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Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
The forgotten story of WWII's baby-faced assassins who, aged just 14 and 16, seduced Nazis in bars before luring them to their deaths
Sisters Freddie and Truus Oversteegen blew up bridges and railway tracks with dynamite, smuggled Jewish children out of concentration camps and executed as many Nazis as they could, using a firearm hidden in the basket of their bike. They were only teenagers at the outbreak of World War II, but they soon used their harmless appearance to gain the trust of the officers before luring them to their deaths. Now, their stories are back in the spotlight after being shared on Instagram, with fans calling for their heroic acts against the face of evil to be made into movies, bemoaning the 'seven million Spider-Man or Batman reboots' viewers get instead. Freddie and Truus joined the Dutch resistance at the ages of 14 and 16, respectively, after witnessing horrifying violence by the Nazis, who invaded their home nation, The Netherlands, in 1940. Truus, born on 29 August 1923, in Schoten, had been protecting Jewish children, dissidents and homosexuals in safe houses across Haarlem, near Amsterdam, during the Second World War. But aged 16 she saw a baby battered to death in front of its family by a Nazi - and following the terrifying moment, she and her younger sister Freddie turned to killing all the soldiers they could. Truus recalled in Sophie Poldermans' Seducing and Killing Nazis: Hannie, Truus And Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines Of World War II: 'He grabbed the baby and hit it against the wall. 'The father and sister had to watch. They were obviously hysterical. The child was dead,' the resistance fighter said, according to the New York Post. Truus claimed she aimed her gun at him and fired, adding she did not regret slaying the 'cancerous tumours in our society'. Alongside her sister Freddie, born in Haarlem, near Amsterdam on September 6, 1925, and raised by their communist mother, and their law student friend Hannie Schaft, the trio became played a clandestine role in the resistance. The team had a routine: first approach the Nazi men in bars, and, having successfully seduced them, ask if they wanted to 'go for a stroll' in the forest, where, as Freddie herself put it, they would be 'liquidated'. '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 acted as a courier for the resistance to begin with but was soon drafted into seducing Nazis with bright-red lipstick and pretending to be drunk alongside her sister and a 20-year-old Hannie. The law student, who had red hair and crystal-white teeth, through herself into the role by learning German and perfecting casual conversations with the soldiers. After luring them into the woods, she or a male companion would quickly shoot the unassuming officer. Author Ms Poldermans explained: 'They were killers, but they also tried hard to remain human. They tried to shoot their targets from the back so that they didn't know they were going to die.' The sisters have never revealed how many people they killed and despite Ms Poldermans being friends with them for 20 years, it does not feature in her book. But Truus did confess to breaking down in tears or fainting after killing someone, adding 'I wasn't born to kill.' Freddie - who died on September 5, 2018, one day before her 93rd birthday - was the last surviving member of the Netherlands' most famous female resistance cell, who dedicated their lives to fighting Nazi occupiers and Dutch 'traitors'. The female members of the Dutch resistance are often overlooked, and it was and still is often thought of as a man's effort. However, this kind of thinking proved to be a fatal mistake to many Nazi men, who did not recognise the threat posed by the Oversteegen sisters as they rode their bikes around Haarlem, scouting out targets or acting as lookouts for other executions. Both Oversteegen sisters survived the war. Truus found work as an artist, and was inspired to write a memoir and based on her experiences in the resistance. She died in 2016. Freddie told Vice that she coped with the traumas of the war 'by getting married and having babies.' She married Jan Dekker and their three children survive her, as do her four grandchildren. However, speaking after his mother's death in 2018, Freddie's son Remi Dekker told the Observer: 'If you ask me, the war only ended two weeks ago. 'In her mind it was still going on, and on, and on. It didn't stop, even until the last day... She shot a few people, and these were the real, real bad guys. But she hated it, and she hated herself for doing it.' In the years leading up to her death, Freddie suffered from several heart attacks at the nursing home in Driehuis where she lived - about five miles outside Haarlem. The Oversteegen siblings' friend Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, was captured and executed by the Nazis just weeks before they surrendered. 