Teenage Nazi Hunters

Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. She was only 14 years old that first time, 14 pretending to be older, more worldly. It hadn't been hard to persuade the man to follow her. It seldom is. A little flirting, a hand lingering just a beat too long on his arm, the sleeve of his nearby forest, she suggested, holding his gaze in a way that she hoped seemed bold, hoped he'd mistake the slight tremor in her voice for nerves, a young woman being so terribly forward. Her arm tucked into his the couple left the bar, making their way along the path deeper and deeper into the shelter in darkness. The man hurled pressing her back against the rough bark of the tree, his hands suddenly everywhere. That's when she did it. That's when in one motion that felt like forever, that felt the way time slows and stutters in a dream.

She slid the revolver from the pocket of her woolen coat and pressing it to his head pulled the trigger. It was Dutch resistant fighter Freddie Oversteegen's first time killing a Nazi. Turns out, she had a real talent for it. Oh, weird stuff. Freddie Oversteegen was born in 1925 in the Dutch city, Harlem. It's an ancient place. The first mentions of Harlem appear in dating back to the 10th century. Residents of Harlem were used to being under siege. First from nature. The city occupies a narrow strip of land between the turbulent North Sea and the River I and the Haarlem Lake. Tough spot for flood risk, but location location location when it came to trading.

Unfortunately, being a hotspot for trading almost always means being a target for attack. It took only one good siege in the year 1270 for the city to throw up an impressive defensive wall, one they improved and fortified over the centuries, eventually adding a canal more than 49 feet wide that encircled the entire city, which didn't stop Spain from laying siege to the place in the 16th century. It took the Spaniards seven months to topple everything they had. While it wasn't enough to save their city, it bought their country enough time to arm up and prepare for war, a war known as the 80 Years War, a war the Dutch won, marking the beginning of the end of the great Spanish Empire. If you're wondering why Spain had it in for the Dutch, it wasn't because they coveted all those tulips and Gouda. It was religion, like it almost always is. King Philip II of Spain wanted to persecute Protestants, and the Dutch Protestants were like, Hmm, that's gonna have to be a no from us, King Philip.

Yeah, of course, there were other factors at play and all the usual political maneuverings designed to keep the powerful in power. But the root of it was religious intolerance. That's why the 80 Years War is sometimes called the Dutch Wars of Religion. All of this is to say that the people of Harlem weren't a bunch of apple cheek softies clomping around in wooden shoes like some cartoon stereotype. They were tough.

They were proud. They were fighters. And then came World War Two. The Dutch had maintained a policy of neutrality for over 100 years when Germany took aim at the country in 1940. Germany's real goal was the conquering of France. It just worked out that occupying the Netherlands and Belgium was the most strategic way to accomplish that. Plus, if the Nazis could successfully took over the Netherlands, England would effectively be blocked from setting up a base of operations on the European mainland. Strategy. And when you think of the bottomless amount of human ingenuity, energy and blood that's gone into creating strategies for war and domination since the beginning of time. Anyway, the German military invaded the Netherlands on May 10 1940. The Dutch government had declared martial law a month earlier, but urged its citizens to remain calm and go about their lives as normal, which they did, because the war seemed so far away, as wars always do, until suddenly, they're at your door.

The first target of the German bombers were Dutch military airfields and barracks and bridges, paratroopers and soldiers dropped from the skies. The Germans failed in their attempt to take Dutch Queen Wilhelmina and her government hostage, in large part, because the Dutch soldiers weren't having it. Their equipment might have been outdated, and their powers hamstrung by the country's policy of neutrality.

But it was crazy to underestimate the fierceness of their hearts. In one battle, they used their own flooded lands as a kind of defense and held off the German army for three days. The flight of their monarch Queen Wilhelmina to England took some of the heart out of the Dutch people though. And between that and the German threat to bomb the city of Rotterdam back to the Stone Age, it was over. On May 15, 1940, the Netherlands capitulated. The country was under Nazi occupation. Here's what Nazi occupation looked like to the Dutch. On that main morning, the German bombers were spotted in the skies heading toward the North Sea, or so Dutch observers thought. The planes instead turned 180 degrees and attacked the Netherlands. As bombs rained down, thousands of Dutch were forced to flee their homes on foot, carrying whatever they could. Many died trying to escape. That threat made by the Germans to annihilate the city of Rotterdam? It was an ultimatum made in bad faith.

Negotiations for surrender with the Dutch military command were underway when the German bombers, on orders of uber Nazi Hermann Göring, unleashed hell from above. 80,000 homes were destroyed, and as many as 900 people were killed. Excruciating as it was for the proud Dutch military, the country surrendered. The Nazis installed a new government, one headed up by Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The bombing stopped, but the terror began. The Jewish population knew better than to be lulled by any kind of false truce or compromise. Many had left their homes in Germany to escape the Nazi regime. And now the Nazis found them again. Many tried to flee to England by ship. Many went into hiding. You've read the diary, Van Frank.

