From The New Zealand Herald
A World War II heroine who used her harmless appearance to
gain the trust of Nazis before executing them has died in The
Netherlands, aged 92.
Freddie Oversteegen was born in Haarlem, near Amsterdam on September 6, 1925 and raised by her communist mother.
She was just 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, the
Daily Mail reports.
Together with her older sister Truus and their friend Hannie Schaft,
she blew up bridges and railway tracks with dynamite, smuggled Jewish
children out of concentration camps and executed as many Nazis as she
could, using a firearm hidden in the basket of her bike.
The trio 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 died on September 5 - one day before her 93rd birthday. She was
the last surviving member of the Netherlands' most famous female
resistance cell, who dedicated their lives to fighting Nazi occupiers
and Dutch "traitors" just outside Amsterdam.
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 in North Holland,
scouting out targets or acting as lookouts for other executions....
...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."...
....
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