The Teenage Girls Who Seduced and Killed Nazis

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When the Nazis steamrolled into the Netherlands in May of 1940, Jannetje Johanna "Hannie" Schaft and Truus and Freddie Oversteegen were just 19, 16, and 14 years old respectively.

As for the Oversteegen sisters, their mother, Trijn, had left their father years before. Freddie states of this, "She was just fed up one day—we lived on a large ship in Haarlem, but my father never made any money and didn't pay anything for the barge. But it wasn't an ugly divorce or anything—he sang a French farewell song from the bow of the ship when we left. He loved us, but I didn't see him that often anymore after that."

Immediately after the Nazis came to town, despite the risks, Freddie goes on, "During the war, we had a Jewish couple living with us, which is why my sister and I knew a lot about what was going on..."

At the same time, their mother also had her daughters join in with her in the rather dangerous task of posting and distributing anti-Nazi and communist literature around town.

Given their brazen activities, word soon got around to the resistance that the girls might be open to joining, with one Frans van der Wiel coming calling in 1941. Freddie states, "A man wearing a hat came to the door and asked my mother if he could ask us [to join the resistance]. And he did... she was OK with it. "

She also states her mother simply requested of them that no matter what the resistance asked them to do, to "always stay human."

Of the sisters' personal decision to join, Truus stated,

A war like this is a very raw experience. While I was biking, I saw Germans picking up innocent people from the streets, putting them against a wall and shooting them. I was forced to watch, which aroused such an enormous anger in me, such a disgust... You can have any political conviction or be totally against war, but at that moment you are just a human being confronted with something very cruel. Shooting innocent people is murder. If you experience something like this, you’ll find it justified that when people commit treason, such as exchanging a four-year-old Jewish child for 35 guilders, you act against it.

Needless to say, they were all for it, though not quite realizing at that point everything they'd be asked to do. She states, "I thought we would be starting a kind of secret army. The man that came to our door said that we would get military training, and they did teach us a thing or two. Someone taught us to shoot, and we learned to march in the woods. There were about seven of us then—Hannie wasn't a part of the group yet, and we were the only girls."

For the text version of this and references, go here: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/03/the-teenage-girls-who-seduced-and-killed-nazis/
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