The Teenage Girls Who Assassinated Nazis
Armed assassins. Seducers. Ambushers. These aren’t the typical words one would use to describe teenage girls, especially ones growing up in World War II Europe. But that is exactly what Freddie Oversteegen, her older sister, Truus, and their friend, Hannie Schaft, were during the war.
Freddie and Truus grew up in poverty, raised by a single mother. Although the family slept on threadbare mattresses, they began taking in Jewish refugees in 1939. A year after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, a member of the Haarlem Resistance Group came to their house and asked to recruit Freddie and Truus. As young, teenage girls, the sisters’ naive appearance was the perfect cover-up for their covert activities. As Truus’s daughter recalled, “Because they were girls, nobody noticed them.”
On one of their first assignments, the sisters burned down a Nazi warehouse and flirted with the guards to distract them. They soon learned to shoot and targeted high-ranking Nazi officials and Dutch collaborators by doing drive-by shootings on their bicycles. On one assignment, Truus lured an SS officer by suggesting a walk in the forest where another member of the resistance was ready for the kill. But paramount to the sister’s membership in the resistance was helping to…