You know how that story ends. In the aftermath of the German invasion, hundreds and hundreds of Jews committed suicide. At first, life under occupation was tolerable for non-Jews. Hitler viewed the Dutch as fellow Aryans, brothers and sisters in the master race. There were plenty of Dutch businesses that profited from selling and exporting goods to Germany. And at least in the beginning, Reich boss Arthur Seyss-Inquart played nice with the elites. The Germans called it the velvet glove approach. So what if the common Dutch man and woman were appalled at how their political parties were abruptly outlawed? How their houses of worship were abruptly Nazified? The fat cats were still fat and being very well fed by their German overlords. So screw the little people, right? Isn't that the way it so often goes? But as the war raged on, Hitler demanded more and more from the occupied territories. Dutch resources were strained to breaking point. By June 1944, the Dutch were starving. Fuel was scarce to non-existent. The people were broken and desperate.

The winter of 1944-1945 was a time of such harsh weather and terrible famine that they called it the winter of hunger. The real horror, though, was the rounding up of thousands and thousands of Jewish people, all deported to Nazi concentration camps. More than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands alone. It needs to be said that unlike Belgium and France, also under Nazi control, only in the Netherlands were there public protests against the persecution of the Jews. But the Nazis swiftly clamped down on that opposition. With every month came new restrictions, new regulations, new actions taken against the Jewish people. In the Netherlands, the Germans had complete control, something that wasn't true in Belgium and France. And what did they do with that complete control? They used it to deceive and deflect, effectively obscuring the true nature of those deportations. Nazi mastermind and soulless skin suit Adolf Eichmann could not possibly have been more pleased with the results.

Walton and Amba just must suck it gone, as war on rock. Translation? In the beginning you could say as the trains for Netherlands were really rolling. It was quite wonderful. Jesus, Lord God Almighty, the Nazis, demons, just straight up demons. So yeah, the phrase, the Netherlands was under German occupation, doesn't even get close to describing the reality.

As sudden and violent as the invasion was, the real nightmare was only just beginning. Freddie Oversteegen was 14. Her sister Truce was 16 when the Germans invaded. The girl's parents were divorced. They live with their mother, a communist and a woman with zero tolerance for injustice. Even before the war came to the Netherlands, Freddie's parents had been active resistors. The family lived on a barge and hid refugees from Lithuania in the hold of their boat. After the divorce, mother and daughters moved to an apartment. They were poor, but that didn't stop them from hiding Jews from both Amsterdam and Germany in their cramped and threadbare flat. Two years before her death, Freddie described the terror of witnessing people being taken from their homes. The Germans were banging on doors with the butts of their rifles that made so much infernal noise. You'd hear it in the entire neighborhood and they would always yell. It was very frightening, very frightening, but it wasn't enough to stop Freddie and her sister Truce from helping their mother pass out anti-Nazi pamphlets on the streets. The German army had plastered the streets of Harlem with posters calling for Dutch men to go to work in Germany. The sisters defaced these posters, covering them with warnings like, don't go to Germany. For every Dutch man working in Germany, a German man will go to the front. Talk about courage. And their bravery didn't go unnoticed. It wasn't long before there was a knock on their door, but it wasn't the Nazis. It was a commander with the Haarlem Council of Resistance. He had a question for Freddie and Truce's mother. Any chance these two girls might be willing to join the underground resistance? Absolutely was the answer. And so it began. It was a small group, fewer than 10, and Freddie and Truce were the only girls at first. Freddie later described what kind of training they'd received as members of this secret army. Mostly it amounted to marching in the woods and learning how to shoot and how to use dynamite. The sisters aced an early assignment when they successfully burned a Nazi warehouse to the ground. There were other lessons too, like learning to disguise themselves in order to smuggle Jewish children out of the country. And speaking of disguises, their youth and their gender proved to be the best disguise of all. Wearing her long dark hair and braids, Freddie looked much younger than she was. Barreling down the streets of Harlem on her bicycle, braids bouncing, Freddie rarely earned more than a passing glance from Nazi soldiers or officials. To them, she was just one more Dutch child, hardly worth their attention. I guess the Nazis considered real resistance to be work suited only for men. Little did they know that tucked in Freddie's bicycle basket were illegal firearms.

Who would have dreamed that the rosy-cheeked girl sailing past on that bicycle was, in fact, a ruthless assassin? And her former law student, Janitia Johanna Schaft. Five years older than Freddie, Jo, as she was called, was studying to become a human rights lawyer at the University of Amsterdam. Her close friendship with two Jewish students there, Sonja Frank and Feline Pollock, made her acutely aware of the actions being taken against Jews. Already passionate about human rights and now morally outraged, Jo found herself caught in the crosshairs of history. In 1943, university students were required to sign a declaration of allegiance to the occupying German forces. Eighty percent of the student body complied. Jo was not among them. She left university and returned to her parents' home, bringing Sonja and Feline with her. The two Jewish students went into hiding, and Jo became an activist. She started small, stealing identity cards for Jews in hiding, including her friends Sonja and Feline. Then she joined the Resistance Council, where she met two sisters, Freddie and Truus Oversteegen. The three young women became close friends, and Jo earned a new name, Hanny.

Hanny's most distinctive feature was a glorious head of bright red hair. She never headed out on an assignment without styling that hair and carefully applying makeup and lipstick. As she told Truce, if this was her time to die, she intended to die clean and beautiful. Hanny spoke excellent German and was adept at eavesdropping on the conversations of German officers in bars and cafes. She was charming and clever and easily struck up a rapport with her intended targets. The three young women took on mission after mission. They stole documents, helped sabotage rail lines, blew up bridges.

