During World War II, as Nazi forces swept across Europe, a teenage girl in the Netherlands was trained as a covert assassin for the resistance. She was only 14 years old. Her name was Freddie Oversteegen, and she would become known for using flirtation and charm to lure Nazi soldiers to their deaths.
Freddie was born on September 6, 1925, in the village of Schoten, Netherlands. Her family was working class and held deeply left-wing political ideals. She grew up with her older sister, Truus, in an area north of Amsterdam known as the Red Zone, where communists were forced to live.
By the 1930s, the girls and their mother, Trijntje, had joined an underground organization called the Red Aid. The group helped Jews and refugees escape the growing Nazi regime. Freddie’s father was also a political activist, but he showed little interest in supporting the family financially.
The parents divorced, and their mother raised the girls alone while working in industrial factories. The family had been living on a large boat in Haarlem at the time. Freddie later recalled that her father never made money and paid nothing for the barge, so her mother simply left one day.
The divorce was not ugly, Freddie said. Her father sang a French farewell song from the bow of the ship on the day they left. She knew he loved them, but she did not see him often after that.
Resistance to fascism was in the Oversteegen girls’ blood from the start. Their youth was full of memories of hiding Jews and political fugitives in their home. After the divorce, their mother moved them to a modest apartment with straw mattresses she made herself.
Even though the apartment was barely large enough for the three of them, they began harboring fugitives. Freddie remembered living with a Jewish couple during the war years. The Overstegens were anti-fascists from the start and never succumbed to the fear tactics of the Germans.
In a 2016 interview with Vice, Freddie recalled how people were taken from their homes. She remembered the Germans banging on doors with the butts of their rifles, making so much noise that the entire neighborhood could hear it. They always yelled, and it was very frightening.
When the war officially began, Freddie and Truus began handing out flyers and pamphlets with information on how to join the resistance. They rode their bikes and wore their hair in pigtails to look as innocent and young as possible. This helped throw anyone suspicious off their trail.
They also vandalized German posters that had spread across Amsterdam. Freddie said she and her sister glued warnings across German posters that called men to work in Germany. Then they would hurry off on their bikes.
The punishment for distributing information or organizing against the Nazis was essentially a death sentence. The Oversteegen girls were showing more courage as young teenagers than most people show in a lifetime.
Their fearless commitment caught the attention of Franz van der Wiel, the commander of the Haarlem council of resistance. He personally visited their house to ask their mother for permission to recruit Freddie and Truus. Their mother said yes without a second thought.
The sisters were eager to join. In a later interview, Freddie recalled the moment van der Wiel told them what their duties would be. They were expected to sabotage bridges and railway lines and learn to shoot Nazis.
Freddie remembered her sister Truus replying, “Well, that’s something I’ve never done before.”
Freddie and Truus were two of seven girls recruited by the resistance. At first, they thought they would be forming a secret army. Their responsibilities turned out to be quite different.
They received their training deep in the woods, where commanders taught them military techniques, including how to shoot a gun. They also learned to march.
When it came time for the first mission, Truus was told to flirt with a young German soldier and ask him to join her for a stroll in the same woods where the girls had trained. As a distraction, the resistance set up a seemingly coincidental run-in with an acquaintance, who was actually another resistance soldier.
Once the German soldier was distracted, the fatal shot was fired. Freddie was acting as a lookout a few feet away. She described the moment in an interview, saying, “That man never knew what hit him.”
This became the girls’ preferred tactic for taking out German soldiers who had overtaken their city. While Freddie could not recall how many soldiers she had killed, it had a profound effect on both sisters.
Truus explained in a 2016 interview, “It was tragic and very difficult, and we cried about it afterward. 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.”
As the war went on, the resistance realized that Dutch citizens collaborating with Nazi Germany were a far bigger threat than German soldiers. In a BBC interview, Freddie’s son Remy recalled a story his mother told him about a Dutch traitor.
The traitor was planning to hand over a list with the names and locations of all the Jews in the Netherlands. Freddie approached the traitor on a bicycle in a park and asked what her name was. Once Freddie confirmed she had the right person, she shot her point blank.
While some attacks involved luring men into the woods by flirting, the Oversteegen sisters became incredibly skilled shooters as the war went on. They took out Dutch collaborators while racing by on a bicycle. Truus would often ride the bike while Freddie sat on the back and took aim.
The sisters also performed many other dangerous tasks, including smuggling Jewish children out of the Netherlands to safety. They completed many successful missions and saved an innumerable number of lives.
On one occasion, Truus witnessed a mission fail. She hid in the grass and watched as the Germans spotted Jewish children with searchlights and gunned most of them down.
Despite their fearlessness, there was one task the sisters refused. Their commander asked them to abduct the children of a high-ranking Nazi official. The sisters knew that if the plan went wrong, the children would have to be killed to keep them from identifying resistance members.
They refused the task and told their commanders that committing violent acts against children was something they could not and would not do.
Hannie Schaft joined the resistance with Freddie and Truus in 1943, and the three girls quickly became inseparable. Schaft had left the University of Amsterdam, where she had been studying to become a lawyer, because she refused to sign a pledge of loyalty to Germany.
Together, the three were unstoppable. Schaft became known as “the girl with the red hair” because of her bright flaming hair, which made her easy to spot. Eventually, she dyed her hair black to avoid detection.
The Nazis caught Schaft in 1945, just a few weeks before the war ended and the Netherlands was freed. She was smuggling an illegal newspaper on her bicycle when the Nazis caught her. They tortured her for information, which she did not give.
Allegedly, when the German assigned to kill her missed his mark and skimmed her arm, she said, “I’m a better shot,” before he shot her once more to finish the job.
According to a BBC interview with Freddie’s son, when he was a child, he showed his mother his school history textbook. It contained a photograph of her dear friend along with a story of the fierce bravery of the girl with red hair.
Seeing her friend’s name go down in history brought tears to Freddie’s eyes. Her son said it was always hard for his mother to live with the fact that she and Truus survived the war and Schaft did not.
After World War II, the sisters dealt with their trauma in their own ways. While they led different lives, they always remained close. When asked if they ever talked about the war with each other, Freddie replied, “Yes, always. We never had to say ‘remember when’ because it was always at the top of our minds.”
Freddie got married and had three children. When Truus formed the Hannie Schaft Foundation, Freddie served on the board.
Freddie’s son Remy said the war actually lasted 80 years for his mother. She never stopped talking about her experiences and sharing them with those in her life.
Truus got married and had four children. She named her first child Hannie after her friend and fellow resistance fighter.
Truus processed her experiences by becoming an artist and creating remarkable sculptures. She also became a public speaker who lectured on World War II and anti-Semitism. In 1982, she published a book about her experiences titled *Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever*.
Both Freddie and Truus died at the age of 92, just a few years apart from each other.
For a long time, the Oversteegen sisters were overlooked for their valiant war efforts because of their association with communism. They finally received recognition in 2014 with the Mobilization War Cross, awarded by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.