How One 14 Year Old Girl’s ‘Innocent’ Bicycle Killed Dozens of Nazi Officers
1) A Question on a Park Bench (Haarlem, Netherlands — 1943)
The park in Haarlem held a late-summer hush, the kind of quiet that makes a sound out of a single bicycle bell. A woman sat alone on a bench, hands folded around a purse that contained more than leather and coins. A teenage girl with braided pigtails approached, her step light, her face ordinary enough to be invisible. She looked like twelve at first glance, maybe sixteen if you knew what war does to childhood.
.
.
.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked gently.
The woman answered. The girl’s eyes shifted—one small, confirming breath.
Freddy Oversteegen pulled a pistol from her coat, met the woman’s gaze, and fired.
The woman fell. Freddy turned, climbed onto her bicycle, and pedaled away into the city’s narrow streets. She did not look back. She would later say that the first thing you want to do when you shoot someone is to pick them up—to help—even as your hands are shaking with the act you’ve chosen. That impulse never left her. Neither did the knowledge of what she had prevented.
Because the woman she had killed was a collaborator with a list. Names. Addresses. Every Jewish family in the region, ready to be handed to the Gestapo. If delivered, it would have meant dozens—hundreds—dragged from beds, marched to trains, vanished into camps. Freddy had severed that link with one shot, saving lives she would never know.
By the end of the war, Freddy and her older sister, Truus, would carry out assassinations and sabotage missions that the resistance did not often assign to girls—missions that would become the whispered legends of Haarlem. They learned to shoot in an underground potato shed. They lured Nazi officers into forests and ended them with a single bullet. They rescued children. They refused missions that crossed the line into inhumanity. They fought monsters and held onto their humanity with a grip that did not loosen.
They were not alone. Across the Channel and across the Atlantic, Allied soldiers—Americans among them—fought in uniform against the machinery that made lists like that possible. In cities and camps from the Netherlands to Texas, a counter-story to the war grew: ordinary people choosing decency despite the darkness.
2) Straw Mattresses and Illegal Newspapers
Freddy Oversteegen was born in 1925 near Haarlem. She and Truus lived a childhood compressed by poverty into ingenuity. Their divorced mother, Trijn, moved the family into a cramped apartment where mattresses were stuffed with straw and kindness was stuffed into whatever space remained. Jewish refugees fleeing Germany slept in their beds. Political fugitives ate at their table. Strangers hid in their walls. Freddy and Truus made dolls for children suffering in the Spanish Civil War; their mother taught them a sentence they would say in different forms all their lives: If you have to help somebody, you have to make sacrifices for yourself.
May 10, 1940. German troops rolled into the Netherlands and rolled over the army in five days. Occupation rewrote the streets—flags, armbands, orders, hunger. Freddy remembered the sound of German rifle butts slamming doors. She remembered the shouting. She remembered the kind of fear that teaches you where your heart is by moving it into your throat.
Trijn did not whisper acquiescence; she taught resistance. Freddy and Truus distributed illegal newspapers that told truth in paragraphs that could cost a life. At night, they rode through Haarlem with paste and paper, covering Nazi posters with messages of refusal: The Netherlands must be free. Don’t go to Germany. For every Dutchman working in Germany, a German soldier goes to the front. Bicycles made them fast and anonymous. Youth made them invisible.
Someone noticed anyway.
Frans van der Wiel, leader of the Haarlem Council of Resistance, knocked on their door in 1941. He had heard about the mother who hid refugees and the daughters who defied propaganda. He asked Trijn if her girls could join the resistance. Trijn said yes. The girls said yes.
Van der Wiel tested them first. He returned dressed as a Gestapo officer, stormed into their apartment, brandished a gun, shouted for names, demanded to know where a Jewish man was hidden. Freddy and Truus did not break. They fought back—kicking, striking, refusing to betray anyone even when death stood pretending in their doorway.
The act ended. The test was passed.
Van der Wiel told them the truth of the work: sabotage bridges and rail lines. Learn to shoot Nazis. Truus looked at her younger sister. Freddy grinned with a kind of ferocity that did not yet understand its cost.
“Well,” she said, “that’s something I’ve never done before.”
Trijn gave them one more sentence to carry underground: Always stay human.
3) Fire, Forest, and the Bicycle
They learned to shoot in a potato shed deep enough to hold lessons the daylight didn’t need to see. A mission was assigned: burn a Nazi warehouse under guard. The plan was simple because it depended on something complex—men who underestimate girls.
Freddy and Truus walked up to SS guards, talked as if the world were normal, flirted just enough to move eyes and attention. Resistance members slipped behind, set fires, vanished. The guards turned back to a building already burning.
Van der Wiel saw what the sisters could do. They could enter places men could not. They could sit across from targets in taverns, laugh, brush an arm, ask in a voice like curiosity: Would you like to walk in the woods? They could lead the officer down a path without witnesses, where the other sister waited. One bullet to the head. A body into a prepared hole. Two girls on a bicycle rode away.