'Hannie was her soulmate friend. Freddie could never understand why the Nazis killed her just before the end of the war. She always took red roses to her grave,' revealed Manon Hoornstra, after the youngest Oversteegen sister shared many of her war time memories with the documentary maker. In Hannie's honour, Truus founded the National Hannie Schaft Foundation in 1996. Freddie served as a board member. 'Schaft became the national icon of female resistance,' said Jeroen Pliester, the foundation's chairman. Her story was taught to Dutch children and retold in a 1981 Dutch film, 'The Girl With the Red Hair'. For the sisters, their work with the resistance wasn't something they would ever regret, but it left its emotional scars. They both dealt with 'post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), enduring severe nightmares, screaming and fighting in their sleep,' revealed human rights activist Ms Poldermans to Time magazine in 2019. The author added: 'These women never saw themselves as heroines. They were extremely dedicated and believed they had no other option but to join the resistance. They never regretted what they did during the war.' 'It was tragic and very difficult and we cried about it afterwards,' Truus said, about the feeling of having killed somebody. 'We did not feel it suited us - it never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals. One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life.' Their mother gave Truus and Freddie only one rule, 'always stay human', the sisters once recalled. The Dutch newspaper IJmuider Courant, reported that Freddie once told an interviewer: 'I've shot a gun myself and I've seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.' During the later years of her life, Freddie strived for more acknowledgment of her role, and both sisters eventually received the Dutch Mobilization War Cross in 2014, before a street was named after each of them. 'So many years after doing their work in the shadows, they were glad for the public recognition,' Ms Poldermans told the publication. 'They wanted their stories to be known - to teach people that, as Truus put it, even when the work is hard, 'you must always remain human.''
France 24
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
80 years on, Dutch WWII musical still 'incredibly relevant'
The character, a Dutch-Jewish student named Bram, tumbled bleeding down a makeshift dune as the audience gasped in horror and the gunshots faded away in a red mist. This dramatic scene is one of many in the Netherlands' longest-running musical that deliver a message audiences and actors say is as relevant today -- 80 years after the end of World War II -- as it was back then. "Especially now with all the tensions in the world and of course with Russia and Ukraine and everything that is going on in Gaza now, I think yes, even more than ever, that this performance is very important," leading actor Joep Paddenburg told AFP. More than 3.7 million Dutch visitors -- a fifth of the country's entire population -- have seen "Soldaat van Oranje" (Soldier of Orange) since the show first hit the stage in 2010. It has since grown into a cultural phenomenon and will soon also be adapted for international audiences, its producers said. Based on a book by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, one of the Netherlands' most famous war heroes, it tells his version of events following the Nazi invasion of May 10, 1940. The musical starts with a group of Leiden University students including Hazelhoff, now played by Paddenburg, being suddenly confronted by the news that German troops have invaded. "The war turns everything upside down," the official programme for the play explains. "Everyone has to make their own choices. Will you fight for freedom and country? Will you do nothing? Or will you deliberately join the enemy?" Some -- like Hazelhoff and his friends, including Bram, played by Eli ter Hart -- join the Dutch Resistance. Others don blinkers and pretend the war does not exist. A third group, however, become committed Nazis, not only collaborating but actively serving in the SS. 'Confronting' The latter include Hazelhoff's former friend Anton, who becomes a member of the Dutch SS and approves Bram's execution after his arrest. The role of Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who fled to exile in Britain, also features prominently. It shows her anguish as her small nation across the English Channel buckles under the Nazi jackboot. Hazelhoff joins the queen, played by Sylvia Poorta, after a perilous journey across the Channel and becomes her trusted adjutant. He smuggles radios to the Resistance and later joins the Royal Air Force. The musical draws to a close at the end of the war, following Wilhelmina's return and the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945. "The Netherlands was massively impacted by the Second World War," said Kevin Schoonderbeek, 39, the musical's resident director. "Everybody has a story and that has filtered through the generations -- even up to today," he told AFP. Schoonderbeek previously acted in the musical, playing the role of Anton. About 10 years ago "my grandmother, who was a young girl during the war, came to see the play", he said. "For her it was very confronting to see me in a Nazi uniform. She had a sort of a flashback to that time, remembering the sound of boots, uniforms, planes flying overhead," he said. 