She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance,
though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years
younger.When she rode her bicycle down the
streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi
officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the
woods, serving as a lookout or seductively leading her SS target to a
secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun
and was preparing an execution.The Dutch
resistance was widely believed to be a man’s effort in a man’s war. If
women were involved, the thinking went, they were likely doing little
more than handing out anti-German pamphlets or newspapers.Yet
Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were
rare exceptions — a pair of teenage women who took 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.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 Ms. 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, Dutch resistance fighter who killed Nazis through seduction, dies at 92
Steel Phoenix Studios 