A teenage girl with braided pigtails walked up to a woman sitting alone on a park bench in Haarlem, Netherlands, in 1943, asked her name, confirmed her identity, and shot her dead before pedaling away on her bicycle — an act of assassination that saved hundreds of Jewish lives and opened one of the most extraordinary and least-known chapters of Dutch resistance history.
The girl was Freddie Oversteegen. She was 16 years old. The woman she killed was a Dutch collaborator who had compiled a list of every Jew in the region — names, addresses, entire families — and was preparing to hand it to the Nazi occupiers.
That list would have meant deportation and death for hundreds of innocent people. Freddie stopped it with a single bullet.
By the end of World War II, Freddie and her older sister Truus would assassinate dozens of Nazi officers and Dutch collaborators, seducing them in bars, luring them into forests, and shooting them dead on street corners. The exact number is unknown. When asked, Freddie always gave the same answer: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”
Their story, buried for nearly 70 years by a Dutch government that shunned them for their communist ties, resurfaced only in 2014 when Prime Minister Mark Rutte awarded both sisters the Mobilization War Cross. Freddie was 89. Truus was 91.
Freddie’s son later called it the happiest day of his mother’s life.
Freddie Oversteegen was born in 1925 in the village of Schoten, just outside Haarlem. Her childhood was anything but ordinary. The family lived on a houseboat.
Her father earned little. Her mother, Trijn, was a communist who believed that when you see injustice, you do not look away — you act.
When Freddie was young, her parents divorced. Her father sang a French farewell song from the bow of the ship as they left. She rarely saw him again.
Trijn moved her two daughters into a tiny apartment in Haarlem. They slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. They had almost nothing.
Yet their mother still made room for others. Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. Political fugitives running from the Nazis.
Strangers who needed a place to hide. Freddie and Truus grew up sharing their beds with people whose names they sometimes did not even know.
They made dolls for children suffering in the Spanish Civil War. They learned early that some things matter more than comfort. Their mother taught them one lesson: “If you have to help somebody, you have to make sacrifices for yourself.”
It was a lesson they would never forget.
On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. The Dutch army held out for five days, then surrendered. Freddie was 14.
Truus was 16. The occupation began immediately. German soldiers filled the streets.
Nazi flags hung from buildings. New rules, new restrictions, new fears.
Freddie later remembered the terror of those first days. “I remember how people were taken from their homes,” she said. “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.”
But the Oversteegen family did not hide. They fought back. Freddie and Truus joined their mother, distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets and illegal newspapers.
At night, they sneaked through the streets with paste and paper, covering German propaganda posters with their own messages.
“The Netherlands must be free,” the posters read. “Don’t go to Germany. For every Dutch man working in Germany, a German soldier goes to the front.”
Then they would race away on their bicycles, hearts pounding, knowing that if they were caught, they would be shot.
They were never caught. Two young girls on bicycles — who would suspect them?
Their activities did not go unnoticed. In 1941, a man named Frans van der Wiel came to their door. He was the commander of the Haarlem Council of Resistance, part of the underground network fighting the Nazi occupation.
He had heard about the Oversteegen family — the mother who hid refugees, the daughters who distributed illegal pamphlets.
He wanted to recruit them. He asked Trijn, “Can your daughters join the resistance?” Freddie was 14.
Truus was 16. Their mother said yes. The girls said yes.
But van der Wiel was not convinced yet. He needed to know if they could be trusted, if they would break under pressure. So he tested them.
A few days later, he returned to their apartment — this time dressed as a Gestapo officer. He burst through the door, waving a gun, screaming in German, demanding to know where a Jewish man was hiding.
Freddie and Truus did not break. They did not give up a single name. Instead, they fought back, kicking and hitting the man they thought was a Nazi, refusing to betray anyone, even if it meant their own deaths.
Van der Wiel stopped the act and revealed who he really was. They had passed the test.
Now he told them what joining the resistance would actually mean. “You’ll learn to sabotage bridges and railway lines,” he said. He paused.
“And you’ll learn to shoot Nazis.”