The girls helped move Jewish refugees from one hiding spot to another. They took shifts as hospital volunteers. Now, thanks in part to her youthful appearance, Freddie proved herself excellent at following targets and at serving as a bigger ambitions, and they formed their own assassination squad. Along with a fellow member of the resistance and one of its founders, Jen Bonkamp, Hanny assassinated a high-ranking German officer. She shot him in the back as he climbed onto his bicycle. Bonkamp finished the job but was badly wounded and wound up in the hospital. Hanny fled on her own bike, and it wasn't long before the Germans were turning the city upside down in search of the red-haired girl.

Bonkamp, on his deathbed and interrogated under the influence of heavy medication, revealed her address. The Nazis raided her family home and arrested her parents, but Hanny, with her distinctive hair now dyed jet black and wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, had transformed from law student to dark angel of death. The three teen assassins began a campaign of Nazi liquidations for their word. In one case, Trues lured an SS officer into the woods where another resistance member was waiting with a gun.

Eventually, the girls were pulling the triggers themselves. Their methods varied. Sometimes they would follow a target to his home and kill him there. Sometimes they would ambush a Nazi on their bikes. Sometimes they would entice the man into a nearby alley or forest, promising seduction but delivering a bullet instead. Eventually, their targets expanded to include Dutch collaborators. They were ruthless. They were relentless. They were the closest of friends, each other's most trusted confidant, and against all odds, they survived the war...almost.

In March 1945, Hanny was stopped at a German checkpoint. She was carrying both a gun and newspapers, illegal newspapers under the Nazi occupation. The Germans questioned her, becoming convinced that at last they had captured the red-haired girl. They arrested her, forced her to wash her hair over and over, revealing the black dye they'd suspected. They interrogated her for hours on end, all day, all night, trying and trying to break her. No matter what they did, what they Hanny refused to give up a single name. The only confession they managed to get out of her was her own admission to being part of the resistance. And the resistance was searching for her. It was assumed that Hanny had been imprisoned at the Wetteringschanz, the notorious prison that housed Anne Frank and her family before they were deported. She was disguised herself as a German nurse, insisting that her assignment was to take prisoner Hanny Schaft for medical testing. But it was no use. Hanny was being held elsewhere. Meanwhile, furious and disgusted by their inability to break Hanny's spirit, her Nazi captors yanked her from her cell. It was April 17, 1945. Time had run out for the red-haired girl. The two men tasked with executing Hanny were named Matthias Schmitz and Kuiper. They took Hanny to the beach at Overveen. The men gave her a hard shove and demanded she begin walking as they followed. Schmitz fired a round at the back of her head, but managed to only graze her. Allegedly, she said with great defiance and contempt, I shoot better. Kuiper later reported that the shot from Schmitz took him by surprise and that Hanny screamed in pain. Kuiper said that he fired a burst from his submachine gun at her, that at least one round struck her in the head, killing her instantly. They flung her body into a mass grave, one already filled with the 421 corpses of other souls murdered by the Nazis. When that mass grave was excavated after liberation in May 1945, hers was the only female body found. Freddie and Truce had survived the war somehow, but the loss of Hanny's shaft was almost more than the sisters could bear. Freddie was inconsolable. She and Hanny had the kind of friendship you'd call soulmates. Freddie could not understand why, at the end of the war, the Nazis had so brutally, so unnecessarily killed Hanny. To Freddie, the Nazis had violated the rules of engagement, had shown themselves to be not soldiers like herself, but thugs, criminals. And maybe even worse, there seemed to be no real consequences for the Dutch who'd collaborated with the Nazis. They were permitted to just slip right back into society, into the peaceful everyday life they'd once enjoyed, but now with blood on their hands. It didn't help that the Dutch government was drinking the Cold War Kool-Aid and cracking down hard on anything that carried the whiff of communism. That's why in 1951, the Dutch government used force to prevent the commemoration of Hannie Schaft's death. The ugly truth about the Netherlands in World War II is this. There were more Nazi collaborators than there were resisters. And what resistance there was to the Nazi occupation and the genocide of the Jewish people came disproportionately from members of the Communist Party. The story the Dutch government wanted to tell its people and the world didn't have room for that set of inconvenient facts.

So when the people gathered in May 1951 to mark the deeds and the death of resistance fighter Hanny Schaft, the government sent in the police and the army and four armored vehicles equipped with machine guns. It was an unbearable betrayal for Freddie and an infuriating one for choose. How did the sisters go on after the war? How does anyone? How do you reconcile the horror and the atrocities you've witnessed and endured with the return of peace, with the expectation that you'll just go back to normal now, whatever that is.

The Oversteegen sisters found that recognition for the work they'd done in the resistance would not be forthcoming. That was one more battle they'd have to fight. And it seemed that Freddie was done fighting. She slid into a private life post-war. She married a man named Jan Dekker and the couple had three children. Freddie tried, tried to put the behind her, but she struggled with depression and insomnia.

