Freddie Oversteegen was only 14, petite with long braids, when she became an assassin and saboteur.
Freddie was raised by her divorced mother in Haarlem. Her mother was politically engaged, fiercely anti-Nazi and offered shelter to Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s, even though the sisters Truus and Freddie were forced to sleep together in a small single bed.
It was 1940, Germany had invaded the Netherlands, and she and her sister, Truus, who was two years older, had been recruited by the local Dutch resistance commander, in the city of Haarlem.
When the war started, the girls were only 16 and 14 years old.
The sisters worked as nurses in Enschede, on the German border in eastern Holland, where they could surreptitiously report on a German military airport. They also distributed leaflets and anti-Nazi posters.
Their anti-Nazi activities brought them to the attention of Frans van der Wiel, the Dutch underground leader in Haarlem, who visited them and, with their mother’s blessing, persuaded them to join the Council of Resistance.
“Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: Sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus Menger-Oversteegen recalled in a 2014 book, “Under Fire: Women and World War II.” “We told him we’d like to do that.”
Then the commander added, “ ‘And learn to shoot — to shoot Nazis,’ ” she said.
“I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ”Their mother gave them only one rule, Ms. Oversteegen said: “Always stay human.”
Retaining their humanity became more challenging once the sisters joined the seven-member underground cell based in Haarlem (they and Ms. Schaft were the only women) and learned that their job would entail blowing up bridges and railway tracks — and murder.
“Yes, I’ve shot a gun myself and I’ve seen them fall,” Freddie Oversteegen told a TV interviewer. “And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”
They were engaged by the resistance for the distribution of illegal magazines, helping people in hiding and the transport of weapons. "They were young and would not be searched as well as older girls and women. That was especially true for Freddie. She was small and seemed two years younger than she actually was. If she was arrested with all kinds of weapons, she would look with an innocent look and would often be allowed to drive on.
Together with Truus, she carried out attacks and sabotage actions, such as setting fire to a German storage facility in Overveen using aspirin tubes filled with a flammable liquid. On a visit to Enschede they met Hannie Schaft. Truus and Freddie Oversteegen already had pistols with them. They got shooting lessons in an empty potato bunker.
The sisters, along with a lapsed law student, Hannie Schaft, became a singular female underground squad, part of a cell of seven, that killed collaborators and occupying troops.
The three staged drive-by shootings from their bicycles; seductively lured German soldiers from bars to nearby woods, where they would execute them; and sheltered fleeing Jews, political dissidents, gay people and others who were being hunted by the invaders.
Just like Hannie Schaft, the girls did not hesitate to liquidate Nazis. Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen said that they seduced Germans and bad Dutch in cafes. "We asked if they wanted a party in the forest and then liquidated them. We had to do that. It was necessarily evil, because they killed good people. "When asked how many people she had wound up, she replied," You shouldn't ask soldiers anything like that. "Hannie Schaft was arrested and did not survive the war. Both sisters do.
The three women drew the line once.
They had been ordered to kidnap the children of the politician and senior Nazi officer Arthur Seyss-Inquart, reichkommissar of the occupied Netherlands. The plan was to swap the children for imprisoned members of the Dutch underground. The three refused because the children could have been killed if the exchange went awry.
“We are no Hitlerites,” Ms. Schaft was once quoted “Resistance fighters don’t murder children.”
In 2014, Freddie and Truus received the Mobilization War Cross from the hands of Prime Minister Rutte.
Source Caption NY-Times