'Incredibly relevant' The war "was a major national trauma that should not be forgotten", wrote Bo Le Granse of Tilburg University in a Masters thesis on "Soldaat van Oranje". The story "is a way to grasp the idea of the Second World War, not just for the older generations but for the younger ones as well" Le Granse said. With chairs seated on a giant revolving tribune, the musical offers the audience a unique immersive experience, often referred to as "docutheatre". Various stages are placed around the revolving seating disk, providing several unique sets that are used at different points in the three-hour long production consisting of 33 different scenes. Brought to life by state-of-the-art electronics, the Nazi bombing of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940, for instance becomes eerily realistic. But it is the scenes of human drama depicting the torture and fates of the resistance fighters that are the most realistic -- and poignant. After the play, members of the audience said the lessons of war and freedom were as pertinent today as they were eight decades ago. "This musical is still incredibly relevant. There is still war in different parts of the world," said Sofie Groen, 37, a therapist on holiday from Mainz in Germany. "To me it's an incredible honour to play this role," added Paddenburg, who plays Hazelhoff.
France 24
29-04-2025
- General
- France 24
‘Unwavering friendship': The true story of nine women who escaped a Nazi death march
'It wasn't until she told me, one day over lunch, that I realised she was a war hero.' Gwen Strauss' great-aunt, Hélène Podliasky, was one of nine women who used their wits and courage to escape a Nazi death march and find the Americans in the spring of 1945, as World War II was drawing to an end. Seven of the nine were in the French Resistance and two were in the Dutch Resistance. They were all arrested in France and deported to Ravensbrück, Hitler's concentration camp for women. April 30 marks 80 years since Ravensbrück was liberated by the Soviets. 'In my family, we always talked about Daniel, Hélène's husband, and all the things he'd done,' Strauss recalls. Daniel Bénédite was a well-known Resistance fighter who had helped save artists like Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Hannah Arendt. 'But Hélène didn't talk about her story, and neither did we,' says Strauss. This was typical not only within the families of women who had been deported, but also in society in general. After the war ended, the women lucky enough to have survived the concentration camps rarely talked about what had happened to them. 'She wanted to tell me' But Strauss knew Hélène had an extraordinary story, and so, a few weeks after their lunch, she recorded her great-aunt's account. Ten years later, in 2012, Hélène, who was in her nineties, died peacefully after a short illness. 'She wanted to tell me, because she knew it would be forgotten otherwise,' says Strauss. She did not immediately start writing about Hélène's escape from Nazi Germany. 'I let it sit, and I regret that,' she says. 'Because if I had started sooner, I might have been able to interview more of the women. By the time I started to really investigate the story, all of them had died.' In 2017, appalled by the white supremacist riots in Charlottesvile, Virginia, Strauss decided the time had come to revisit Hélène's story of resistance and resilience and write "The Nine: How a Band of Daring Resistance Women Escaped from Nazi Germany" (Manilla). 'I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real' An archivist in Leipzig tracked down documents which showed Hélène's name, because she had spent time there at a forced labour camp. 'That was really a gut punch. I saw her name on these Nazi lists, and it was real,' says Strauss. But tracking down the other eight members of the group was not easy, in part because they had nicknames and noms de guerre. Click here to watch our documentary By sheer chance, some years earlier, she had come across a book, "Neuf filles qui ne voulaient pas mourir" (Nine girls who didn't want to die, Arléa), in a Parisian book shop. 'It was just sitting there on the table.' The author, Suzanne Maudet, known as Zaza, was one of the nine and had been very close to Hélène. She contacted Zaza's nephew, because he was the one who had got her book published and his name was in the preface. 