Truus looked at her little sister. Freddie grinned and said, “Well, that’s something I’ve never done before.”
Their mother gave them one piece of advice before they left: “Always stay human.”
The Oversteegen sisters were taken to an underground potato shed. There, in the darkness beneath the earth, they learned to fire a weapon. They learned how to aim, how to stay calm, how to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁.
Their first mission was not assassination. It was arson. Nazi warehouses needed to burn, but they were guarded by SS soldiers.
The plan was simple. Freddie and Truus would approach the guards, talk to them, flirt with them, distract them with smiles and laughter while the rest of the resistance slipped in from behind and set the fires.
It worked perfectly. The warehouses burned. The guards never suspected the two teenage girls who had been chatting with them moments before.
Van der Wiel saw what they were capable of. These girls could go places men could not. They could get close to targets no one else could reach.
Their youth and innocence were weapons more powerful than any gun. It was time for them to learn what that really meant.
Freddie’s first assassination target was not a German soldier. It was a Dutch woman. The resistance had received intelligence about a collaborator, a Dutch citizen working with the Nazis.
This woman had compiled a list — names, addresses, every Jew in the region. She was planning to hand it to the Germans.
That list was a death sentence for hundreds of people. Men, women, children. Entire families who would be rounded up, deported, murdered.
The resistance gave Freddie the assignment.
She rode her bicycle to a public park where the woman would be. She found her target sitting on a bench. Freddie approached, casual, innocent — just a girl with braided hair.
She asked, “What’s your name?” The woman told her. Freddie confirmed she had the right target.
She pulled out her pistol, looked the woman in the eyes, and shot her.
The woman fell. Freddie got on her bicycle and rode away.
Later, she would describe what it felt like. “The first thing you want to do when you shoot somebody is to pick them up,” she said. The instinct to help — even after you have killed them.
That impulse never left her. No matter how many times she pulled the trigger.
Freddie and Truus developed their own techniques. Sometimes they worked alone. Sometimes together.
Their methods evolved as they learned what worked.
The forest. They would go to bars and taverns where German officers gathered. One sister would walk in alone, strike up a conversation with an officer, laugh at his jokes, touch his arm, lean in close.
Then she would ask the question: “Would you like to go for a stroll in the woods?”
The officer always said yes. They would walk into the forest together, deeper and deeper, away from the roads, away from witnesses. And there, hidden among the trees, the other sister would be waiting.
One bullet to the head. The officer would fall. They would leave his body in a hole that had already been dug and walk away.
The bicycle. Other times, speed was the weapon. Truus would pedal the bicycle while Freddie sat on the back, pistol ready.
They would identify their target walking down the street, ride past him, and Freddie would fire. Then they would keep riding. Just two girls on a bicycle.
Nothing unusual.
“We always went by bike, never walked. That was too dangerous,” Truus explained later. “I always made sure the coast was clear.
That worked very well.”
The doorstep. Sometimes they would follow a target home, learn his address, his routine. Then they would knock on his door.
When he opened it, he would see a young girl — innocent, harmless. By the time he realized the danger, it was too late.
In 1943, a third member joined their cell. Her name was Hannie Schaft. Everyone called her Hannie.
She was different from the Oversteegen sisters. Hannie came from a middle-class family. Her father was a teacher.
She was studying law at the University of Amsterdam, planning to become a human rights lawyer.
But when the Nazis demanded that all students sign a loyalty pledge to Germany, Hannie refused. She was expelled. She did not go home.
She joined the resistance.
Hannie had distinctive features that made her stand out. Bright red hair. Green eyes.
Pale skin. The kind of face people remembered. It would eventually get her killed.
But first, she would become one of the most feared resistance fighters in the Netherlands.
Van der Wiel tested her the same way he had tested the Oversteegen sisters. He gave her a gun and sent her to assassinate a Nazi officer. She approached the target, raised the weapon.
Her hands were shaking. She pulled the trigger. Click.
The gun was empty. It had been a test. The Nazi officer revealed himself as van der Wiel.
She had passed.
