The motorcycle courier was a girl with braids, small for her age, looking little more than a twelve-year-old schoolgirl as she pedaled her bicycle through occupied Dutch territory. In a basket under a cloth lay pistols, documents, and the occasional stick of dynamite. German soldiers barely glanced at her. When they stopped her, she smiled and answered in a soft voice, and they waved her through.
Few of them ever suspected that the slight figure on the bicycle was one of the most wanted women in the Netherlands, or that she was on her way to kill them. Her name was Freddie Oversteegen, and together with her older sister Truus she had joined the Dutch resistance at an age when most children were still in school. Truus was born on the 29th of August 1923 in Schiedam; Freddie arrived two years later, on the 6th of September 1925. The sisters grew up on a barge, living with their parents, in a household where politics was never far from the dinner table.
Their mother was a communist with a strong intolerance for injustice, and she raised her daughters to see the world in those terms. When the parents divorced, the girls stayed with their mother, moving into a small apartment in the city of Haarlem. The family lived in poverty. They slept on improvised mattresses stuffed with straw.
Their mother taught them compassion for those less fortunate than themselves, and the sisters often shared the same bed so that the other could be given to the Jewish refugees from Germany who were regularly housed in their tiny apartment. World War II began on the 1st of September 1939, and early on the morning of the 10th of May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands. Within days the Dutch army had collapsed under the weight of the assault. The Luftwaffe dropped paratroopers to seize tactical points and support the advance of German ground troops across the country.
Rotterdam came under heavy aerial bombardment, and on the 14th of May its entire historic center was destroyed in a single attack. When the Germans threatened to bomb the city of Utrecht in the same fashion, the Dutch forces surrendered one day later. Soon the Nazis began to occupy the entire country, and a civilian administration was installed under the SS and Police Leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who was appointed Reichskommissar of the Netherlands. Among his first steps were a series of laws imposing economic discrimination against the Jews.
The overstretched German occupiers moved quickly to exclude Jewish people from Dutch society and restrict their livelihoods. Cafés, swimming pools, sports fields, museums, zoos, libraries, theaters, markets, and many other public places hung signs reading “Verboden voor Joden,” forbidden for Jews. Jews had to hand over their valuables, their businesses were confiscated, and regulations forcing them to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing as a means of identification were announced on the 29th of April 1942. Those found without the badge after the 5th of May, when the regulations came into effect, were arrested and detained for a six-week period at a forced labor camp in the Netherlands.
Everyone knew that this was, in practice, a death sentence. Not all Dutch citizens could bear to watch what was happening to their country and their neighbors. A resistance network began to form, and in Haarlem it was organized through the council of resistance. One day a commander of the Haarlem council knocked on the Oversteegen family’s door.
He asked the girls’ mother whether her daughters could join the underground fight against the Nazis. She agreed. Truus was sixteen years old. Freddie was fourteen.
In an interview in 2016, Freddie recalled the horror of the German occupation in those early months. “I remember how people were taken from their homes. The Germans were banging on doors with the butts of their rifles. They made so much noise you’d hear it in the entire neighborhood, and they would always yell.
It was very frightening. ”
The Nazi policy hardened sharply in the wake of resistance and protest. On the 22nd and 23rd of February 1941, German forces raided the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, arresting and deporting more than 400 Jewish men to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The Dutch people’s reaction was unique among Nazi-occupied Europe: they organized the February Strike, a two-day general strike that began on the 25th of February 1941.
German officials brutally suppressed it. This action was followed by a hardening of Nazi policy. The German authorities, together with collaborating Dutch authorities and civil services, segregated Jews from the general population and incarcerated 15,000 of them in German-administered forced labor camps. The Germans then ordered the concentration of Jews in Amsterdam and sent foreign and stateless Jews to the Westerbork transit camp in the northeastern part of the country.
