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Freddie reddie Oversteegen was born on 6 September 1925 in the village of Schoten, Netherlands.[1] She had an older sister, Truus Menger-Oversteegen.[2]

She and her family lived on a barge. Before the war started in the Netherlands, the Oversteegen family hid people from Lithuania in the hold of their ship.[3][why?]

After the divorce of her parents, Oversteegen was raised by her mother.[2] She moved from the barge to a small apartment.[3] Her mother later remarried and gave birth to her half-brother. The family lived in poverty.[2]

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Freddie Oversteegen

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the Oversteegen family hid a Jewish couple in their home.[3] Freddie Oversteegen and her older sister Truus began handing out anti-Nazi pamphlets, which attracted the notice of Harlem Council of Resistance commander Frans van der Wiel. With their mother's permission, the girls joined the Council of Resistance, which brought them into a coordinated effort.[2] Freddie was fourteen years old at the time.[3][4]

Oversteegen, her sister, and friend Hannie Schaft worked to sabotage the Nazi military presence in the Netherlands.[5] They used dynamite to disable bridges and railroad tracks.[6] They also smuggled Jewish children out of the country or helped them escape concentration camps.[2]

The Oversteegens and Schaft also killed German soldiers, with Freddie being the first of the girls to kill a soldier by shooting him while riding her bicycle.[1][5] They also lured soldiers to the woods under the pretense of a romantic overture and then killed them.[1][5] Oversteegen would approach the soldiers in taverns and bars and ask them to "go for a stroll" in the forest. This all happened during the War.

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Freddie Oversteegen After the resistance

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Freddie Oversteegen After the resistance

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Oversteegen served as a board member on the National Hannie Schaft Foundation, which was established by her sister, Truus.[2] In 2014, Freddie and Truus were awarded the Mobilisation War Cross (Mobilisatie-Oorlogskruis) by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte for their acts of resistance during the war.[1][7] There is also a street named after her in Haarlem.[8]

Oversteegen experienced a series of heart attacks towards the end of her life. She died on 5 September 2018 in a nursing home in Driehuis, one day before her 93rd birthday

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Hannie Schaft was born in Haarlem, the capital of the province of North Holland.[1] Her mother, Aafje Talea Schaft (born Vrijer) was a Mennonite and her father, Pieter Schaft, a teacher, was attached to the Social Democratic Workers' Party; the two were very protective of Schaft because of the death due to diphtheria of her older sister Anna in 1927.[1]

From a young age, Schaft discussed politics and social justice with her family, which encouraged her to pursue law and become a human rights lawyer.[1] During her law studies at the University of Amsterdam, which she started in 1938, she became friends with the Jewish students Sonja Frenk and Philine Polak. This made her feel strongly about actions against Jews. With the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, in 1943, university students were required to sign a declaration of allegiance to the occupation authorities. When Schaft refused to sign the petition in support of the occupation forces, like 80% of the other students, she could not continue her studies and in the summer of 1943 she moved in with her parents again, taking Frenk and Polak with her who went into hiding.[2]

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Schaft's resistance work started with small acts. First, she would steal ID cards for Jewish residents (including her friends).[1] Upon leaving university, she joined the Raad van Verzet [nl] ('Council of Resistance'), a resistance movement that had close ties to the Communist Party of the Netherlands.[2] Rather than act as a courier, Schaft wanted to work with weapons. She was responsible for sabotaging and assassinating various targets.[2] She carried out attacks on Germans, Dutch Nazis, collaborators and traitors. She learned to speak German fluently and became involved with German soldiers.

Schaft did not, however, accept every assignment. When asked to kidnap the children of a Nazi official she refused. If the plan had failed, the children would have to be killed, and Schaft felt that was too similar to the Nazis' acts of terror.[3] When seen at the location of a particular assassination, Schaft was identified as "the girl with the red hair". Her involvement led "the girl with the red hair" to be placed on the Nazis' most-wanted list.[2]

