service in World War II.

For her part, Freddie Oversteegen told Vice that she coped with the traumas of the war "by getting married and having babies." She married Jan Dekker, taking the name Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, and raised three children. They survive her, as do her half brother and four grandchildren. Her husband, who worked at the steel company Hoogovens, is deceased.

In interviews, Ms. Oversteegen often spoke of the physics of killing - not the feel of the trigger or kick of the gun, but the inevitable collapse that followed, her victims' fall to the ground.

"Yes," she told one interviewer, according to the Dutch newspaper IJmuider Courant , "I've shot a gun myself and I've seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up."

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Freddie Oversteegen, Dutch resistance fighter who killed Nazis through seduction, dies at 92

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She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years younger. When she rode her bicycle down the streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi officials rarely stopped to question her.

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The Unforgettable Bravery of Dutch Resistance Truus Oversteegen Freddie Oversteege

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During World War II, the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands spurred the rise of many resistance groups, but few stories are as remarkable as those of Truus Oversteegen, Freddie Oversteegen, and Hannie Schaft. These young women displayed extraordinary courage and resilience, engaging in direct action against the Nazis. Their stories are not only a testament to their bravery but also an inspiration for future generations.Family Background and Early LifeTruus Oversteegen was born on August 29, 1923

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Author Writes About Women Who Led Dutch Resistance

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Hannie was born in the same town as the Oversteegen sisters but had different experiences growing up. Hannie s parents were more affluent and conservative. Hannie joined the resistance after witnessing the injustice of Nazi regime. Hannie later was known as " the girl with red hair". Hannie did not accept every assignment that was given to her because she felt that some of the assignments were no better than what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish people. When seen at the association at a particular location she was referred to as " the girl with red hair" and was put on the Nazis most wanted list. Even thought Schaft was very skilled at her job she eventually was captured by the Nazis at the age of 24. She was killed and her last words were said to be " I shoot better than you" after the first bullet fired at her only wounded her and she was then shot a second time which ended her life.

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in an interview with Freddie oversteegen she tells a story about her and her sister Truus liking the same guy and how Truus was upset at Freddie for a bit she did forgive her. I think this shows how strong of a bond Freddie and Truus have as sisters. I feel like this also shows how even as heros for many the famous sisters are still just humble people who make mistakes and have flaws.