{"id":19325,"date":"2018-09-25T02:20:51","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T09:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/?p=19325"},"modified":"2018-09-25T02:25:27","modified_gmt":"2018-09-25T09:25:27","slug":"dutch-resisrance-heroine-dies-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/dutch-resisrance-heroine-dies-92\/","title":{"rendered":"Dutch Resistance Heroine Dies @ 92"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Death Angel<\/p><\/div>\n

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Oversteegen described her part in the resistance as a source of both pride and pain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Freddie Oversteegen: Dutch resistance fighter who lured Nazi soldiers to their Death<\/h1>\n

She and her comrades coaxed\u00a0members of the SS into traps where they would be executed<\/h3>\n
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She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years younger.<\/p>\n

When she rode her bicycle down the streets of Haarlem in North\u00a0Holland<\/a>, firearms hidden in a basket,\u00a0Nazi<\/a>\u00a0officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the woods, serving as a lookout or leading her SS target to a secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun and was preparing an execution.<\/p>\n

The Dutch resistance was widely believed to be a man\u2019s effort in a man\u2019s war. If women were involved, the thinking went, they were likely doing little more than handing out anti-German pamphlets or newspapers.<\/p>\n

Yet Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were rare exceptions \u2013 a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch \u201ctraitors\u201d on the outskirts of Amsterdam.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In perhaps their most daring act, they lured their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to \u201cgo for a stroll\u201d in the forest \u2013 and \u201cliquidated\u201d them, as Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger.<\/p>\n

Freddie Oversteegen, the last remaining member of the Netherlands\u2019 most famous female resistance cell, died one day before her 93rd birthday. She was living in a nursing home in Driehuis, five miles from Haarlem, and had suffered several heart attacks in recent years, Jeroen Pliester, chairman of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation, said.\u201cWe had to do it,\u201d she told one interviewer. \u201cIt was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people.\u201d When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill, she demurred: \u201cOne should not ask a soldier any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The organization was founded by Oversteegen\u2019s sister in 1996 to promote the legacy of Schaft, who was captured and executed by the Nazis weeks before the end of Second World War. \u201cSchaft became the national icon of female resistance,\u201d Pliester said, a martyr whose story was taught to schoolchildren across the Netherlands and memorialized in a 1981 movie,\u00a0The Girl With the Red Hair<\/em>, which took its title from her nickname.<\/p>\n

Oversteegen served as a board member in her sister\u2019s organization. But she \u201cdecided to be a little bit out of the limelight,\u201d Pliester said, and was sometimes overshadowed by Schaft and Truus, the group\u2019s leader.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have always been a little jealous of her because she got so much attention after the war,\u201d Oversteegen told\u00a0Vice Netherlands<\/a>\u00a0in 2016, referring to her sister. \u201cBut then I\u2019d just think, \u2018I was in the resistance as well.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It was, she said, a source of pride and of pain \u2013 a five-year experience that she never regretted, but that came to haunt her in peacetime. Late at night, unable to fall asleep, she sometimes recalled the words of an old battle song that served as an anthem for her and her sister: \u201cWe have carried the best to their graves\/ torn and fired at, beaten till the blood ran\/ surrounded by the executioners on the scaffold and jail\/ but the raging of the enemy doesn\u2019t frighten us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freddie Nanda Oversteegen was born in the village of Schoten, now part of Haarlem, in the Twenties. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and Freddie and Truus were raised primarily by their mother, a communist who instilled a sense of social responsibility in the young girls; she eventually remarried and had a son.<\/p>\n

In interviews with anthropologist Ellis Jonker, collected in the 2014 book\u00a0Under Fire: Women and World War II<\/em>, Freddie Oversteegen recalled that their mother encouraged them to make dolls for children suffering in the Spanish Civil War, and beginning in the early 1930s volunteered with International Red Aid, a kind of communist Red Cross for political prisoners around the world.<\/p>\n

Although living in poverty, sleeping on makeshift mattresses stuffed with straw, the family took in refugees from Germany and\u00a0Amsterdam<\/a>, including a Jewish couple and a mother and son who lived in their attic. After German forces invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the couples were moved to another location; Jewish community leaders feared a potential raid, because of the family\u2019s well-known political leanings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were all deported and murdered,\u201d Oversteegen told Jonker. \u201cWe never heard from them again. It still moves me dreadfully, whenever I talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oversteegen and her sister began their resistance careers by distributing pamphlets (\u201cThe Netherlands have to be free!\u201d) and hanging anti-Nazi posters (\u201cFor every Dutch man working in Germany, a German man will go to the front!\u201d). Their efforts apparently attracted the attention of Frans van der Wiel, commander of the underground Haarlem Council of Resistance, who invited them to join his team \u2013 with their mother\u2019s permission.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnly later did he tell us what we\u2019d actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines,\u201d Truus Oversteegen said, according to Jonker. \u201cWe told him we\u2019d like to do that. \u2018And learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis,\u2019 he added. I remember my sister saying, \u2018Well, that\u2019s something I\u2019ve never done before.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

By Truus\u2019 account, it was Freddie Oversteegen who became the first to shoot and kill someone.\u201cIt was tragic and very difficult and we cried about it afterwards,\u201d Truus said. \u201cWe did not feel it suited us \u2013 it never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals… One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life.\u201d<\/p>\n