On 10 May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. The invasion included heavy aerial bombardment, and Rotterdam’s historic center was destroyed on 14 May. Dutch forces surrendered one day later, and the occupation began.
Soon after, the Nazis introduced anti-Jewish laws designed to exclude Jewish people from society. Systematic deportations of Dutch Jews to death camps began in July 1942. But some Dutch citizens could not bear what was happening to their country and people, and they joined the resistance.
Among them were two sisters who became known for resisting the occupation and killing Nazis. Truus Oversteegen was born on 29 August 1923 in Schoten, the Netherlands. Her younger sister Freddie was born on 6 September 1925. The sisters lived with their parents on a barge.
The girls grew up in a socially aware household. Their mother, a communist, had a strong intolerance for injustice. After their parents divorced, the girls stayed with their mother and were raised in a small apartment in Haarlem. The family lived in poverty and slept on improvised mattresses stuffed with straw.
They were taught compassion for those less fortunate. The sisters often shared the same bed to spare the other one for Jewish refugees from Germany who were regularly housed in their small apartment.
Soon after the occupation, a commander of the Haarlem Council of Resistance knocked on the Oversteegen family’s door. He asked their mother if the girls could join the underground fight against the Nazis, and she agreed. At the time, Truus was 16 years old and Freddie was only 14.
In an interview in 2016, Freddie recalled the frightening moments following the German occupation. She remembered people being taken from their homes, with Germans banging on doors with the butts of their rifles. She said the noise could be heard across the entire neighborhood.
On 22 and 23 February 1941, German forces raided the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. They arrested and deported more than 400 Jewish men to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. In response, the Dutch people organized the February strike, a two-day general strike that began on 25 February 1941. German officials brutally suppressed it.
The Nazi policy then hardened. German authorities and collaborating Dutch civil services segregated Jews from the general population and incarcerated 15,000 of them in forced labor camps. Jews were ordered to concentrate in Amsterdam, and foreign and stateless Jews were sent to the Westerbork transit camp.
Signs forbidding Jews from entering cafes, swimming pools, sports fields, museums, zoos, libraries, theaters, markets, and other public places appeared. Jews had to hand over valuables, and their businesses were confiscated. Regulations forcing Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing were announced on 29 April 1942.
Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands began in July 1942. The last train left Westerbork for Auschwitz on 3 September 1944. During those two years, the Germans and their Dutch collaborators deported some 107,000 Jews, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, where they were murdered. Only 5,200 survived. Another 25,000 to 30,000 Jews went into hiding, assisted by the Dutch underground, and two-thirds of those managed to survive.
During the war, the Oversteegen family hid a Jewish couple in their home.
One of the biggest impacts on the Dutch people was caused by the German Arbeitseinsatz, or labor deployment. It forced every man aged between 18 and 45 to work in German factories. Approximately 500,000 Dutchmen were transported by force to Germany. Life in the factories was hard and dangerous, as the buildings were regularly bombed by the Allies. Those who refused to go were forced into hiding.
Freddie and her sister played a crucial role in distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. They spread leaflets and pasted warnings to discourage Dutch men from working in Germany. Their messages read “Don’t go to Germany” and “For every Dutch man working in Germany, a German man will go to the front.”
The Oversteegen sisters were the only two women in the seven-person underground cell of the Haarlem Council of Resistance. Freddie later recalled that at the beginning, she thought they would be starting a kind of secret army very soon. But the girls were doing much more than handing out leaflets.
They were shown how to fire weapons, taught the basics of sabotage, and learned how to rig railways and bridges with dynamite so travel paths could be cut off. Resistance counterintelligence, domestic sabotage, and communications networks provided key support to Allied forces throughout the liberation of Holland. Members of the resistance, if discovered, were immediately sentenced to death.
With her hair in braids, Freddie looked like a 12-year-old schoolgirl. Her innocent looks made her invaluable, as she could slip by Nazi controls unnoticed. Few soldiers took notice of her as she rode a bicycle through occupied territory, secretly acting as a courier transporting paperwork and weapons for the resistance.
Together with her sister, Freddie would burn down a Nazi warehouse and plant a communist flag at the headquarters of the National Socialist movement. They would escort small children, homosexuals, and Jewish refugees into hiding spots and arranged false documentation for them, helping them escape concentration camps.
When necessary, the Oversteegen sisters would also kill. Freddie was the fastest shooter and did so while riding a bicycle. Truus soon began killing Nazis as well.
On one occasion, Truus witnessed a horrifying scene where a Nazi grabbed a baby and hit it against a wall. The father and sister of the baby, both crying hysterically, had to watch as the Nazi smacked the baby against the wall until it was dead. Truus stopped, pointed her gun at the Nazi, and shot him dead without any regrets.
On a different occasion, both sisters were riding a bicycle. While Truus was pedaling, Freddie would shoot a Nazi traitor from the back.
One notable aspect of Freddie’s resistance work was her role as a seductress. Being young and attractive, she would approach German soldiers and collaborators under the pretext of a romantic encounter. At night, she would put on makeup and find a target in a bar or restaurant, then start flirting with him.
She would lure the target out, asking him to go for a walk in the woods. Once they were alone, Freddie and her companion would bump into a man along the same path. Unknown to the Nazi officer, the man would be a resistance member who would shoot the Nazi dead and leave him in a hole that had been dug earlier.
They targeted mostly Nazi officers but also Dutch collaborators who gave the Nazis details of Jewish and dissident families. However, they refused to target the children of high-ranking Nazis. When resistance commanders asked them to kidnap the three children of Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, they refused. They argued that resistance fighters do not kill children and that they only fight against real fascists, not their children.
In 1943, the Oversteegen sisters were joined by a 22-year-old former law student named Hannie Schaft. The three women became inseparable for the next two years. They continued to be involved in acts of sabotage, distributing illegal newspapers, and carrying out targeted assassinations of German soldiers and collaborators.
As a law student, Hannie used her knowledge and skills to aid the resistance. She gathered intelligence, forged identity papers, and participated in clandestine operations to undermine the Nazi occupiers. She caused so much damage and killed so many Nazis that her capture was considered a high priority, ordered by Adolf Hitler himself. She was known as “the girl with the red hair.”
Both Freddie and her sister Truus survived the war. Unfortunately, Hannie Schaft was captured by German authorities in 1945, just weeks before the liberation of the Netherlands. She was interrogated, tortured, and ultimately executed by firing squad on 17 April 1945. Her sacrifice and bravery made her a symbol of Dutch resistance against Nazi oppression.
The Germans officially surrendered all their troops in the Netherlands on 5 May 1945, three days before the general capitulation of Germany. After the war, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower awarded Hannie a posthumous Medal of Freedom in November 1945.
Truus married Piet Manga and the couple had four children. The eldest was named in remembrance of Hannie Schaft. Truus was a regular guest speaker at universities and secondary schools about war, anti-Semitism, tolerance, and indifference.
On 10 May 1967, Yad Vashem recognized Truus Oversteegen as Righteous Among the Nations, Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In 2014, for their services during World War II, both Truus and Freddie were awarded the Mobilization War Cross by the Dutch prime minister.
Truus passed away in 2016 at the age of 92. Freddie passed away two years later at the same age. To this day, their story, along with others like theirs, serves as a beacon of courage in the face of unjust and cruel forces in the world.