Today, we would recognize that Freddie had severe PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. But of course she was alone in her suffering then, alone with her memories. Sometimes she would lie awake in her bed, reciting words to the battle song that was her and her sister's anthem. We have carried the best to their graves, torn and fired at, beaten till the blood ran, surrounded by the executioners on the scaffold and jail. But the raging of the enemy doesn't frighten us. Truus Oversteegen would not vanish into peacetime so quietly. She also married and had four children. She named the oldest after Hanny Schaft. Trues became a painter and a sculptor. She spoke at schools and universities about anti-Semitism, about the war, and about the dangers of indifference and apathy in the face of fascism and brute evil.

Trues and Freddie together founded the National Hanny Schaft Foundation, devoted to raising awareness of both racism and the dangers of extremism. It's very much still in operation today. In May 1967, Trues was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to victims of the Holocaust. She was recognized as righteous among the nations.

It's an honor given to a non-Jewish person who, out of pure altruism and at great risk, helped save Jews from Nazi extermination during the Holocaust. It's the one honor Trues and her sister didn't share. Freddie's name is not listed among the 5,982 people recognized by Yad Vashem. It published a book called Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever. She wrote about her experiences in the war, about being in the resistance with her sister Freddie and their friend Hanny Schaft. She wrote about stalking and killing an SS officer. She wrote about trying to lead a group of Jewish children to safety and how she failed utterly at that mission.

She wrote with great honesty and didn't spare the reader either the truth of her actions nor some of her most painful regrets. Though both Oversagan sisters acknowledged the often violent part they played in the Dutch resistance, they refused to speak of how many had died at their hands. One should not ask any soldier any of that. We had to do it. It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people. Many years later, in a conversation with Sophie Poldermans, the author of the book Seducing and Killing Nazis, True said this. While I was biking, I saw Germans picking up innocent people from the streets, putting them against a wall and shooting them. I was forced to watch, which aroused such an enormous anger in me, such a disgust, a feeling of dirty bastards. You can have any political conviction or be totally against war, but at that moment, you are just a human being confronted with something very cruel. Shooting innocent people is murder. If you experience something like this, you'll find it justified to act against it. Once, I was confronted with an SS soldier, a Dutch SS soldier even, who was killing a small baby by hitting it against a wall. He grabbed the baby and hit it against the wall. The father and sister had to watch. They were obviously hysterical. The child was dead. I shot that guy right there and then. That wasn't an assignment, but I don't regret it.

It took a very, very long time for the Dutch government to acknowledge the role these teenage girls played in fighting the Nazis during World War II. A very, very long time to recognize their great courage and their profound humanity. It took until April 15, 2014. True was 91 years old. Freddie was 89 years old when the sisters were awarded the Mobilization War Cross. It was established by Queen Wilhelm Mina in 1948 to honor those who had served with valor in the military of the Kingdom of the Netherlands or who had done the work of the military for the country. As you can see, it did take the Dutch government 66 years to finally offer the respect the Obersegen sisters had long, long deserved. Better late than never, I guess and not a moment too soon. True died in June 2014. Freddie passed away 2 years later in September 2016.

Freddie once said something haunting to a reporter working for a Dutch newspaper. Maybe only another soldier can truly understand her words. A soldier who has seen combat, who knows from painful experience that war, real war, bears no resemblance to any movie or video game. Freddie had no illusions about the Nazis and no illusions about herself. She did what had to be done but took no pleasure in it. No false bravado, no chest thumping. At 14 years old, Freddie chose a side. She chose to risk her own life in the hopes of saving another. She chose to fight the darkness and against all imaginable odds, somehow managed to hold on to that one most precious thing, her humanity. I've shot a gun myself and I've seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.

Next time on true weird stuff, it was supposed to be America's Stonehenge, but it got caught in the middle of a bunch of crazy involving Satan and globalists and the new world order and the next thing you know, somebody went all Wile E Coyote with a bundle of dynamite. That's on the next true weird stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents in this episode, Ashley Palmer Fischer for playing Freddie and Stacey Robertson for playing the role of Truce. This is a heavy one, isn't it? I am familiar with this story, but not as in depth as what you've done with this. You know, Freddie, in order to be declared righteous among the nations, you have to be nominated by a witness or a survivor. And if you think about it, Freddie disappeared into private life as soon as the World War Two ended and was not a big public outspoken figure like her sister Truce. And so there was no one to nominate or corroborate her heroism and her humanity during the Holocaust. So she's not listed as righteous among nations. And I don't know if it's too late for that. I mean, perhaps there are surviving documents that could be used to submit her, but it just feels to me like a continuation of the injustice that Freddie is kind of swept aside like that. And it's a small thing and it's her actions that matter, not any recognition, right? But it's troubling to me how quickly this part of the history of World War Two was, they attempted to erase it and her own government is really the guilty party there. It's the Dutch government, who in the aftermath of World War Two, now we've got the rising menace of communism sweeping the globe.

That's all the Cold War stuff. And Freddie and Truce and Hanny, they were communists. The Dutch resistance was communist. And so it rather than acknowledge the courage and the bravery and the moral righteousness and the heroism of these Dutch resistance fighters, the Dutch government was like, well, I mean, you know, they're communists, commie trash. And so kick them to the curb. The fact that it took until 2014 to have this recognized, I don't know. To me, that's like really an affront and an outrage. But I may be too close to the story, right? I admit that. I always love that the labels are more important than what the actions were. You know what I mean?