Sometimes speed was the method. Truus pedaled. Freddy sat on the back, pistol ready, scanning faces for a target down a street. They passed him, fired once, kept moving. No drama. No delay. Two girls, one bicycle, disappearing into normalcy. As Truus explained later: We always went by bike—never walked. That was too dangerous. I always made sure the coast was clear. It worked very well.
Sometimes the door itself was a trap. They followed an officer home, recorded his routine, knocked gently. He opened. He saw youth and harmlessness—two illusions that meant he did not see the gun until it was too late.
Targets were not limited to German uniforms. Dutch collaborators were often the deadliest threats—men and women who betrayed neighbors for money or power, who wrote lists and carried them to offices where those lists became trains. Freddy’s first assassination had been one of those. It broke something in her that did not heal, and it saved lives that could not thank her.
In 1943, a third fighter joined their cell: Jannetje Johanna “Hannie” Schaft, a law student expelled from the University of Amsterdam for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to Germany. A teacher’s daughter, a planner’s mind, a face the city could not forget—red hair, green eyes, pale skin. The resistance tested her with an empty gun—she pulled the trigger without flinching. She passed. She dyed her hair black to avoid the wanted posters that would later call her “the girl with the red hair.”
Together, the three formed a unit built on complements. Hannie thought in contingencies. Truus led, deciding and moving without hesitation. Freddy scouted and charted escape routes that would not be closed when panic arrived.
They didn’t just kill. They derailed trains to slow deportations. They smuggled Jewish children—small bodies carried through night, names memorized then deliberately forgotten for safety. They stole identity papers and forged documents that turned enemies into ghosts. They gathered troop movements and passed them to Allied channels.
One day, the resistance issued an order that revealed the razor thin line between necessity and cruelty: kidnap Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s children—the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands—and use them as leverage to free prisoners. If he refused, kill the children.
Freddy, Truus, and Hannie said no.
“We are not Hitlerites,” Freddy said. “Resistance fighters don’t murder children.”
They had killed many. They would kill more. But not children. That was the line between fighting evil and becoming it.
Not everything had a plan. One afternoon, Truus watched a Dutch SS soldier snatch a baby from a family in the street. The father screamed. The sister screamed. The soldier smashed the child’s head against a wall. The baby died instantly.
Truus stopped her bicycle. She pulled her pistol. She shot the soldier dead. No orders. No mission. No regrets.
“Some things don’t need orders,” she said later. And she was right.
4) A Girl with Red Roots
By 1944, Hannie Schaft was one of the most wanted people in the Netherlands. Witnesses remembered her hair even under dye. Posters spread: Find the girl with the red hair.
She kept fighting anyway. In June, she and Jan Bonekamp were assigned to kill a collaborator named Willem Ragut. They found him. Bonekamp shot him. Ragut didn’t die immediately. Chaos erupted. Bonekamp was shot in the stomach and captured. Hannie escaped. Bonekamp was interrogated, refused to talk, then deceived by an officer who pretended to be resistance, delirium turning discernment to fog. He gave Hannie’s address. He died soon after.
The Nazis arrested Hannie’s parents and sent them to a camp. Hannie went underground. For months, she did not fight; capture would mean the death of everyone she knew.
March 21, 1945. Liberation was weeks away, the war’s end audible like footsteps in the street. Hannie rode through Haarlem carrying illegal communist newspapers and a pistol. A checkpoint stopped her. A search found everything. She was arrested and taken to Amsterdam.
Weeks of interrogation followed—solitary confinement, questions designed to break bones where no brokenness shows. Officials noticed black hair at first, then roots growing red. They realized who they had seized. Hannie confessed to her assassinations. She never gave a single name. She protected Freddy and Truus and everyone else with silence that outlasted pain.
April 17, 1945. Eighteen days before liberation. An agreement existed to halt executions; the Nazi officer in charge ignored it. Hannie was taken to the sand dunes of Overveen, where hundreds of resistance fighters had been killed and buried. Two Dutch collaborators, Maatje Schmitz and Martin Kuiper, raised weapons. Schmitz fired. The bullet grazed Hannie’s head. Wounded, not dead. Hannie looked at him and said the last sentence of a life that earned the right to speak in that moment:
“I shoot better than you.”
Kuiper raised a submachine gun and fired. Hannie Schaft died at twenty-four. She was buried in a shallow grave where her red hair remained visible through the sand. On May 5, the Netherlands was liberated. Eighteen days too late.
Later, they exhumed 422 bodies from Overveen—421 men and one woman. Queen Wilhelmina called Hannie the symbol of the resistance. The state gave her a funeral.
Freddy and Truus received nothing. Not for years. Communists in the Cold War were to be ignored, sidelined, distrusted. The sisters who had risked everything were treated like an embarrassment instead of a defense.
Truus coped by making art—sculptures that stood as memory in bronze, a memoir, speeches. Freddy married Jan Dekker, had three children, tried to live a normal life in a world that had devoured normal and spit back fragments. Nightmares came anyway. Insomnia returned every May 4—Remembrance Day—like a visitation from what she could not bury.
When asked how many they had killed, Freddy answered always the same: One should not ask a soldier any of that. Some numbers are not for public use. They are for private nights and red roses laid on graves.