On 21 June 1944, Schaft and Jan Bonekamp, a friend in the resistance, carried out an assassination in Zaandam on Dutch police officer and collaborator Willem Ragut. Schaft fired first and hit Ragut in the back. Bonekamp was shot in the stomach by Ragut before killing him. Mortally wounded, Bonekamp fled the scene but was arrested shortly afterwards and taken to hospital. There he inadvertently gave Schaft's name and address to Dutch Nazi nurses feigning to be Resistance workers. To force Schaft to confess, German authorities arrested her parents and sent them to the Herzogenbusch concentration camp near the city of Den Bosch.[4] The distress of this situation and her grief over Bonekamp's death forced Schaft to cease resistance work temporarily. Her parents were released after two months.[4]

Krist after his execution on 25 October 1944

Upon recovery, Schaft dyed her hair black and wore glasses to hide her identity and returned to Resistance work. She once again contributed to assassinations and sabotage, as well as courier work, and the transportation of illegal weapons and the dissemination of illegal newspapers.[4] Hannie Schaft and Truus Oversteegen were planning to liquidate NSB member and Haarlem policeman Fake Krist on 25 October 1944, but other Haarlem resistance fighters were ahead of them.

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She was eventually arrested at a military checkpoint in Haarlem on 21 March 1945 while distributing the illegal communist newspaper de Waarheid ('The Truth'), which was a cover story. She was transporting secret documentation for the Resistance. She worked closely with Anna A.C. Wijnhoff.[5] She was brought to a prison in Amsterdam. After much interrogation, torture, and solitary confinement, Schaft was identified by the roots of her red hair by her former colleague Anna Wijnhoff.[5]

Schaft was executed by Dutch Nazi officials on 17 April 1945.[5] Although at the end of the war there was an agreement between the occupier and the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten ('Dutch resistance') to stop executions, she was shot dead three weeks before the end of the war in the dunes of Overveen, near Bloemendaal.[5] Two men known as Mattheus Schmitz and Maarten Kuiper[6][7] took her to the execution site. Schmitz shot her in the head at close range. However, the bullet only grazed Schaft. She allegedly told her executioners: Ik schiet beter "I shoot better!", after which Kuiper delivered a final shot to her head. Schaft's execution was directly

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Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland on April 6, 1906, to Barbara Virginia Hammel and Edwin Lee Hall.[7] She attended Roland Park Country School and then Radcliffe College of Harvard University and Barnard College of Columbia University, where she studied French, Italian, and German.[7] She also attended George Washington University, where she studied French and Economics. She wanted to finish her studies in Europe, so she traveled the Continent and studied in France, Germany, and Austria, eventually landing an appointment as a Consular Service clerk at the Embassy of the United States, Warsaw, Poland in 1931.

A few months later she transferred to Smyrna (İzmir), Turkey. In 1933, she tripped on a fence and accidentally shot herself in the left foot while hunting birds. After being diagnosed with gangrene, on the brink of death, as a last-ditch attempt her leg was amputated below the knee and replaced with a wooden appendage which she named "Cuthbert". She then worked again as a consular clerk in Venice and in Tallinn, Estonia.[8]

Hall made several attempts to become a diplomat with the United States Foreign Service, but women were rarely hired. In 1937, she was turned down by the Department of State because of an obscure rule against hiring people with disabilities as diplomats. An appeal for her to be hired to President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unheeded. She resigned from the Department of State in March 1939, still a consular clerk.[9]

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Hall joined the SOE in April 1941 and after training arrived in Vichy France, unoccupied by Germany and nominally independent at that time, on August 23, 1941. She was the second female agent to be sent to France by SOE's F (France) Section, and the first to remain there for a lengthy period of time. (SOE F section would send 41 female agents to France during World War II, of whom 26 would survive the war.)[a] Hall's cover was as a reporter for the New York Post which gave her license to interview people, gather information and file stories filled with details useful to military planners. She based herself in Lyon. She turned away from her "chic Parisian wardrobe" to become inconspicuous and often quickly changed her appearance through make-up and disguise.[12] Hall was a pioneer as a World War II secret agent and had to learn on her own the "exacting tasks of being available, arranging contacts, recommending who to bribe and where to hide, soothing the jagged nerves of agents on the run and supervising the distribution of wireless sets."[13] The network (or circuit) of SOE agents she founded was named Heckler.[14] Among her recruits were gynecologist Jean Rousset and Germaine Guérin, the owner of a prominent brothel in Lyon. Guérin made several safehouses available to Hall and passed along tidbits of information she and her female employees heard from German officers visiting the brothel.[15]