Now she joined Freddie and Truus. The three young women formed a lethal unit. Hannie was the intellectual, the planner, the one who thought through every detail.
Truus was the leader — decisive, fearless, the one who made the hard calls. Freddie was the scout who mapped everything out in advance and knew every escape route.
Together, they were unstoppable.
The three women did not just 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. They blew up railway lines to stop deportation trains carrying Jews to concentration camps. They smuggled Jewish children out of the country, sometimes walking them across borders in the middle of the night.
They stole identity papers and forged documents to help refugees disappear. They gathered intelligence on German troop movements and passed it to Allied forces.
And yes, they killed German soldiers, Nazi officers, and Dutch collaborators.
The collaborators were often the most dangerous targets. Dutch citizens who betrayed their own people for money or power. Who turned in their Jewish neighbors.
Who worked for the Gestapo. Freddie and Truus focused more and more on these traitors as the war went on.
“We were dealing with cancerous tumors in society,” Truus explained. “You had to cut them out like a surgeon. You couldn’t arrest them.
You couldn’t try them. There was no other solution.”
One day, an order came from resistance leadership. The target: Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, one of the most powerful Nazis in the country. The mission: kidnap his children.
The plan: use the children as leverage to force him to release resistance prisoners — and if he refused, 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 the children.
Freddie, Truus, and Hannie refused the mission.
“We are not Hitlerites,” Freddie said. “Resistance fighters don’t murder children.”
They had killed many people. They would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 more. But children — never.
That was the line between resistance and terrorism, between fighting evil and becoming it. They would not cross it.
Truus was cycling through the streets one afternoon when she saw something that would haunt her for the rest of her life. A Dutch SS soldier — a Dutchman who had joined the Nazi forces — was standing in the street. He had grabbed an infant from a family.
The father was there. The baby’s sister. They were screaming, hysterical.
The soldier held the baby up and smashed it against the wall. The child died instantly.
Truus stopped her bicycle. She pulled out her pistol and shot the soldier dead. Right there in the middle of the street.
It was not an assignment. There were no orders.
“That wasn’t a mission,” she said later. “But I don’t regret it.”
Some things do not need orders.
By 1944, Hannie Schaft was one of the most wanted people in the Netherlands. Her red hair had been spotted at too many scenes. Witnesses described her.
Word spread. The Nazis issued a bulletin: “Find the girl with the red hair.”
Hannie dyed her hair black, started wearing glasses, changed her appearance as much as she could. But she did not stop fighting.
In June 1944, she and a fellow resistance fighter named Jan Bonekamp were assigned to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 a Dutch collaborator named Willem Ragout. They found him. Bonekamp shot him, but Ragout did not die immediately — and in the chaos, Bonekamp was shot in the stomach.
Hannie escaped. Bonekamp was captured. He was taken to a hospital, dying.
The Nazis interrogated him. He refused to talk. Then they tried a different approach.
An officer pretended to be a resistance member, told Bonekamp he was a friend, that he wanted to help. Bonekamp, delirious from blood loss and medication, believed him. He gave up Hannie’s address.
He died shortly after.
The Nazis raided Hannie’s parents’ home. They arrested her mother and father and sent them to a concentration camp. Hannie went into hiding.
She could not fight anymore. If she was captured, everyone she knew would die. For months, she stayed underground.
But she could not stay hidden forever.
March 21, 1945. The war was almost over. Allied forces were advancing.
Liberation was weeks away. Hannie was cycling through Haarlem, carrying copies of an illegal communist newspaper and a pistol. She was stopped at a Nazi checkpoint.
They searched her. They found everything. She was arrested.
They took her to a prison in Amsterdam. For weeks, they interrogated her, tortured her, kept her in solitary confinement. They knew they had captured someone important, but they needed her to confirm it.
Eventually, they noticed something. Her hair was black, but her roots were growing in red. They had found the girl with the red hair.
Hannie admitted to her assassinations. She confessed to what she had done. But she never gave up a single name.
Not one member of the resistance. Not Freddie. Not Truus.
No one. She protected her friends until the very end.
