The Deadly Cycle: How a 14-Year-Old Girl Used an Innocent Bicycle to Eliminate Nazi Commanders
The park bench in Haarlem, Netherlands, looked ordinary in the fading light of 1943. A teenage girl with braided pigtails approached a woman sitting alone. To any passerby, she looked no older than twelve—innocent, harmless, perhaps lost. She leaned in and asked softly, “What’s your name?”
The woman provided it. Without a word, the girl pulled a pistol from her coat, looked the woman squarely in the eyes, and shot her dead. She didn’t scream. She didn’t panic. She simply hopped onto her bicycle and pedaled away into the mist.
Her name was Freddie Oversteegen. She was sixteen, and the woman she had just eliminated was a high-level Dutch collaborator. In that woman’s purse was a list of every Jewish family in the region—names and addresses she was minutes away from handing to the Gestapo. That single bullet saved hundreds of lives.
By the end of World War II, Freddie and her sister, Truus, would assassinate dozens of Nazis and collaborators. The exact number remains a secret. When asked, Freddie always gave the same soldier’s reply: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”
This is the chilling, true story of two teenage girls who seduced Nazi officers, lured them into the forest, and became the most feared assassins in the Dutch Resistance.
The House of Straw and Secrets
Freddie Oversteegen was born in 1925 in the village of Schoten. Her childhood was defined by a specific kind of hardship that breeds iron-willed adults. Her family lived on a cramped houseboat. Her mother, Trijntje, was a staunch communist who raised her daughters with a singular philosophy: When you see injustice, you don’t look away; you act.
After her parents divorced, Trijntje moved the girls to a tiny apartment in Haarlem. They slept on mattresses stuffed with straw and often went hungry. Yet, their door was never locked to those in need. Long before the war reached their doorstep, the Oversteegen home was a sanctuary for Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and political fugitives running from the rising tide of fascism.
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Family games
The girls grew up sharing their meager meals and beds with strangers whose names they didn’t know. They made dolls for children suffering in the Spanish Civil War. They learned early that comfort was a luxury, but humanity was a duty. Trijntje told them, “If you have to help somebody, you have to make sacrifices for yourself.”
The Occupation and the Test
On May 10, 1940, the shadows grew long over the Netherlands. Nazi Germany invaded. The Dutch army surrendered in five days. Immediately, the rhythm of life changed. German boots drummed on the cobblestones. The “banging” began—the sound of rifle butts against doors, followed by the screams of families being dragged into the night.
The Oversteegens didn’t hide. They began by distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets and illegal newspapers. At night, Freddie and Truus would cycle through Haarlem with pots of paste, covering German propaganda with messages of defiance: “The Netherlands must be free!”
In 1941, a man named Frans van der Wiel, commander of the Haarlem Council of Resistance, knocked on their door. He had seen the pigtails on the bicycles. He wanted to recruit them.
But first, he tested them. A few days later, he burst into their apartment dressed as a Gestapo officer, waving a gun and screaming in German for the location of a hidden Jewish man. The girls didn’t flinch. They didn’t beg. Instead, they fought back, kicking and hitting the man they believed was a monster. They were willing to die before they betrayed a secret. Van der Wiel dropped the act. They had passed.
“You’ll learn to sabotage bridges,” he told them. “And you’ll learn to shoot Nazis.”
Freddie, the youngest, simply grinned. “Well, that’s something I’ve never done before.”
The Underground Potato Shed
The sisters were taken to an underground potato shed. In the damp, earthy darkness, they were taught the mechanics of death. They learned how to strip a pistol, how to breathe through a shot, and how to remain calm when the life leaves an enemy’s eyes.
Their first mission was arson—burning Nazi warehouses. The girls used their youth as a cloak. They would approach the SS guards, flirting and laughing, acting like “silly” schoolgirls. While the guards were distracted by the smiles of two pretty teenagers, the resistance slipped in from behind and set the world on fire.
