New York: Given her demeanour as a 14-year-old, nobody could have guessed she was a member of the Dutch resistance. But when this girl in braids would pedal down the streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms camouflaged in a basket, Nazi officials rarely stopped to question her.
When she strolled through the woods, seductively leading her SS (Hitler’s paramilitary outfit) targets to a secluded place, there was no hint that she carried a handgun and was preparing an execution. Given that Dutch resistance was a male preserve, Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, left an indelible imprint by taking up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch “traitors” on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps, reports Washington Post.
In perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to “go for a stroll” in the forest – and “liquidated” them, as Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger. “We had to do it,” she told one interviewer. “It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people.” When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill, she demurred: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”
Freddie Oversteegen, the last remaining member of the Netherlands’ most famous female resistance cell, died on September 5, one day before her 93rd birthday. She was born in the village of Schoten, now a part of Haarlem, on September 6, 1925. Her dad and mom divorced when she was a toddler, and Freddie and Truus were raised primarily by their mom, a communist who instilled a way of social accountability within the younger ladies.
