#freddie dekker oversteegen | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heatherwanderer · 6 years

Photo

Her name is Freddie Oversteegen.

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.

”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!’”

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.

Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, the last surviving member of the trio, died on Sept. 5, the day before her 93rd birthday, at a nursing home in Driehuis in the Netherlands, about five miles from where she was born.

#fuck nazis #Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen

15 notes · View notes

morganbelarus · 6 years

Text

Her war never stopped: the Dutch teenager who resisted the Nazis

Freddie Oversteegen, who has died at 93, waged a campaign of killing and sabotage but struggled to adapt to peacetime

The first thing the Nazis took from Freddie Oversteegen was her bed.

Her mother, Trijn, a communist bringing up her children independently in the Dutch city of Haarlem, sheltered Jews, dissidents and gay people as they fled Germany in the 1930s. Oversteegen, who was seven when Adolf Hitler came to power, bunked in with her big sister Truus to make room.

It was the start of a struggle that would last until she died on 5 September, the day before her 93rd birthday, in a nursing home not far from where, as teenagers, she and Truus carried out a campaign of assassinations and sabotage against Nazi invaders with pistols hidden in their bicycle baskets.

If you ask me, the war only ended two weeks ago, her son Remi Dekker told the Observer. In her mind it was still going on, and on, and on. It didnt stop, even until the last day.

Oversteegens war began one Friday in May 1940 with planes roaring overhead and the smell of smoke. Realising the Nazis had invaded the Netherlands, her family began burning their radical literature. Oversteegen, then 14, and Truus, 16, were already used to smuggling refugees and distributing forbidden texts. It wasnt long before the resistance came to recruit them. Her mother only gave them one rule, Oversteegen once recalled: Always stay human.

Oversteegen in 1943, when her innocent appearance made her an invaluable resistance fighter.

Oversteegen was petite, and with her twin plaits she easily passed for 12. Her innocent looks made her invaluable as she could slip by Nazi controls unnoticed. The two sisters began as couriers, moving weapons and stealing identity papers to help Jewish people escape.

One early assignment was arson the two burned down a Nazi warehouse, flirting with the guards as a distraction. Soon, they were taken to an underground potato shed and taught how to shoot. Their method was the Dutch equivalent of a drive-by. My mother drove the bicycle, and Freddie sat on the back and was shooting, recalled Truuss daughter, Hannie Menger. Because they were girls, nobody noticed them.

Some targets were Dutch collaborators who gave the Nazis details of Jewish and dissident families. Others were high-ranking Nazi officers. On one assignment to liquidate a member of the SS, the sisters found their target in a restaurant. As Oversteegen kept watch, Truus lured him out by seductively proposing a walk in the forest, where another resistance fighter shot him dead. The sisters regarded the killings as a grim necessity that was secondary to their more important work: rescuing children. The two helped smuggle Jewish children through the Netherlands, sometimes even as bombs fell from Allied aircraft overhead.

Occasionally, they were not successful and children were killed. This caused grief so profound that the sisters descendants struggle to speak about those operations today.

Their cell expanded to include Hannie Schaft, a law student notorious to Nazi authorities as the girl with the red hair. Truus, a commanding presence with a level gaze and a throaty laugh, was the leader. The three developed an iron bond.

Oversteegen never forgot the day that Schaft failed to return from an assignment. She had been captured at a checkpoint. Though her hair was dyed black, the red colour of her roots revealed her identity. Aged 24, Schaft was executed in the dunes west of Haarlem, just 18 days before the Netherlands was liberated.

Hannie was her soulmate friend, said Manon Hoornstra, a filmmaker to whom Oversteegen confided many of her war memories. Freddie could never understand why the Nazis killed her just before the end of the war. She always took red roses to her grave. The peace was not easy for Oversteegen. As the cold war began and McCarthyism took hold in the United States, communist resistance fighters became so out of favour that in 1951 the Dutch government forcibly tried to prevent the commemoration of Hannie Schafts death. Oversteegen felt alienated from the country she had fought for, and was embittered to see former Nazi sympathisers not held to account.

German soldiers marching through a town in Holland in May 1940. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

She married Jan Dekker, an engineer at a local steel factory, and threw herself into domestic life, raising three children. Her family tried to protect her from troubling memories of the war, but she struggled with the trauma all her life, particularly around the annual Remembrance of the Dead on 4 May.

She shot a few people, and these were the real, real bad guys, her son, Remi Dekker, recalled. But she hated it, and she hated herself for doing it.

Unlike Truus, who married a fellow resistance fighter and was open about her experiences, Oversteegen struggled to speak about the war and sometimes felt overlooked.

She feared the very attributes that served her so well in the war her tiny stature and sweet voice made her invisible in peacetime. She hated her high voice, Dekker said. She used to say, Nobody listens to me! The release of a film about Hannie Schaft in 1981 made her famous and helped rehabilitate the sisters in national memory. Eventually in 2014, the Dutch government awarded them medals of military service, in what Mark Rutte, the prime minister, called an act of historical justice.

The two sisters retained a deep bond until Truuss death two years ago. One word was enough for them to understand each other, recalled Menger, Truuss daughter. They had relied on each other completely during the war. Their lives were in each others hands.

Towards the end of her life, Freddie began to speak about her war experiences, opening up to the documentary makers Hoornstra and Thijs Zeeman for their 2016 film Two Sisters in the Resistance. After much persuading, she returned to the woods where Truus had led the SS officer to his death and where, Freddie believed, he is still buried.