April 17, 1945. Eighteen days before the Netherlands would be liberated. The war was over.
Everyone knew it. There was even an agreement between the Nazis and the Dutch resistance to stop executions. But Willy Lages, the Nazi officer in charge, ignored it.
He wanted Hannie Schaft dead.
Two Dutch collaborators — traitors to their own country — were assigned as executioners. Their names were Maarten Kuiper and Mattheus Schmitz. They took Hannie to the sand dunes of Overveen, the same dunes where hundreds of resistance fighters had already been killed and buried.
Schmitz raised his pistol and fired. The bullet grazed Hannie’s head. It wounded her, but it did not 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her.
She looked at her executioner and said, “I shoot better than you.”
Kuiper raised his submachine gun and fired. Hannie Schaft died in those dunes. She was 24 years old.
They buried her in a shallow grave. So shallow that her red hair was still visible above the sand.
The Netherlands was liberated on May 5, 1945 — 18 days after Hannie died.
After the war, they found 422 bodies in the Overveen dunes. 421 men and one woman. Hannie Schaft.
She was given a state funeral. Queen Wilhelmina called her “the symbol of the resistance.”
But Freddie and Truus received nothing. For decades, the Dutch government ignored them. Why?
Because they were communists. During the Cold War, anyone with communist ties was sidelined, forgotten, treated with suspicion. The sisters who had risked their lives to save their country were treated like enemies.
Truus coped by creating art. She became a sculptor, making memorials to the resistance. She wrote a memoir.
She spoke publicly about what they had done.
Freddie chose a different path. “I coped by getting married and having babies,” she said. She married a man named Jan Dekker, had three children, and tried to build a normal life.
But the past never let her go. She suffered from insomnia, nightmares that came without warning. Every year on May 4, Remembrance Day in the Netherlands, she woke up with dread.
When people asked how many people she had killed, she always gave the same answer: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.” She never said the number. Neither did Truus.
Some things you carry alone.
For almost 70 years, Freddie and Truus waited. Finally, in 2014, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte invited them to a ceremony. He awarded them the Mobilization War Cross, a military honor for service during World War II.
Freddie was 89 years old. Truus was 91.
Freddie’s son said it was the happiest day of his mother’s life. After 69 years, someone finally said, “Thank you.”
Streets in Haarlem were named after them. Their story was told in books and documentaries. But for most of their lives, they had lived in silence, unrecognized, unhonored.
Two teenage girls who had killed Nazis with their bare hands, forgotten by the country they saved.
Truus Oversteegen died on June 18, 2016. She was 92 years old. Freddie Oversteegen died on September 5, 2018, one day before her 93rd birthday.
Throughout her life, Freddie visited Hannie Schaft’s grave. She left red roses for the friend who did not make it.
When asked what advice she had for future generations, Truus said: “When you have to make a decision, it must be the right one, and you must always remain human.”
Those were the words their mother had given them before they joined the resistance. Always stay human.
Freddie and Truus killed people. They shot men in forests and on street corners. They watched the life leave their enemy’s eyes.
But they remained human. They cried after every 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. They refused to murder children.
They carried the weight of what they had done for the rest of their lives.
The Nazis killed millions systematically, industrially, without remorse — and lost their humanity entirely. That is the difference.
During World War II, 90 percent of the Dutch population tried to live their lives as normally as possible under Nazi occupation. Five percent collaborated with the enemy. Five percent joined the resistance.
Of that five percent, only a handful of women took up arms — and even fewer killed with their own hands.
Freddie Oversteegen was one of them. A 14-year-old girl with braided pigtails and a pistol hidden in her bicycle basket. She was not a hero from a movie.
There was no dramatic music, no slow-motion shots, no Hollywood ending. Just a teenage girl who decided that some things are worth killing for — and some things are worth dying for.
The three of them — Freddie, Truus, and Hannie — are believed to have killed dozens of Nazis and Dutch collaborators. Some estimates say the number exceeded 100. Freddie lived to be 92 years old.
She never told anyone how many Nazis she killed. And she never apologized for any of it.