'I went to see him in Rennes, with my daughter,' Strauss recalls. 'That was an incredible interview, an incredible day talking with him, because I discovered how traumatic the whole thing was for Zaza.' The death march In Zaza's book, she describes the nine's escape in an almost light-hearted tone. 'It's really happy, positive and optimistic. There are so few allusions to the fact that they were coming from a concentration camp and all that had happened to them before getting to that point.' Strauss knew the real story was far darker. The women had been forced to labour in factories for the German army. They had survived months living in appalling conditions in concentration camps infested with disease, lice and without enough food or water. They were surrounded by violent SS guards and torture was common. The Ravensbrück Memorial estimates that 28,000 of the 120,000 women of more than 20 nationalities who passed through Ravensbrück did not survive. When the Nazis realised the Allies were drawing closer, they forced many prisoners on what became known as death marches, because up to a quarter of the prisoners died along the way. In mid-April 1945, the nine managed to escape from their death march when they were near Oschatz. They were just in time: 'The ones who didn't run away ended up being executed in a field two or three days later,' says Strauss. 'That would have been their fate too'. The escape From Zaza's book and the archives in Leipzig, Strauss began piecing together the story of the nine. She got in touch with Dutch filmmakers who had made a documentary featuring a reunion between Hélène and Madelon Verstijnen (Lon), one of the two Dutch members of the group. She met with more family members from different parts of France, and was able to read accounts some of the women had written which had stayed within their families. She learnt that they had escaped from the death march during a moment of chaos when the guards weren't looking. They hid in a ditch, pretending to be dead. This worked, because there were corpses on the roadside. They then walked from village to village in what was still Nazi Germany. Hélène used her impressive language skills with the locals. At one police station, she managed to acquire a hand-drawn map on headed paper, which they were able to use as a laissez-passer during their ten-day escape journey. The women finally found the Americans in Colditz on April 21, 1945, after crossing the frontline, which involved a perilous traverse of a fast-moving river. 'No longer marriageable' The women who returned after being deported found, very quickly, that they couldn't talk freely about what had happened to them. Most people simply couldn't understand what they were saying, the horror they had endured seemed unthinkable. 'There was also this idea of 'Let's not dwell on the darkness, we're trying to build a new world now.' All those stories were so gloomy, and people didn't want to hear them. And also, nobody could understand them except for fellow survivors,' says the author. Women who returned after being deported also faced stigma. Marriages were called off. 'There was this idea that if you had been a young woman in the Resistance and then deported and survived, you must have prostituted yourself in some way to survive. You must have been raped. You were no longer pure and so no longer marriageable.' In "The Nine", Strauss explores the lives the women went on to lead. Some married fellow Resistance members, like Zaza and Hélène. Others, like Joséphine Bordanava (Josée), never told their families they had been in the camps. The survivors arrived in France in spring and summer 1945, but Paris had been liberated since August the year before. 'And then these women came with their shaved heads and their emaciated bodies, and it was so shameful and awful for them,' says Strauss. That explains why the tone of Zaza's book comes across almost light-hearted. She had written it in 1946, a year after the war had ended. 'I think that was the attitude that women who had been in the camps and in the Resistance had adopted. It really comes through in the writing.' 'Unwavering friendship' Instead of 'dwelling in the darkness', Zaza's account focused on the deep bonds the nine developed during their journey. As Strauss continued researching, she brought to light a story of unwavering friendship. They had several close shaves during their escape, attracting attention for being a large group of women. But splitting up was not an option. They encouraged each other, shared what little they had and physically supported members of the group who were ill and suffering. Josée, who had the most beautiful voice, would soothe the group by singing for them. 'To me, that was really the beautiful part of the story that I kept discovering;' says Strauss. 'The women really did help each other out again and again. And that helped them survive. To me, that's an important lesson.'