In 2014, Prime Minister Mark Rutte invited them to a ceremony. He awarded the Mobilization War Cross for service in World War II. Freddy was eighty-nine. Truus ninety-one. Freddy’s son said it was the happiest day of her mother’s life. After sixty-nine years, someone had finally said thank you.
Streets in Haarlem were named for them. Books and films appeared. But recognition came late. Most of their lives had been lived in silence, unhonored—ordinary women who did extraordinary things because no one else would.
Truus Oversteegen died in 2016 at ninety-two. Freddy Oversteegen died in 2018 at ninety-two, one day before her ninety-third birthday. For decades, Freddy visited Hannie’s grave and left red roses. For decades, Truus repeated her mother’s sentence in her own words: When you have to make a decision, it must be the right one, and you must always remain human.
They had killed people. They had watched life leave eyes they had looked into. They had cried afterward, every time. They had refused to kill children. They had carried what they had done without dropping it on anyone else.
That is the difference between resistance and the regime they fought. The Nazis killed industrially, without remorse, machinery erasing humanity. Freddy and Truus killed specifically, reluctantly, with tears. One act saved lives and aimed toward restoration. The other act aimed toward annihilation.
5) The Quiet Courage That Crossed Oceans
During the occupation, most Dutch citizens tried to survive quietly. Some collaborated. Some resisted. Of the resistance, only a handful of women took up arms; fewer still pulled the trigger. Freddy did. Truus did. Hannie did. They were not cinematic heroes with soundtracks and camera angles. They were girls with bicycles and pistols in baskets. They were women who wrote in their hearts: Some things are worth killing for. Some things are worth dying for.
Across the ocean, American soldiers fought not only in open battle but also in smaller, quieter ways that made a different kind of promise. In prisoner-of-war camps like Camp Ruston in Louisiana and Camp Swift in Texas, American guards enforced rules without cruelty, fed enemies well, treated them as human beings, and sent them home to rebuild—creating a story about America that outweighed propaganda and traveled back to Europe in letters and memory.
Strength without compassion is just brutality. The strongest nations proved their strength by making room for mercy. German women POWs who arrived expecting abuse were shocked to receive roast beef, clean beds, fair treatment, and a farewell handshake. They carried that proof back to rubble and hunger, helping create a foundation for reconciliation.
The war was not won only by bullets. It was also won by choices—by teenagers on bicycles who would not let evil pass unchecked, by American soldiers who refused to dehumanize the defeated, by mothers who hid refugees and taught daughters to balance fierceness with decency, by officers who said no to missions that made monsters of the righteous.
6) The Weight They Chose to Carry
Freddy never said how many she killed. Truus did not either. They kept numbers inside the wall of their own hearts, guarding against the cheapening that comes when life is reduced to tally marks. They did not apologize. They did not brag. They allowed space for sorrow and insisted on the line their mother drew.
Always stay human.
And yet—freedom’s arithmetic requires finding courage in places that don’t look like epic battlefields. It arrives on a park bench in Haarlem, in a potato shed, in the bicycle lane at midnight, in a last sentence spoken in dunes. It arrives on a Texas parade ground where an American sergeant shakes a prisoner’s hand. It arrives in letters between former enemies who became friends because they chose decency when history offered them cruelty as the easier tool.
What makes a nation worthy of allegiance? Not flags alone. Not victory alone. The answer is character—how you treat the powerless, the defeated, the stranger. The Americans who guarded POWs in the South and the Dutch girls who risked their lives in the North share a thread: a refusal to surrender their humanity to the machinery of war.
Freddy carried nightmares and never dropped them on her children. Truus sculpted memory into public places so others wouldn’t have to carry ignorance. Hannie died with a sentence that honored truth and courage in the same breath.
7) What Survives
In 2019, historians found records at Camp Ruston and photographs that showed a simple, quiet truth—guards standing professionally, prisoners standing peacefully. In the Netherlands, memorial sculptures mark dunes where courage ended and memory began. Streets carry the sisters’ names. Books try to weigh what cannot be measured.
But the real legacy flows through smaller channels. A mother teaching her daughter that decisions must be right and humanity must be kept. A former prisoner in Germany telling her children that American soldiers were kind instead of cruel. A Dutch sculptor carving the shape of defiance into bronze. An old bar of lavender soap saved in tissue paper because it represented mercy more than cleanliness. A letter from Nebraska to Haarlem across decades, signed by a man who understood that strength and kindness are partners.
The story ends, as most war stories do, with ordinary people doing extraordinary things because extraordinary was required.
Freddy Oversteegen: a girl who shot a collaborator on a park bench to sever a pipeline of death. Truus Oversteegen: a woman who killed a murderer in daylight without orders and slept at last because justice sometimes requires speed. Hannie Schaft: a student who refused an oath, dyed her hair, fought until capture, protected her friends under torture, and died saying a truth that still stands.
And across the ocean, American soldiers—guards and medics and officers—chose mercy inside fences, proving that winning does not require cruelty, that the point of victory is not humiliation, but the rebuilding of a world where people can live without fear.
Always stay human, their mother had said.
They did. And the world, in small ways that matter more than speeches, became better for it.