You find that true anywhere. I knew that there is a complicated situation involving the Dutch and the Nazis. And if I'm not mistaken, after the Nazis, after Germany invaded them, they became like an ally. They were considered an ally of the Germans, I believe, because so many people had kind of gone over to the other side. Yeah, you know, yeah, I mean, and I suppose that in a way you're like, well, I don't have any choice. I guess I have to accept it. You know, I mean, I suppose for just people that just want to go to work and raise families and have jobs, you know, that that's what they decided to do.

I'm really glad that you point that out. Because over the course of human history, we see that dynamic played out over and over and over again, people end up acquiescing and collaborating with evil, because they feel helpless and overwhelmed, and they're just trying to survive. And as I pointed out in the episode, in World War Two, there were more Nazi collaborators among the Dutch than there were resisters. And it was, unless I'm misremembering and something has changed, it was a Dutch collaborator who reported the Anne Frank family, the Frank family.

Right. It was. So, and this was the heartbreak of Freddie Oversteegen's life, that her fellow Dutch would not rise up and fight against this. She had as much disgust and fury for her fellow Dutch who collaborate with the Nazis as she did for the Nazis. And I think she's right in that, I do. Because at the end of the day, it's not the jersey that you wear, it's the actions that you take. And so many people were tortured and died at the hands of the Nazis, because of the Dutch collaborators. And so you can understand why she felt utterly and completely betrayed by her own country and her own people. One of the things, there's an interesting little dynamic that's happening right now that this episode you can really illustrate it with. And that is, World War Two was how many years ago? Decades and decades and decades, right? And the German people, they did not from their own history. They teach it in school. They do not tolerate extremism. There aren't Nazis marching in the streets of German cities the way there are Nazis marching in the streets of American cities. And you will never ever hear a German say, yeah, but not all Germans. Have you ever thought about that? In America, where we're very, very inclined to children were so quick to say, yeah, but not all men, but not all women, but not all this and not all that. And you never hear that from the German people, because they took the lesson and decided, you know what, never again. And we are going to be better. We are never again, going to allow this darkness to engulf us. And that's what happens when you look at the facts squarely in the eye, and you don't flinch from your own culpability and accountability. And that is something that is so dominant right now in social media discourse. You see so much, yeah, but not all this and not all Republicans and not all Democrats and not all men and not all gay people and not all Christians. We are so triggered and so defensive. And so of course, history is coming back around like she always does tired old bitch that she is. And she's like, all right, here we go again. I guess we're going to repeat this semester. And it does kind of feel that way. If you look at the global political dynamics in the 1930s and 40s. I mean, you really see some disturbing ripples and echoes. I was in a play called judgment Nuremberg, and I played the judge. And there's a great scene in it where he said that this is during the Nuremberg trials after the war. And the judge is wondering, and he asks of the housekeeper, who is at the residence where he is staying while he these trials are going on, he said, basically, did you know what was going on? Did you have any idea? And the answer is, kind of. You know what I mean? Yeah, kind of, yeah, kind of knew what was going on. And you went, well, okay, that's, it's kind of going on. But you know, all right, you just sort of accept certain things. And it's just like you keep on making these little moral decisions of what we're going to accept this and this and this and this and this. I sure I've done three plays that involve Nazis. And that is that one of them is a college professor who gets seduced into becoming a member of the SS who starts out as a college professor having an

affair. And at the very end of the play, he is determining how the the Jews are to be put to death in the concentration camps. So he starts in, you know, wearing, wearing a tweed jacket at the beginning of the play. And at the end, he's in an SS uniform. The other thing, and we we kind of talked about this before we got started today, and it's about Adolf Eichmann, who I've also portrayed on stage, very brilliantly, may I add, like, I know you and seeing you playing Eichmann, I had chills running down my spine. It was uncanny.

So the one thing that we talked about, about Adolf Eichmann was the idea that Adolf Eichmann was a hardware salesman. But inside he was waiting for the right situation to happen where he could become Adolf Eichmann, this Nazi who was involved with all of this Holocaust stuff. And the thing about it is, he was sort of an opaque person. He didn't seem to have any real feelings about all this. Juxtapose that with Freddie, who at the very end says, what did I want to do in that moment? I Somebody was doing it out of duty, knowing that this is what had to be done, but understanding the humanity of the situation. The other person, Adolf Eichmann, who had no feelings whatsoever about that. And if the rise of Nazism hadn't happened, he would have remained a hardware salesman with this capacity for evil dormant inside.

Yeah, this unrealized capacity for evil, right. And, and I that's why I think Eichmann is such a compelling figure to study. Because it's the, it's just the truth about human nature, and about being human, is that we have these capacities within us, what do we choose to fertilize? What do we feed? And I think, I mean, we are surrounded by people on all sides who have within them the seed of goodness or the seed of And what will life circumstances do with that? How much of that will grow and flourish? And how much of it will remain dormant?