Some of the remaining provincial Jews were sent to the first camp. The systematic deportations of Dutch Jews to death camps began in July 1942, and they continued for two years. The last train left Westerbork for Auschwitz on the 3rd of September 1944. During that period, the Germans and their Dutch collaborators deported some 107,000 Jews, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, where they were murdered.
Only 5,200 survived. In addition, 25,000 to 30,000 Jews went into hiding, assisted by the Dutch underground, and two-thirds of those managed to survive the war. The Oversteegen family was among those who hid a Jewish couple in their home. Another of the biggest impacts on the Dutch people during the occupation was caused by the German Arbeitseinsatz, or labor deployment, which forced every man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to work in German factories.
As part of this program, approximately 500,000 Dutchmen were transported by force to Germany. Life in the factories was hard and dangerous; the buildings were regularly bombed by the Allies. Those who refused to go were forced into hiding. Freddie and Truus played a crucial role in distributing anti-Nazi propaganda, spreading leaflets and pasting warnings designed to discourage Dutch men from working in Germany.
Their efforts were aimed at disrupting the German war machine and undermining the occupier’s control. The 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 of her time with the resistance, she thought they would soon be starting a kind of secret army.
But the girls were doing much more than handing out leaflets. They were shown how to fire a weapon, taught the basics of sabotage, and given tips on how to rig railways and bridges with dynamite so that travel paths could be cut off. The resistance’s counterintelligence, domestic sabotage, and communications networks provided key support to Allied forces throughout the liberation of the Netherlands. Members of the resistance, if discovered, were immediately sentenced to death.
Freddie’s innocent looks made her invaluable. With her hair in braids, she could slip by Nazi controls unnoticed, riding her bicycle through occupied territory as a courier, transporting paperwork and weapons for the resistance movement. Together with her sister, she 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, arranging false documentation for them and helping them escape the concentration camps.
But when it was necessary, the Oversteegen sisters would also kill. Freddie was the fastest shooter, and she did so while riding a bicycle. Truus soon began killing Nazis as well. On one occasion, Truus witnessed a horrifying scene in which a Nazi grabbed a baby and hit it against a wall.
The father and sister of the baby, both crying hysterically, were forced to watch as the Nazi smacked the baby against the wall until it was dead. When Truus passed by and saw the scene, she stopped, pointed her gun at the Nazi, and shot him dead without any regrets. On another occasion, the two sisters were riding bicycles together. While Truus pedaled, Freddie shot a Nazi traitor from the back.
One notable aspect of Freddie’s involvement in the resistance was her work 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, find a target in a bar or restaurant, and begin flirting with him. Then 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. The sisters 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 the resistance commanders asked them to kidnap the three children of Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, they refused, arguing that resistance fighters do not kill children. “We only fight against real fascists, not their children,” they said. In 1943, the Oversteegen sisters were joined by a then twenty-two-year-old former law student named Hannie Schaft. The three women became inseparable for the next two years, continuing 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. The damage she caused and the number of Nazis she killed were so significant that her capture was considered a high priority and was ordered by Adolf Hitler himself. She was known as “the girl with the red hair,” and her determination and courage made her an iconic figure within the Dutch resistance movement.
Both Freddie and Truus survived the war. Hannie Schaft did not. She was captured by the German authorities in 1945, just weeks before the liberation of the Netherlands. She was interrogated, tortured, and ultimately executed by firing squad on the 17th of 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 the 5th of May 1945, three days before the general capitulation of Germany. After the war, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower awarded Hannie Schaft a posthumous Medal of Freedom in November 1945. Truus married Piet Manga, and the couple had four children, the eldest of whom was named in remembrance of Hannie Schaft.
Truus became a regular guest speaker at universities and secondary schools, speaking about war, anti-Semitism, tolerance, and indifference. On the 10th of 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 ninety-two.
Freddie passed away two years later, at the same age. Their story, as well as the stories of others like theirs, remains a reminder of what ordinary people can do when faced with unjust and cruel forces. There were many shared tears, but they did not turn away.
