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Haarlem, 1941. The Nazi yoke already weighs on the whole of the Netherlands. It is night and the bar in this Dutch city is full of soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht ready to have a good time. Three girls, barely 15 years old, enter the tavern, sit down with the soldiers and seduce them. It is an ideal scenario. Intoxicated with power, the Nazis agree to their request to go for a walk in a forest that will become their grave.

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It might look like a deleted scene from Shosanna Dreyfus in 'Inglorious Basterds,' but it was a reality for Freddie Oversteegen, icon of the Dutch resistance. Born in 1925 to a working-class family, she imbibed the communist ideals of her mother, Trijntje, who raised her and her older sister Truus single-handedly after they divorced. When the Nazis invaded their country in May 1940, the Oversteegen family welcomed a group of Jews into their home. "There were trucks in the street full of corpses," Freddie recounted in an interview. "It was terrible," she added.

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The impact of the Nazi occupation galvanized this young girl and her sister into action. Together with her mother, they began to distribute a censored leftist newspaper and anti-fascist leaflets in the city, calling for the liberation of the Netherlands. Soon after, Commander Frans van der Wiel would call them to join the communist resistance group 'Raad van Verzet'. They did not hesitate. Freddie was then 14 years old; Truus, 16.

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After learning to shoot and survive in hiding, the Oversteegen sisters cycled around Haarlem with a gun in their basket. One of the missions they carried out was that of the bar. Confident, the Nazi soldiers and their Dutch collaborators allowed themselves to be seduced. Once in the forest, they would "liquidate" them. "We had to do it. It was a necessary evil," explained Freddie before he passed away last September, a day before celebrating his 93rd birthday. "You don't shoot a man in the first place, you shoot the enemy."

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In 1943 a red-haired girl joined that communist resistance cell, consisting of the three girls and five men. She was Hannie Schaft, probably the best known anti-fascist fighter in the Netherlands. Together they became a bit of a problem for the invaders. They hid dissidents, helped Jewish children escape the country, blew up railroad tracks and bridges supplying ammunition to the Wehrmacht from Germany, and even managed to raise a communist flag at the Nazi party headquarters in Utrecht on Labor Day.

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That whole sabotage plan was far from easy for the Oversteegen sisters. "You lose everything, it poisons all the beautiful things in life," Truus explained about the feeling of having killed someone. Sleepless nights, tears and a sense of bitterness. "I shot them myself and watched them fall. And what you want to do is help them get back up," she said, Freddie.

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Truus Menger-Oversteegen at the unveiling of her memorial sculpture to Hannie Schaft, with Princess Juliana (right) May 3, 1982
photo courtesy of North Holland Archives

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Both survived the war. Truus became an artist and wrote a memoir about her journey. Freddie married and had three children. Hannie Schaft was not as fortunate and, just 18 days before the liberation of the Netherlands, she was captured, tortured and executed by the Nazis. She was 24 years old. Proud of this "act of historical justice" that also haunted them for the rest of their lives, the Oversteegen sisters wanted to make it clear that they were not heroines, "we just did the right thing". A grain of sand against the fascist machine, an act of resistance. Underestimating women was a grave mistake for the Nazis.

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The teenage Dutch girls who seduced and killed Nazis - BBC REEL