And we do see in over and over and not just in World War Two, but we see in every conflict involving human beings, there are always those people that are, they're activated by violence and oppression. And the Nazis, we're going to do an down the road on the Nazi fixation on the occult. What a bunch of weird twisted mofos, like nothing you've ever seen, like, it's just, it's more than just like, well, you know, they were, they were called up by the German Army, and they did what they had to do. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's so much more to it than that. There were men in the German Army in World War Two, who behaved like soldiers. And then there were the Nazis, the Eichmanns, the the bitch of Buchenwald, all of these, all of these people who were just waiting for the chance to let that darkness out of its box. And you really see this in the story of the Oversteegen sisters and Hanny Schaft. Hanny Oversteegen, and Freddie, of course, you've heard of like, weren't there some teenage girl Nazi killers? But, but that's super reductive, too, isn't it? Right? Just Oh, some teenage little too. Well, I mean, my God, what's scarier than a teenage girl, lol. The courage, but beyond the courage, the moral clarity that Freddie Oversteegen had at age 14. And lived with and died with the moral clarity, I think is the real story here. And I'm, I'm disappointed, even though she's gone. And it's meaningless. I'm disappointed that she's not counted as righteous among the nations. And no, I can't nominate her, by the way. It has to be a survivor or a witness. So I can't. And as more time goes on, that that's going to be harder to find. Yeah, we don't have many of those. There was something very interesting about the story, too. And you were talking about the idea that you transition from this life where you're doing this, which is I mean, you're confronting monstrous things with monstrous acts to transition from that. And then go back into Alright, fine, let's go and do the laundry. And we'll go to the store and raise the kids and do all that other stuff. My father said something very interesting one time we when they were living in Nevada, they lived near a veteran cemetery. And my father because there weren't enough priests at the church, he used to officiate these funerals. And from time to time, I would go with him. And I was sometimes a pallbearer for strangers just because they didn't have enough people. And we were walking around the cemetery after one of the services. And he said, there was nothing to prepare me for what I had to do in going into World War Two. And he was in the Navy in the South Pacific. And he said, and equally, there was nothing to prepare me for the transition out of that mode back into what my life became. And I always thought that was an interesting thing for him to say. I when you when you I mean, because you have not, you and I have been very lucky in that our lives have been mostly peaceful and safe, right? They was such a towering figure, not just in your life, but in the lives of all who knew him. And really, like, you're one of those guys who can genuinely say, like, my dad was my hero.

Yes. So as after he told you that, like, how has that? How have you processed that thinking about what what he was really saying to you? I think what he's really saying is that there's a lot of stuff that he has hidden inside that has that was left unresolved. That's what that meant to me. That he carried and lived with. Yeah, I think there was an awful lot of that. And you have to wonder, like, I think a lot of time, I think a lot about, like, veterans who served in the Vietnam War, how they came home and were just, like, erased and shoved to the side, and had to carry so much trauma inside themselves, while also being viewed as they were somehow the bad, the bad guys in all of that. And I think about how corrosive to the soul and the human spirit that would be. And I think we've done a little better. It was subsequent generations, I hope we've done a little bit better. I don't know, I hope we have, but sometimes I wonder. Well, because you know that, um, people like the World War Two, they came home, and they, they swallowed it, and got on with the business of the American dream, and the boom. And, and they like, like, we have a good friend whose father served as a very, very young man, I mean, like, barely 20 years old, and was a sergeant, and he was at the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, he was fighting the Nazis. He wasn't even like a fully grown adult. And he brought that home, and he never spoke of it. Well, and I think that when you see the way it shaped his life, right? I think you, if you were seen, especially as a man, if you were seen as seeking some sort of psychiatric help, it was a sign of weakness on your part, rather than a sign of something needs to be fixed here. I mean, my parents, neither of them ever did, but I think they both would have benefited from that. And when it came to the priest of church, he was who you looked good for. He was who you had over for dinner, and he was who you looked good for. You didn't utilize them as somebody of, I've got a problem, I need, I need help, maybe a spiritual solution. You just didn't do that.

You just, you just lived with it. You just swallowed it. And you just lived with it. There are a couple of things that are wrong with that. First of all, it's so damaging to the individual. But I think it's also damaging to the larger society. And this is one of the things the Germans got right post World War Two, that they understood that there was no swallowing this, that it had to be reckoned with, it had to be confronted. And that's, that's one of the, that's one of the great mistakes that we but we make it in the micro level to you know, you, we swallow conflict and relationships at home and at work and, and, you know, all of that, you swallow all that you swallow, but it leaks out in a million different directions. And we're seeing that now. I, when I think about Freddie and Truce and Hanni, so Freddie was 14, Truce was 16.

And Hanni was like 21, because she was in law school, right? When I think about, when I think about what they did, and what they had to do, and, you know, you can make it a swashbuckling story. But the truth is, they, they failed too. And when you read Truce's book, which is hard to find it, by the way, it's in Dutch. And it's not on Amazon, you won't find it there. I mean, when she writes about how they failed leading these Jewish, this small group of Jewish children to safety, how they got caught. I want you to imagine living with that. I want you to imagine living with that. And the way she punished herself for that. At 16 years old. That it's that kind, that kind of courage, that kind of moral fortitude to have that swept aside, and forgotten is, it hurts us all. Whether you're Dutch or not, it hurts us all as human beings. And then you think about Hannie Schaft. So there she is in law school. And here come the Nazis. And the only way you're allowed to stay in college is if you sign your allegiance to the Nazi party.