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Family games
But soon, the missions turned from property to blood. The resistance identified a Dutch woman who had betrayed her own neighbors to the Gestapo. Freddie was given the task. She performed it with the cold efficiency of a professional. Later, she would confess the psychological toll: “The first thing you want to do when you shoot somebody is to pick them up.” The instinct to help never left her, even as she became an expert killer.
The Forest Lure: Seduction and Survival
Freddie and Truus developed a signature move that became legendary in the Dutch underground. They would frequent taverns where German officers drank. One sister would walk in alone, catch the eye of a high-ranking officer, and lean in close. She would whisper a question that no lonely soldier could refuse: “Would you like to go for a stroll in the woods?”
The officer, blinded by arrogance and lust, would follow the “innocent” girl deep into the forest, away from the roads and witnesses. There, hidden among the trees, the other sister would be waiting. A single, muffled crack of a pistol, and the officer would fall into a pre-dug grave. They would take his papers, get back on their bicycles, and pedal home in time for dinner.
In 1943, a third member joined their cell: Hannie Schaft. Hannie was a law student with flaming red hair and a brilliant mind. The three women became an unstoppable, lethal unit. Hannie was the planner; Truus was the fearless leader; Freddie was the scout who knew every alley and canal.
The Line in the Sand
They blew up railway lines carrying deportation trains to concentration camps. They smuggled Jewish children across borders in the middle of the night. But there was one mission they refused.
Resistance leadership ordered them to kidnap the children of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi Reichskommissar of the Netherlands. The plan was to use them as leverage, and if he refused, to kill them.
The girls were horrified. “We are not Hitlerites,” Freddie declared. “Resistance fighters don’t murder children.” They had killed many men, but they refused to become the very monsters they were fighting.
However, the war offered no mercy. One afternoon, Truus saw a Dutch SS soldier grab an infant from a screaming family and smash its head against a wall. Without an order, without a second thought, Truus stopped her bike, pulled her pistol, and shot the soldier dead in the middle of the street. “Some things don’t need orders,” she said.
The Fall of the Red-Haired Girl
By 1944, Hannie Schaft was the most wanted woman in Holland. The Nazis issued a bulletin: “Find the girl with the red hair.” Despite dying her hair black and wearing glasses, Hannie was captured at a checkpoint in March 1945.
For weeks, she was tortured in an Amsterdam prison. She never gave up a single name. On April 17, 1945—just 18 days before liberation—Hannie was taken to the sand dunes. When the executioner’s first shot only grazed her, she looked him in the eye and taunted him: “I shoot better than you.” The second burst killed her. She was twenty-four.
The Long Silence of the Cold War
When the Netherlands was liberated on May 5, 1945, Hannie Schaft was given a state funeral and hailed as a national symbol. But Freddie and Truus Oversteegen received nothing.
The Cold War had begun, and because the sisters were communists, the new Dutch government viewed them with suspicion. For seventy years, the girls who had risked everything were sidelined and forgotten.
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Truus coped by becoming a sculptor, creating massive bronze memorials to the resistance. Freddie chose a quieter path—marriage and children. But the ghosts followed her. She suffered from lifelong insomnia and “nightmares that came without warning.” Every year on May 4th, Remembrance Day, she would wake up shaking with dread.
Finally, in 2014, the world remembered. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte awarded the sisters the Mobilization War Cross. Freddie was 89; Truus was 91. It was the first time their country had said “Thank you.”
The Legacy of the Bicycles
Truus died in 2016. Freddie died in 2018, just one day before her 93rd birthday. Until her final breath, she visited Hannie’s grave, leaving red roses for the friend who didn’t make it.
The Oversteegen sisters lived by a simple, brutal code given to them by their mother: Always stay human.
They killed because they had to, but they cried after every mission. They fought monsters without becoming them. While the Nazis killed systematically and industrially without remorse, these girls carried the weight of every life they took for nearly a century.
In a war where 90% of the population tried to stay invisible, a 14-year-old girl with pigtails and a bicycle chose to stand up. She wasn’t a Hollywood hero; she was a teenager who decided that some things were worth killing for, and some things were worth dying for.