On the way there in the car, we could see that she was very vulnerable because she started singing, Hoornstra recalled. It was a song that the members of the resistance group always sang when they were afraid.

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

=> *********************************************** Article Source Here: Her war never stopped: the Dutch teenager who resisted the Nazis ************************************ =>

Her war never stopped: the Dutch teenager who resisted the Nazis was originally posted by 16 MP Just news

#16 MP Just news

0 notes

beckylower · 5 years

Text

In a continuation of my research into lesser-known heroes, I have come across two sisters who took a stand during the darkest time of the twentieth century. Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen and Truus Menger-Oversteegen were just young teenagers when they joined the DutchResistance. And like their more well-known comrade, Hannie Schaft, their story is one of youth acting with tremendous courage against the greatest evil of the modern world.

Left: Freddie Right: Truus

Born in 1925 and 1923 respectively, Freddie and Truus spent their early childhoods on a barge in Schoten (later absorbed by Haarlem), Netherlands until their parents divorce. Thereafter, the sisters lived with their mother, an avowed communist, in an apartment in Haarlem. Mrs. Oversteegen raised her girls to believe that one’s principles should be supported by one’s actions. With war looming, mother and daughters demonstrated their belief in fair treatment for all by harboring Lithuanian refugees after the Soviet invasion in 1940. It should be remembered that the USSR and Germany were allies early in World War II. After Hitler overran the Low Countries, the family hid a Jewish couple in their

Freddie looking quite young in braids.

apartment for a time until the couple was arrested and sent to a concentration camp where they perished.

The Oversteegen girls’ resistance to the Nazi occupation began in an informal, but very dangerous way. They started by handing out anti-Nazi pamphlets and pasting warnings over Nazi posters seeking workers to go to Germany. With a fair number of Dutch collaborators vying for German favor by turning in resisters, this activity was dangerous indeed for the Nazis had no compunction about torturing and killing anyone, including children, who opposed them in even the simplest ways.

In 1941, a commander of the Haarlem Resistance Group approached Mrs. Oversteegen hoping to recruit the girls. Their mother and the girls agreed. Freddie was only 14 and Truus 16 at the time. Many of the young women who were part of the Resistance did not take part in armed actions. Instead, they hid refugees and downed Allied pilots. They acted as curriers between resistance groups. They gathered intelligence, but they did not take up arms. The Oversteegen girls played a very different part is resisting the Nazi occupation of their homeland. Because of their ages, it might have been felt they were less likely to fall under suspicion. Whatever the reasoning, Freddie and Truus were trained in the tactics of armed resistance. They learned how to shoot, how to blow up bridges, and how to sabotage railway lines. They literally took up arms against their Nazi occupiers just like the men of the resistance, but the girls also had assets their male counterparts did not.

Truus with weapon

To the usual list of saboteur responsibilities the girls added “liquidations.” Their targets were Dutch collaborators and Nazis and the girls were very effective. Who would suspect two young teens out for a ride on their bicycles were stalking and killing people? But that is exactly what they did and they reserved their most strategic plans for Nazi soldiers.

As one can see from her photo, Freddie was a lovely girl. No matter the horrors of war soldiers do not lose their interest in girls. In fact, being far from home and in dangerous situations probably heightens their desire for the normalcy found in female companionship. The girls took complete advantage of this. They met, probably flirted with, and invited Nazi soldiers to accompany them to isolated “make out” spots. Once in the wooded areas, the anticipated romantic interludes turned deadly. The girls or other resistance fighters killed the soldiers on the spot. In 1943, the Oversteegen sisters joined forces with Hannie Schaft and the trio formed a sabotage and assassination cell. Luring Nazi soldiers to their deaths became their mission and stock-in-trade. The sisters were devastated when Hannie was captured and killed in 1945 just three months before the war’s end.

After the war, the girls refused to talk about how many people they had killed, saying that “soldiers do not tell and we were soldiers.” Truus became a sculptor and later wrote and spoke about her wartime experiences. Freddie married and had a family. While they knew their war work was vital, what they had done marked the rest of their lives. Freddie suffered life-long insomnia. “We did not feel it suited us,” Truss told [an interviewer] of their assassinations. “It never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals.”[1]

It took many years for the Dutch government to officially recognize the Oversteegens’ contributions to the Resistance because they were communists, but in 2014 they were finally honored with the Mobilisatie-Oorlogskruis, or “War Mobilization Cross.” Truus died in 2016 at age 92 and Freddie in 2018 one day before her 93rd birthday.

One can only imagine the courage it took for young teens to undertake the work they did on behalf of their nation during its darkest hour.

Related Fiction: Three recent bestsellers featuring wartime resistance.

Resources

https://www.history.com/news/dutch-resistance-teenager-killed-nazis-freddie-oversteegen

https://time.com/5661142/dutch-resistance-friendship/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/23/freddie-oversteegen-dutch-teenager-who-resisted-nazis

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/freddie-oversteegen-who-assassinated-nazis-teenage-resistance-fighter-has-died-92-180970319/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/nazi-germany-dutch-resistance-freddie-truus-oversteegen-hannie-schaft-a9188306.html

https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/museum/en/exhibitions/missed/missed-hannie-schaft

https://historycollection.co/the-gutsy-teenage-oversteegen-sisters-killed-nazis-during-wwii/2/

Seducing the Nazis In a continuation of my research into lesser-known heroes, I have come across two sisters who took a stand during the darkest time of the twentieth century.

#Dutch Resistance #Freddie Ovwersteegen #Seducing Nazis #Truus Oversteegen #World War II

0 notes