And eight out of 10 college students in the Netherlands did that. Eight out of 10. Because they didn't think that for some of them, I guess they didn't think they had any choice. What's interesting about the end of her life is that the she was killed in 1945. Only a few months before the end of the war. So you would think yeah, at this point, the biggest thing that they would be concerned about would be fighting the war, but they were still carrying out these kinds of atrocities, even right up to the end.

That's what was so hard for Freddie. Because although Freddie was a 14 year old girl, who became a resistance fighter, 14 years old, no military training, she didn't even, she wasn't even in high school, because you know, the country was under occupation, and she's hiding in the woods. 14 years old, no formal military training. And yet, the clarity and integrity of a soldier, and understanding that there are rules of engagement in wartime. But, but there are things that are not the act of a soldier, there are there are things that are murder. And what the Nazis did to Hanny Schaft was in Freddie's view, murder, not the act of an enemy combatant in wartime. She was crystal clear about that, right? It was unnecessary to kill her and in the way that they killed her. It was flat out cold blooded murder. Because Freddie could at 14 years old, 15 and 16 years old as the war went on. As a young teenager, Freddie understood innately that where the lines were where the boundaries were. And that the Nazis had crossed that line. And of course, as you saw at the end of the episode, which I did include that passage from Polderman's book, because I want people to hear an eyewitness account of the Nazis casually and brutally slaughtering a child on the city street in full view of everyone. I want you to know if you're not like a super history buff, and you don't really pay that much attention. And, you know, maybe you've seen Schindler's List. And that's it, right? I want you to understand. I want you to understand what happened in this world, just a handful of years ago, and how savage and psychotic and vile it was. And Truce saw that. She was, I think 16 and a half when that happened. So I want you to imagine yourself at that age, or if you have kids, I want you to imagine your daughter at that age or son. She witnessed that in full view. There were people all over the street watching that Nazi slaughter that baby. And only she took action. Only she changed that. So there were a lot of people older than she was with more life experience, who remained frozen. And she took action. And you need to know, as a human being on this planet, you need to know what we are capable of, on the darkest and the lightest side, you need to know, because we're at a time in our history, as a civil as a species, where the darkness is creeping over the horizon again, and what are we doing? You used to be like when I was a teenager, and we were studying history and the story of Anne Frank and her family. You know, the the priests because I had Jesuit priests for teachers, and priests would say, you know, we ask ourselves, what would I have done? If I were there? And people always say, well, I would not have allowed it, I would have fought back, I would have protested, I would have protected people, I would have hidden people, I would have done anything. But the reality is, is whatever you're doing right now, is probably what you would have done back then. You know how many Dutch people they didn't have Twitter and threads and Facebook and Telegram and all that stuff back then, right? But you know how many Dutch people said, I can't get involved in politics. I'm just trying to I'm just trying to live my life here. You know how many people threw up their hands and went, I know something terrible is happening. But what can I do? I'm just one person. The majority of them did. And that's why there were more Dutch collaborators with the Nazi occupation than there were Dutch

people resisting it. So whatever you're doing right now, and I include myself in that, whatever you're doing right now is probably what you would have been doing. Yeah, because because you'd, I think that I probably would have operated from a place of fear. And I think that there's the word courage is bandied around a lot. But to be able to take an action like that after witnessing what was happening with that child, and just saying, I have to meet out some kind of justice with this. That's true courage. And to have that at that age, I, I'm not sure that I'd have it at the age I am now, let alone when I was a teenager. Yeah, I mean, I've thought a lot about this. I don't, you know, I don't have murder in me. I really don't. I think that in order for me to pull a trigger, it would have to be under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Like, I couldn't shoot a bunny rabbit, or deer. Yes. But and I grew up, I grew up, by the way, in a house full of hunters and guns. And I live with with him in with a house full of locked up guns now. But I couldn't. Somebody asked me about hunting the other day. And I said, I have no problem with hunting. I'm fine. If you want to go out and hunt, I have no problem. I understand that they need to do it, especially with the deer.

And I mean, I have no problem with it. If it's done legally. I just don't think that I can put a rifle up and hit an animal. I just, I just can't do it. If you can't, I don't have what I don't have an opinion about that. Go ahead and do it. That's fine. But I know that I can't do that. I, you know, I've had people ask me this too, because I kind of like kind of have the image of being someone that would be like violently opposed all that. You know, I grew up in the wilderness and you know, my father had a hunting outfitting camp. Like, one of my favorite childhood pictures is me and my brother Mark before we moved out west. And there are two deer hanging from our backyard swing set so that my father could dress them out. And my brother and I are posing with the deer and I'm holding on to one of their tails. Like I don't. I mean, I don't remember. It's my favorite thing. I don't remember a time in my life where there weren't hunters and wild game in the freezer and guns in the house. And bows, bow and arrow situations, whatever you call that archery. I don't know what you call that kind of hunting. But yeah, I had a fight with that. I had no fight with that at all. I have no fight with a sport. My husband likes to shoot. What do you call the frisbee things? Clays? Oh, yeah. Whatever you call them. Yeah. My husband's a sports shooter. We have several guns locked up in a gun safe. I had no fight with that. I'm just telling you that for me, like Max, I don't think I can go out and shoot something unless I am pressed against the wall. And I would hope that I have what Freddie and Truce and Hanny had. But I won't know until I'm tested. And I'll be honest, I pray to never be tested. Because when I think about what Freddie and Truce carried throughout their very long lives, the burden that they carried, and the way, you know, when you fight for what's right and good, and then your own government, a bunch of collaborators, a bunch of fat cats, kicks you under the table to keep you hidden. That makes processing all of that that much harder. Like, where was the space for grace and healing for Freddie and Truce? And I think for Truce, because she was so She was an activist her entire life. And she an incredible artist as well. I think for her, she was able to find a little bit of that. And I think that Freddie died carrying the whole weight. I hope I'm wrong. But, and I don't know what you think about that, Max, but I feel like she died carrying that enormously heavy weight.

