"Idiots, I shoot better than you."
History is there for the lessons. No one wants to descend into the past, returning to places of horror created by men of evil ... well except maybe trump. But, as history teaches us he will never win in the end.
Meet the Dutch girls who seduced Nazis — and lured them to their deaths
When she came across a Nazi killing an infant by repeatedly swinging its tiny body against a brick wall, Truus Oversteegen didn’t flinch.
The freckle-faced teenager, who was just three months shy of her 17th birthday when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, was a newly minted member of the Dutch resistance. She had been mostly assigned to hide Jewish children, political dissidents and homosexuals in various safe houses throughout Haarlem, her hometown, which was about 12 miles west of Amsterdam.
But what she saw now forced her to act with a sudden, brutal energy.
“He grabbed the baby and hit it against the wall,” Truus recalled years later of the horrifying scene. “The father and sister had to watch. They were obviously hysterical. The child was dead.”
Truus quietly pointed her gun in the direction of the Nazi and shot him dead.
“That wasn’t an assignment,” she said. “But I don’t regret it .?.?. We were dealing with cancerous tumors in our society that you had to cut out like a surgeon.”
Truus, her younger sister, Freddie, and law student Hannie Schaft were among a handful of young women who took on clandestine roles to destabilize Nazis during the Second World War. While women’s resistance work was largely confined to spying, code-breaking and typing, few actively dared to take on the work of the Dutch trio — as underground assassins.
That’s the theme of the recently published “Seducing and Killing Nazis: Hannie, Truus and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of World War II” (SWW Press), which documents the exploits of the three young Dutch resistance fighters whose dangerous work set them apart.
“These women never saw themselves as heroines,” writes the book’s author Sophie Poldermans, who is also a human-rights activist in the Netherlands. “They were extremely dedicated and believed they had no other option but to join the resistance. They never regretted what they did during the war.”
Although their roles in the underground were at first confined to stealing Dutch identity documents to help persecuted Jews, the girls quickly graduated to more ruthless duties .....
Before their deaths, the sisters told Poldermans that Hannie was defiant until the end, and they liked to repeat the story of her execution — which has become the stuff of legend in the Netherlands, based on several police reports and witness statements.
When the first bullet missed its mark, Hannie fixed the soldiers sent to kill her with a steady gaze.
“Idiots,” she said. “I shoot better than you.”
https://nypost.com/2019/12/14/meet-the-dutch-girls-who-seduced-nazis-and-lured-them-to-their-deaths/
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