The official historian of the SOE, M. R. D. Foot, said that the motto of every successful secret agent was "dubito, ergo sum" ("I doubt, therefore I am.").[16] Hall's lengthy tenure in France without being captured illustrates her caution. In October 1941, she sensed danger and declined to attend a meeting of SOE agents in Marseille which the French police raided, capturing a dozen agents. After that debacle, Hall was one of the few SOE agents still at large in France and the only one with a means of transmitting information to London. George Whittinghill, an American diplomat in Lyon, allowed her to smuggle reports and letters to London in the diplomatic pouch.[17]

The winter of 1941–42 was miserable for Hall. In a letter she said that if SOE would send her a piece of soap she would be "both very happy and much cleaner." In the absence of an SOE wireless operator her access to the American diplomatic pouch was the only means the few agents left at large in France had of communicating with London. She continued building contacts in southern France and she assisted in the brief missions of SOE agents Peter Churchill and Benjamin Cowburn and earned high compliments from both. She avoided contact with an SOE agent sent to Lyon named Georges Duboudin and refused to introduce him to her contacts. She regarded him as amateurish and lax in security. When SOE headquarters directed that Duboudin should supervise her, she told SOE to "lay off." She worked as little as possible with Philippe de Vomécourt, who, although an authentic French Resistance leader, was lax in security and grandiose in his ambitions.[18] In August 1942, SOE agent Richard Heslop met with her and described her as a "girl" (she was 36) who lived in a gloomy apartment, but he relied on her to facilitate communications with other agents. When a suspicious Heslop demanded to know who "Cuthbert" was she showed him by banging her wooden foot against a table leg producing a hollow sound.[19]

Another task Hall took on was helping British airmen, shot down or crashed over Europe, escape and return to England. Downed airmen who found their way to Lyon were told to go to the American Consulate and say they were a "friend of Olivier." "Olivier" was Hall and she, with the help of brothel-owner Guérin and other friends, hid, fed, and helped dozens of airmen escape France to neutral Spain and hence back to England.[20]

The French nicknamed her "la dame qui boite" and the Germans put "the limping lady" on their most wanted list

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After the war, Hall visited Lyon to learn the fate of the people who had worked for her there. Her closest associates, brothel-owner Germaine Guérin and gynecologist Jean Rousset, had both been captured by the Germans and sent to concentration camps, but they survived. She arranged 80,000 francs (400 British pounds) compensation from the United Kingdom for Guérin, but most of her other helpers received nothing. Many of the people she knew had not survived, including the three men she had called "nephews," who had been executed at Buchenwald.[41] Robert Alesch, the German agent and priest who had betrayed her network in Lyon, was captured after the war and executed in Paris.[25]

Hall joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, one of the first women hired by the new agency. As a woman, she was discriminated against, as the CIA later acknowledged. She was passed over for promotions, honors, and work for which she was qualified, despite the support and efforts from her superiors who knew her work directly. She was given a desk-bound job as an intelligence analyst, to gather information about Soviet penetration of European countries. She resigned in 1948, and then was rehired in 1950 for another desk job.

In the 1950s, she again headed ultra secret paramilitary operations in France as a model for setting up resistance groups in several European countries in case of a Soviet attack. She became a "sacred" presence and the first woman operations officer in the entire covert action arm of the CIA, and a valued member of the Special Activities Division supporting undercover activities to prevent the spread of communism in Europe. She received a poor performance report from a superior who had never overseen her work. In 1966, she retired, at the mandatory retirement age of 60.

In the secret CIA report of her career, the CIA admitted that her fellow officers "felt she had been sidelined--shunted into backwater accounts because she had so much experience that she overshadowed her male colleagues, who felt threatened by her," and that "her experience and abilities were never properly utilized."[42]

While in Haute-Loire, Hall had met and fallen in love with an OSS lieutenant, Paul Goillot, who worked with her. In 1957, the couple married after living together off-and-on for years. They retired to a farm in Barnesville, Maryland, where she lived until her death on July 8, 1982. Her husband survived her by five years.[43] She is buried in the Druid Ridge Cemetery, Pikesville, Maryland.