I think you're right, especially with, you know, what happened at the very end of the episode, you know, the story portion of the episode, when you realize, yeah, I was doing this. But what is my instinct as a human being, as a fully formed, even as a teenager, loving human being, and that is, I want to help you. That's my first instinct.

You just have to hope that Freddie, at the end, she died in 2016, which was a minute ago, if we're being real, okay? A minute ago. You just have to hope that when she died, that having held on to her humanity was enough of a comfort, because she never wavered. She never wavered in her morality or her conviction that no one had the right to do to the Jewish people what the Nazis did. No one had the right to rain that kind of terror down upon the world. And she was so clear about that, right till her dying day. You have to hope that was enough for her so that she could leave this world with a teaspoon full of because it's unbearable to think otherwise. It's always too late.

We say, oh my gosh, we need to do better. But it's always, in hindsight, it's always too late. Always. It just is. You would think, after the atrocities came out about what happened in Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, and what happened in the Nuremberg trials and everything else, you would think there would never be any circumstances under any condition that anybody would be yelling any kind of anything under a Nazi flag. And yet.

And yet, I will say that it's a shock, a heartbreak, and a complete betrayal to me when I turn on the news and I see Nazis marching on American city streets. First of all, I think a I think what a pack of morons. Show me you've never read a book without showing me you've never read a book, right? Because I think that I don't know what percentage, but I think that a fair amount of those clowns cosplaying as Nazis in the streets of American towns and cities just have no idea. They have no idea. They don't understand anything except their own internalized racism and bigotry. That they have a full handle on. They have swallowed that piece of bait, hook, line, and sinker, and they know that they fully despise people that aren't them. That they are clear and authentic about. But to have any knowledge of human history, any knowledge of what happened in World War Two, to put on that armband and to give that Heil Hitler salute is just the most devastating betrayal of the American experiment that I can imagine. And yet, because it's still America, for another minute or two, because this is still America, we let those cosplaying clowns walk on our streets. That's what freedom looks like, and freedom is always messy. But here's the thing about, I want to speak directly to you, my little Nazi cosplay boys. Let me speak directly to you. The very freedom that you want to strip from others is the freedom that allows you to cosplay being a Nazi in Florida. Right? Yep. Yeah. So in a world where we deny others their full humanity and their full freedom, never doubt. Never doubt you're next. Never, ever doubt that you are next. When you side with the bad guys, when you step into the darkness, and you collaborate with evil, know that you may be way down on the list, but you're on it. And it's coming for you. And won't you be surprised? You'll be just as surprised as some of those SS officers who thought they were going to get a quick lay in an alley outside a tavern on the streets of Rotterdam or Harlem or Amsterdam, only to find a teenage girl putting a bullet in their heads. You'll be almost as surprised as that. Except for that guy, the end came quicker than it'll come for you. That's the point of morality. That's the point of humanity. We are not meant, we were not built by God to walk in the darkness. And that's why that shit always ends badly. Always, always, always, always.

It never ends well. Tell me one time, Max. Tell me one time. Never. One time. Never. Yeah. I'll tell you what, you get a library card, but it's free. You can be surprised what you might learn about yourself and your fellow humans. So this is our little way of paying tribute to Freddie Oversteegen, who of the three teenage Nazi assassination squad girls is the who is least recognized. And she may not be yet declared righteous among nations. Freddie Oversteegen is righteous among nations. And we thank you for listening to this episode of True Weird Stuff. This one was heavy. This one was this one was hardcore, you know. But on the next episode of True Weird Stuff, we're going to tell you a story that's going to make you wait. What? How did I not know about that? It's so nice. For me, that's about 75% of these episodes. So yeah. So crazy.

It's so crazy. Humans are so much fun when we're being fun crazy, as opposed to when we're being evil crazy. Yeah, wouldn't it be better if we could all just go, you know what, I need to be nuts. But we could be nuts in a fun way. And not nuts in a murderous, genocidal way. Right. And we we didn't even touch on we didn't touch on the current events in this episode.

And we won't, because I don't want to overshadow the story of Freddie and Truce and Hanni. But just in case you think that everything in this story is a relic of the past. I do invite you to turn on the news. Thank you. Thank you for listening to True Weird Stuff. And I promise we'll have an episode coming up that's basically like, food is delicious. Am I right? To give you a little break from humanity's worst behavior. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs