Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 130 - The Teenage Communist Hit Squad of The Netherlands

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

During WWII partisans came in all shapes, sizes, and ages. And sometimes death was 15 years old and riding a bicycle. Listen to It Came From the Sea @fromtheseapod Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/nazi-germany-dutch-resistance-freddie-truus-oversteegen-hannie-schaft-a9188306.html https://www.history.com/news/dutch-resistance-teenager-killed-nazis-freddie-oversteegen Poldermans, Sophie. Seducing and Killing Nazis: Hannie, Truus and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of WWII

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is Sarah, host of It Came From the Sea, yet another podcast on the Nate Bethea universe universe what's up sarah hey not much just starting to roast in my room in hawaii yeah how's your uh we're recording in the morning and i normally don't do that um how's your morning going uh well it's only 80 degrees right now so if we finish before noon i probably won't have a heat stroke if we we don't finish by noon, I feel like we have other problems such as I launched into some weird history, which I don't have in my script.

Yeah, this morning, we decided to record and I was like, Okay, let's let's do this. And I went to the corner store to grab some coffee and some really bad musubi. And I know it's bad. Trust me, like I've eaten this musubi so many times. I know's not good but i don't care i hate myself and then i found out they weren't open till nine so i drove to the corner store for no reason and turned around and came back and i was so disappointed that i made my own coffee which doesn't taste as good as iced coffee from the corner store i guess what i'm saying is i'm unhappy you tried to hate yourself and you ended up playing yourself instead yeah like imagine going to the store fully knowing you're getting a food that you don't like and then you can't even get it like that's a level of disappointment that yeah it's it's a level of disappointment that can truly only happen in oahu um

now sarah i thought it'd be interesting to have you on for this episode because one very specific reason. We're talking about partisans during World War II. Obviously, that totally connects to your STEM show. Yeah, right. But mostly because we're talking about the most unlikely partisans of all time. When we think about killing nazis and shit like when we talk about which i mean everybody can get behind that right um like partisans like

spies like we probably think of like some soe badass or some like grizzled like ian fleming or some shit yeah or like someone who they could like cast you know daniel Daniel Craig to fill in in Defiant. Shit like that. So instead, we're going to talk about teenage girls. I don't know why you don't think teenage girls are dangerous. You obviously haven't hung out with enough of them. I am not a libertarian, so you're correct. These weren't just spies, which they did do that. They were a cold-blooded fucking hit squad of the dutch resistance again i don't know why you wouldn't assume teenage girls are

cold-blooded i mean it's fair um i don't i'm not i haven't been steeped in teenage girl culture yeah your sexism is showing joe i know know. I'm fucking cancelled. Fucking cancelled. I told you I was coming for you. You said you were coming for Nick. You didn't say you were coming for me. Column A, column B. Me and Nick are actually the same person moving back and forth very quickly. You have a mic set up in two rooms

as you run back and forth between them. Yeah, it's a bit that I have. It's how I get my exercise. It's called podcaster forth between them yeah it's a bit that i have it's how i get my exercise it's called podcaster cardio um yeah it's uh i guess the most i know about teenage girls is like mean girls um yeah and would they not murder somebody yeah you're right i could see regina george shooting somebody in the head this is the gritty reboot of uh regina george um but it carries uh so this this starts with uh someone named freddie overstegan which is a uh freddie is a girl's name in the netherlands apparently um i don't i don't think it's a nickname um

so this is a little bit of a side note someone made fun of my german pronunciation the other day which to be fair, it's bad. I know it's bad. I don't speak German. I've only graced Germany with my presence for a limited amount of time. And I did not pick up the language while I was there. And they were from Denmark.

So yeah, Danish, Dutch, slightly different, but I was like, don't worry. I'm eventually coming for Denmark. And I,

apparently I hit right next door instead. But but so what you're saying is all denmarks are bastards uh actually it seems like a nice place i don't know i've never been there quickly backtracking to secure the denmark listeners yeah i have to shore up my denmark vote um have nothing bad to say about Denmark at this time. We'll revisit this at a later time. So Freddie Overstegen was born in the town of Harlem. No, not that one. In 1925 in the Netherlands. Her mother and father both divorced at a young age,

and her dad skipped out of town, leaving her mom to care for Freddie and her older sister, Trues. Which, again, I might be pronouncing this wrong. This is like a Disney story in the making. You already got one dead parent. Yeah. Almost every fucking story I tell on this podcast begins with, and then dad left.

It's a good motivator. Almost every single one. The sister's name is spelled T-R-U-U-S. I think it's Truesues i don't know yeah um freddie described her father as a good man who just couldn't make any money and never did anything for the family uh which sounds like being a bad father with extra steps um and then he apparently sang a french farewell song as he bailed on his family which is like the most depressing version of like the song of music ever again this is straight up like a disney

musical waiting to happen yeah you see if my dad uh sang a french farewell song before he and like tap danced his way down to the cigarette store to never come back this would be much more heartwarming uhwarming her mom worked pretty much every job that she could find in order to provide for her family unfortunately even for her that like even with all that that wasn't really much because apparently the

Netherlands hadn't invented bootstraps yet but like pull herself up by her clogs I don't know the family was forced to live in an old barge in the middle of a river which okay which sounds born for that yeah i like the stories that i find is like yeah they were forced to live on a barge but like okay i get that that's weird but it's also kind of awesome houseboat come on yeah in seattle that's just prime real estate in seattle that's the only real estate left uh we could sell you

this old houseboat that is just filled full of used needles and amazon applications i will take it thank you that's a half million dollars please ma'am fuck honestly that's probably underestimating it but that's true yeah i'm assuming their barge wasn't as nice it didn't have nearly as many needles it's just full of old clogs. I don't know anything else about the Netherlands. Clogs, windmills, and Freddy oversteeping. That's all I got. Splintery-ass wooden shoes everywhere.

Freddy and Trues would go to school during the day, and when they got home, their mother would give them in-depth lessons on communism, of which she was a ardent believer um like i cannot underestimate i cannot understate how communist these teens are that's fucking rad it's it's incredible um though like rather than talking about boring ass economic theory uh she was more of a fan of you know talking about things that matter like class struggle and liberation something that would become pretty important later on in their lives

I'm saying I don't fucking care about it I don't know if I've talked about it much on the show but like I've made it known in other interviews that I don't fucking read theory because I find it incredibly boring I've used theory for like primary sources and stuff for research papers that i've written where i was talking about things like liberation and class struggle but like i'm not gonna be like

ah yes time to crack open this fine lenin like i'm not gonna fucking do it man uh also i don't like lenin but that's something else entirely um now in between working and talking about a work the oncoming workers revolution they would use their barge to hide refugees criminals and other people that did not want to be found which is known as praxis hell yeah like these are these guys are like it's not just like party barge yeah like they're not communist party barge the only cool communist party yeah like it's not like like ah yes would you like to come to our reading circle like we don't really care why you're running from the cops but like come hang out with us we got this shitty ass barge

you can hide out in yeah we got plenty of rooms in this fucking barge watch out for clogs and even though they like didn't they never asked these people for money uh or anything um even though they were desperately poor um like they'd pay out of their pockets for food and people would just become another member of like the weird barge commune until they left i really want a barge commune now yeah barge communes are rad they're they're the new patreon goal yeah they're the new urban garden barge yeah the patreon goal for like a barge and off the coast of this island would cost several million dollars i'm not here i'm actually just gonna break into uh uh pearl harbor and steal one uh nate cut that part out just steal the missouri it'll be fine rihanna did it right

i'm hearing a knock on my door i believe the security police are after me or whatever the fuck they're called um short police yeah whatever i don't know the wet mps moist boys yeah moist boys uh yeah like there was just everybody if you had money or food or whatever like you could chip in but if you had nothing it was perfectly fine um now this whole refugee smuggling ring thing uh adversely affected the family but they didn't really care one of the lessons their mother taught them was quote if you have to help someone like refugees, you have to make sacrifices for yourself. Which, yeah. It's a lot better than anything my mom taught me.

Yeah, it's almost like you fight for someone you don't know or something. That's weird. Yeah. I think I've heard that from someone before. Fuck you got mine? I don't know how to say fuck you got mine in Dutch, but yeah, that. It's trickle-down economics, but with clogs. The Netherlands itself had long considered itself a neutral nation

in the affairs of the nations going around them. It kept themselves out of war with its neighbors since the 1800s. During World War I, as Europe burned, the Netherlands did the smart thing and kept the fuck out of it, which may have been why Kaiser Wilhelm quit wanting to be such a bad Kaiser and ended up hiding out there after 1918.

That's where the Kaiser crashed after he abdicated the throne. Because nobody else would probably have him. Due to their neutrality as the Nazis began their initial campaigns of violence and oppression against the Jewish populations of Europe, but mostly starting

in Germany, the Netherlands was considered a safe spot for many of them. Dozens of them began hiding out in the Overstiegen Barge until they got on their feet or got papers to go to America or Canada or England. The Overstiegen Barge was a solid place for them to land

to get on their feet and move on somewhere else. Though a lot of them ended up staying in the Netherlands because they're like, well, the Netherlands is always neutral. The Nazis aren't going to come here. Spoiler alert. That is not what happens. But did they though? Yeah, it's unfortunate

that these Nazis ruined our norms of genocide that Europe has become so closely guarded to. Don't they understand the gentlemanly rules of warfare? Yeah, you can't invade me. I said I don't want to go to war. This isn't fair. I said time out. Yeah, I'm telling mom.

The Overstiegen family, probably like most of the netherlands assume that the the germans would just go around them uh and they would do their biannual takeover europe-a-thon or whatever uh but that isn't what happened because like you know that's what happened during world war one um when there was like that idea of like gentlemanly warfare and everybody like all the leaders are related to each other so they all are gonna like honor certain things yeah it's just in hindsight the nazis didn't do that so much that it's kind of funny that they were so naive yeah and that can be said for a lot of wars throughout history like i can't believe you did that like you know when you're bayoneting and blowing people up like there's not really like i don't know monarchs are stupid and like that's one of the reasons

why they're so stupid because like that's one of the reasons why it was always kind of shocking that like Wilhelm ended up in like the Netherlands and not like literally because he was related to most of the monarchs in Europe right I mean granted his cousin Nikki over in Russia had a

different ending which yeah the Netherlands aren't looking so bad. Yeah, the Netherlands look great this time of year. Compared to getting shot up in a basement. Yeah, I'm not one for being pro-Bolshevik, but I actually fully support giving them Kaiser Wilhelm. Like, do what you do, fam. Bury him in a basement after you're done.

Now, like I said, most people in the Netherlands probably assumed that the Nazis would go around them. Instead, the Nazis attacked the Dutch Merchant Navy as World War II erupted around them and even sank a passenger ship, killing 84 people. So many tulips lost. Yeah, there was that whole argument like, well, there could have been soldiers or munitions on it. That was never proven.

It's not like the Lusitania where that is a fact. But I mean, it also doesn't make torpedoing civilians cool. Turns out, not cool. Not cool. Yeah. Anyway, welcome to the obvious war crimes cast. I listened to the hell out of that to be fair yeah that's kind of our brand now is like having to point out obvious horrible crimes are in fact

war crimes because people try to debate them um but that's that's the world we live in is that war crimes are just uh seen through the scope of nationalism 99 of the time it's good and healthy yeah it's fine and good. Nothing bad could possibly happen to those. Anyway, let's go live to Iraq and ask them how things are going. The joke is it literally doesn't matter when this comes out. It will always be a problem. Yes.

Yeah. Now, the Dutch authorities realized that maybe things wouldn't be so cool between them and the Germans this time, and they ordered their military to prepare itself. But that didn't really end up mattering, as Germany was a main trading partner of the Netherlands at this time, and the government attempted to rearm. They did so through Germany, who would then just not send shipments of weapons because they knew what they were going to use them for of shooting at Germans when we invaded them. Yeah, sensing a problem here yeah like it's actually kind of hilarious that the netherlands thought that the germans would be okay with this like no we need thousands and thousands of tanks and rifles for other reasons we're not we're not going to use them to fight you despite the fact

you just blew up hundreds of our civilians. That's something that we do. Even the Germans aren't that stupid. We supply weapons to terrorists and then look like shocked Pikachu when they use them back on us. Look, that's our thing. Furthermore, the Netherlands was strictly neutral, meaning they

were just as likely to shoot down an allied plane as they were a German one. So the brits of the french didn't want to give them any weapons uh yeah didn't want to give weapons to someone that they weren't sure were even on their side um yeah like neutrality at this point is kind of a moot point they probably should have thrown there a lot and obviously with the allies um i mean when they're calling themselves the allies they sound better i don't know yeah obviously branding uh the allied marketing team hit one another park uh yeah great at this point it's pretty obvious neutrality is a joke um i mean it worked for switzerland but it's mostly because they were just laundering money for the nazis yeah right it's all the gold really lets people like look the other way yeah

the swiss are like yes we don't understand why we're processing millions of gold teeth but you know we're fine with it this is great um yeah and uh at this point the the netherlands still didn't want to throw their lot in they were they were really hoping that they could like have armed neutrality we're like look we have weapons we'll fight you if you invade us but like it's the netherlands and you're facing germany good luck uh there was also the possibility that maybe the ussr would be open to sending supplies um but there was a small problem with that because the dutch government had not recognized the soviet union as a nation as it was 1939 and they are still really committed to that white russian cause uh against communism whoops well yeah record scratch but you're wondering how i ended up here

on may 10th 1940 the germans invaded the netherlands without a declaration of war even bothering to come up with any good reason to do so i assume this is just a group of them sitting around the table and going oh come on we are nazis guys let's just invade the netherlands like we already got away with poland yeah fuck it yeah what what is your cassius belly of invading the Netherlands? Nazis. Oh, right. We can. Yeah. Because who's going to stop us?

The Netherlands? Like, come on. When was the last time we sent you weapons? Come on. It's just Hitler doing the shoulder thing going, come on, come on. Is tanks rolling? Ah.

Well. Now, most of the myths that surround the fall of france were actually pretty true when it came to the fall of the netherlands um the world was in the grip of the tail end of the great depression and the dutch government slash its military budget as much as it could to the point that if they tried to cut it again but they stopped there just being nothing left to cut uh so soldiers really didn't have anything to fight with soldiers themselves just clogs

just rocket propelled clogs swords is doing nothing soldiers themselves suffered for this in every way to save cost conscripted soldiers would serve only 24 weeks which is not even long enough for them to get most of basic training,

which sometimes did not include firing their weapons. If I was to cut something from basic training, it would not be marksmanship. It might be like, I don't know, learning how to march or something, but like not using your weapon. Joe, you need drill and ceremony. It's free. Yeah.

It costs nothing to march around in circles for hours obviously um and then they would just be like set home and out of around 200,000 soldiers only around a thousand professionally trained officers were within the ranks oh my god yeah and dutch soldiers were mostly only armed

with world war one era surplus and outside of that the dutch only brought five tankettes. Not even a single normal sized tank. What's a tankette? Is it just a tiny tank? Kind of. It's like, it made for like, the idea was like for direct infantry support during World War I. Like the interim years.

It's super small, very under armored and has it's fucking worthless it sounds like a tank you would market towards housewives in the 50s uh yeah it wasn't great uh especially when you don't have a single regular tank yeah and their air force was made up of world war one era biplanes which i do love a good biplane i i love a good biplane until like a mesher schmidt me 109 is shooting at me well it's not great yes and like you're in the biplane so that means you have to have a cartoonish mustache and like goggles you're like and a really long white scarf yeah aiming a fucking pistol out the cockpit and demanding that the fucking the regular World War

Two fighter plane duel you like a gentleman so yeah I guess what I'm saying is things are bad the Dutch army was so unfit for the battle that like their own government which remember cut all the costs and made all these problems apparent in the Dutch army admitted that it was unfit for battle by their own standards, which were so incredibly low already.

Anyway, the Netherlands was painfully owned by the Nazis. Right, right, right, right, right, right. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned in every single way possible, the little Dutch soldiers who could inflicted nearly as many casualties on the Germans as the Germans did them and frustrated every offensive attempt. Yeah. That's impressive. It kind of is. Like, if the Germans, if this was like at all a peer battle, the Germans would have lost, which actually is most of the case for the early war period. If they knew they were going to die, you can't knock them for thinking like, oh, we're going to

take as many of these Nazi fucks as possible before that. Yeah, where are you going to retreat to? We're Dutch, this is where we live. A fjord? Do they have fjords? I feel like they might be called something else. I feel like fjords is a Scandinavian thing. I don't know.

Somewhere a Dutch listener is getting very mad at us. That's fine. Listen to my podcast, give money to my Patreon, and maybe I'll listen to your complaints. The Germans attempted to deploy paratroopers, and it was kind of hilarious because the German Fulsham Jaegers were kind of a miserable failure throughout World War II. They tried to use them again in Crete, and it was another of hilarious because like the the german folsom jaegers were kind of a miserable failure throughout world war ii like they they tried to use them again in crete and it was another hilarious failure but like they uh they deployed them they landed and they were immediately

ambushed by dutch soldiers every single time i think i've heard about that actually yeah it's pretty great righteously owned each time it pretty much came down to uh the dutch were winning um like in a straight up fight the well i mean winning is a strong term because obviously the german the germans have endless amounts of reserves they can pour into in the tiny netherlands if they want um but really what was happening is that the germans accepted like expected to kind of did what they did to austria which was just kind of walk in. Fucking flatten it, yeah. Because the Anschluss was like,

the Austrian military was given orders to resist the Germans, and then they were rescinded because they were afraid of the damage it would do, and knowing it was a lost cause, not to mention there were some not, like there's a powerful Nazi movement in Austria at the time. Not really.

They were expecting that the netherlands would be like look we know how this ends let's not have our cities be blown up and our people killed when they when then people realize like no we're i'm not playing this shit we're fighting like if you want if you want to take over our country we're gonna make you pay for it um and like the resistance pissed the germans off so badly they decided they would just resort to blanket war crimes uh they sent uh 90 planes to carpet bomb the city of rotterdam killing nearly a thousand civilians and making another 80 000 homeless uh in case that wasn't enough to scare the dutch into surrendering they threatened to do the exact same thing to every dutch city if they

did not surrender the dutch yeah it was like look we obviously can't beat yeah like we obviously can't beat you because you're being because you're like actually defending yourselves you fucking assholes so like we'll just destroy your country right we're gonna give up the pretense of even like being remotely fair in this war which is why i'm kind of fine with america hitting germany with the uno reverse card in a couple years um it's not like they hadn't earned it yeah like i'm not i'm not fond of carpet like strategic bombing or whatever but like it couldn't have happened to but to a worse person you know i'm saying just america pointing at nazi germany going we learned it from you scoreboard scoreboard as they firebombed dresden

um now the dutch army finally surrendered or at least part of it did other parts of the army refused and continued fighting alongside the french um deciding that the whole surrender thing didn't apply to them because you know fuck nazis fuck it yeah uh you know unfortunately as heroic as it is we all know how that story ends um but the fact was like the the the netherlands and a lot of the low countries and france are always maligned as being like oh the cowards they just surrendered like that's not what fucking happened right um and that's why i had to throw that in there and that's one of the reason why is like i've seen not historians but like just people um they're like i don't understand why all these uh all of the the resistance popped

up when like they didn't really resist the nazi invasions when like that's not what happened they're very very unhappy with being occupied by the germans right um so while all of this was happening uh the overstiegen family cared for the refugees on their barge, as well as took in people that were made homeless by the German bombs. How big was this barge? It was pretty fucking big. They could fit dozens of people in there. Maybe it wasn't super comfortable, but it was better than being blown up by Germans.

Yeah, I was picturing a barge like the size of i don't know like uh maybe a pickup truck or something like wider obviously but like not huge this sounds like it's pretty big garbage barge yeah yeah it's a garbage barge full of people fuck yeah um now remember like during during this time the oversteegans are very very openly skirting a possible trip to a concentration camp because they were hiding uh more more and more jews and of course remember their membership yeah their member like literal membership on the rolls of the local communist party uh which is like about the only thing they could have done that was almost as illegal as you know daring to be a jewish person yeah um but none of this made the family stop uh in fact they decided that

hiding people and being members of an organization that could very well get them killed wasn't risky enough they soon built their own printing press and began cranking out anti-nazi leaflets and handing them out around town that's fucking dope and the funniest part is they're like these were the the the sisters doing this, and the mom was helping. And they'd escape on bicycles before the Gestapo could show up to grab them. This is what Tumblr should be doing now, but isn't. Come on, Tumblr. Just escaping a bicycle-borne resistance.

There were one of a few working cells of something that could be considered a Dutch resistance. While armed groups did exist, at the beginning of the occupation, they were very rare. A reason for that were if you were a non-Jewish Dutch citizen, the occupation was pretty light-handed. And that was by design. The Nazis considered the Dutch people Aryans. And they wanted to incorporate them into this greater German Reich idea that they wanted. and they would they wanted to incorporate them into this greater german reich idea that they wanted um like they didn't think that the dutch to be subhuman in any way it's almost like this concept of aryan blood is totally arbitrary and made up but go on yeah it's almost like the races are stupid um uh and you know normally the germans would pretty much pillage countries

that they took over for resources um and like they this would happen eventually but like you know if you happen to be in eastern europe you were fucked uh everything like they would it would be like someone coming through and pulling the copper out of the walls in order to sell it they'd steal everything to fuel their war machine um but unfortunately being part of the quote-unquote german reich actually did good things for the netherlands if you happen yeah weren't there a bunch of the like labensborns camp set up in the netherlands uh i think some of them were the netherlands uh and some of them were um in like scan like the german scandinavian areas to keep it like away from the front line yeah yeah like because they wanted like good quote-unquote stock that's what i'm thinking

like okay so it's just so you can kidnap a bunch of like dutch women and force them to be sex slaves it's cool um you know unfortunately the laban's born program was a volunteer program. Oh, even better. Yeah, and most of them were German. Most of them were German women, but a lot of them some of them were not. So, one of the singers, this is total tangent, do you know one of the singers of ABBA was born in one of the

Lebensborn's camps? I did hear about that, and I wonder how they process that shit. Poorly, apparently. But, yeah. Through song? And like, and like i wonder how they process that shit but poorly apparently but yeah yeah and like it like their lives after the war were pretty pretty awful because everybody knew who they were and well like well yeah whoopsie doodle um that's what happens yeah it's not the kids fault but the kids take for it um yeah but yeah it's like it's that theory of like the little nazis which robert evans did a two-part series on recently and behind the bastards i highly recommend anybody who hasn't listened to it

to go listen to it but like it points out that most people in germany and the collaborators weren't nazis like uh they weren't well they weren't nazis in the idea of like i actually also really hate jews and i agree with all this weird aryan woo-woo that you're throwing around it was like right i care i care about the economy and suddenly there's all these jobs when it's because well all these jobs came up because you stole them from jewish people that could no longer legally own businesses or work. A lot of it was just like, this doesn't this doesn't threaten my status quo. So I'm OK with it.

Yeah. Like first they came for the communists. I said nothing because I wasn't a communist. You know that whole poem. But they like to strip out the first two lines. Can't imagine why. Yeah. Unfortunately, that'll be not be the last time that communists get fucked over for their hand in resistance and things like that in this episode.

Have fun. Yeah. But all this began to change. Because once the Netherlands is part of Germany, you could travel to Germany to work uh there's like a back and forth assuming you had permits and things like that like jobs and benefits popped up for you know a normal white non-communist in the netherlands uh but that began to change as the german war effort began to go south and the resource extraction of the netherlands kicked up and uh and again that happened uh when they started deporting jews from the netherlands um because for a while they didn't do that like that wasn't one of the

first things they did like there was obvious like the normal uh like nuremberg type laws that were applied were like you know there was obvious discrimination against jews but they weren't disappearing um and when that started, the Dutch got pissed, which led to a general strike against the Nazis. Oh, wow. Yeah, one of the more interesting bits of organizing that happened

in occupied Europe and one of the few that happened in German-occupied Europe. And soon the tides of war turned so badly, shortages occurred. The Nazis implemented rationing, which only pissed people off more. And then a man-made famine occurred as they stripped so much from the country, there was nothing left even for rations. It was a good time for man-made famines.

Just all around. Yeah, it seems to be popular in this day and age. Even more so in the Ukraine. That is when the local command yeah uh yeah that is when the local commander of the dutch resistance saw a group of teenage girls handling anti-nazi literature and followed them back to their house because that's normal that's totally normal thing for a grown man to do i have to point out this guy does a lot of suspect shit uh uh once he assured them he was not in fact a nazi spy he asked them to join his resistance cell um if you're wondering who hasn't heard that

from an older man you know hey hey baby girl you want to come join my resistance cell uh if you're wondering if he knew he was recruiting teenage girls into a violent partisan action, their age and appearance is actually the specific reason he was recruiting them. That makes it less weird. Yes. The Nazis had been cracking down on resistance cell actions, making it hard for them to freely move around. This was made up of largely military-aged males, and they were kind of easy to track down and stereotype. But the commander argued they would never suspect a couple of girls then age 14 and 16 of being members of the resistance. Ah, yes, they had yet to consider child soldiers.

Take that, Nazis. He argued that was the exact reason they hadn't been caught while handling out handing out their anti-nazi literature where like the gestapo couldn't possibly think two teenage girls on a bicycle were like scooby-dooing away from them and they're like god damn you kids um obviously the girls were excited about this uh but the commander refused to take them unless their mom consented which cool i guess he's the army yeah that's exactly how i got into the army yeah me too actually with the navy i love it i was one year older than the oldest sister and i also had to get my mom's

permission the long and cherished tradition of having your parents sign for you to go to war yeah uh trues and freddy's mom agreed and that's how a couple middle schoolers ended up in the dutch resistance still cooler than my mom yeah uh way cooler than my mom mom can i go join the the anti-fascist resistance fine but be home by dinner uh it was only after they agreed to join did they was did the uh local resistance commander tell them what he expected them to be doing instead of things also sounds like the army now this is fine yeah uh things like sabotaging railroads and bridges they would also learn how to fire a gun for the first time with the intent of deploying these teenage pipe hitters as assassins. Fuck yeah.

Trues remembers Freddy excitedly saying, quote, Well, I've never done that before, and I fucking hope not. You're 14 years old. Jesus. Freddy, I need you to shoot that fascist in the head. I've never

done that before, but okay. First time for everything i guess yeah i guess when you're raised on a communist barge you like warm up the shooting nazis a lot better than most people um that barge life somehow the way freddie describes all this going down is darkly hilarious in an interview with vice before her death freddie was asked how she joined the resistance and she simply said, quote, a man wearing a hat came to the door and asked my mother if he could have us, and she said yes,

and she was okay with it. Huh. Yeah, just a very official hat or whatever. Freddie assumed that they were joining some secret army, but instead they joined a group of seven males in the woods. And they were the only girls. This is how weird cults start also. I should point out.

This is a plot point in several Stephen King novels. Yeah, as long as they don't go down to the sewer, they'll be fine. It's fine. Yeah. They were taught how to use a pistol and how to march around in the woods for some reason. Because I guess even a secret anti-Nazi resistance army has done bullshit they have to do. Like, imagine, like, yeah, I'm here to stop the Nazis from killing all the Jews in my country. Ah, yes, but first you must learn drill and ceremony.

If you can't march in step, how can you ever kill a Nazi? Yeah. real dumb. Now, the group got their start by doing simple things like shuffling Jewish adults and children to new houses, as well as stealing ID cards so they could pass themselves off as non-Jewish folk if they

were caught or under suspicion of being Jewish. And after a while, the resistance decided to deploy these new girl recruits in the most stereotypical way possible as a honey trap. God damn it. Where's Chris Hansen

when you need him? Adolf, I need you to have a seat. Do you want to tell me why you do you want to tell me why you came here do you want to tell me why you came here today what's in the bag what were you planning on doing with this she just said that she wanted a friend

I was coming over to hang out with her is that why you brought your armband Adolf I mean that's not even that much of a joke because adolf hitler had sex with his underage cousin right no for people who are unaware and then when he would when he would not date her because that was considered uncouth to date your cousin in germany she shot herself with his service pistol uh yeah not because she was like 15 it was because they were related yes yeah definitely um and like directly related it wasn't like this is my sixth

cousin removed or whatever which was still common we have the same grandfather yes um now uh they decided that because trues was the older of the two, that she would be chosen. And she looked older. Don't get too comfortable because that would change too. They were sent off into town and it would hang out at the local bar, which sounds like a pretty rad bar if they don't even card you. I guess when you grow up, everybody knows of that one bar that doesn't card. So if you're slightly older looking,

you could get in. I was one of those kids in high school that everybody said that failed a couple years because I could grow a full beard. And I wouldn't say I looked 21, but whatever. Just looked like a 13-year-old with a beard. It's fine. Yeah, it wasn't a good beard either.

It was like this scraggly, gross um uh so what once in the local bar she waited for a nazi soldier to hit on her and then after a little bit she's like she asked if the soldier would like to go on a walk in the woods oh i mean oh we say this is weird but this would work in literally any military town yeah right now right now like you could go down to a well if any bars were open in honolulu wait for someone with a bad haircut to walk in talk to them for all of five seconds like you want to go walk on the beach and you could fucking do this like if you if you were like because i assume like soldiers are soldiers throughout time right like they found murals on the wall and roman garrisons of like soldiers are soldiers throughout time right like they found murals on the wall and roman garrisons of like soldiers carving dicks so like yeah like i have a hard time believing a german

soldier occupying the netherlands it's literally any different than any fucking soldier in the united states army right now and as a yeah like no yeah when when i was in kadena i was in kadena in okinawa for a while and they literally had to tell us not to hit on people at the base exchange because they were probably high schoolers. It doesn't even have to be a bar. You do not have to be drunk. It can be literally anywhere. If a young woman tells a military member, like, hey, you want to go on a walk? It can be on base.

You're going to get laid. You probably shouldn't though yeah you definitely should not like i drew so i joined i was 17 years old uh like i said before and when i got to my first duty station they told me specifically do not pick up high schoolers we understand that it's legal but you for you but you cannot fucking do it and the first thing i thought i was like well yeah of yeah, of course not. That's disgusting. But then I realized that I graduated high school a year early. So there's people in my age still in high school. Joe is 17, and he's a man, damn it.

Right. So people are like, ugh. I've seen accounts online of people like, wow, I can't believe those German soldiers fell for this 15, 16-year-old. Is it very gross? Yes. Is it very much still happening? Also, yes. This is happening in Fayetteville as we record.

Right fucking now. But, you know, she asked for the German soldier to like, hey, do you want to go on a walk to the woods? And of course it worked. You know, it was bad. So, they lure them back to the woods.

They weren't the trigger people yet. I was going to say, they've got all these adult men who could do the traumatic act of shooting a Nazi in the head for them. Yeah, and that's how it starts. Trues leads them back into the woods. And then she picks up her pace and disappears into the foliage and then the male members come out and she said the only thing she heard was a gunshot the distance

so what's freddy doing the whole time just like watching just hanging out yeah i guess i don't i i guess in a non-creepy way i'd say they're in ambush but yes they're just creeping it like probably i wonder like did anybody tell her not to have sex with the nazi like she's like maybe she's that won't realize with the bar oh like where where's the line here yeah like what if what if her ambush

never shows up how far is she supposed to take it oh yeah yeah um uh freddie later said that the men hid the body so well that the dead nazi is probably still out in the woods yeah cool that's where you deserve to be buried in an unmarked grave uh though like soon the girls would take part in even more direct missions one of the things that the the resistance really liked doing was blowing up railroad tracks and bridges which they both did it's very satisfying to handle yeah they both learned how to handle like explosives and stuff i assume they're both very good at it because they didn't die um another thing they did was to break into nazi rationing offices and steal ration books and distribute them to the endless amounts uh like to distribute all these ration books to people

so like it would completely fuck up the nazi system, and then people would be able to eat. But soon they would be pulling triggers. The sisters were joined by another teenage girl and socialist, Honeyshaft, who would become... Honeyshaft. Yeah. She would become the celebrity of the group, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. And they would create something of a not-leg drink yet hit squad uh schaft was a was a law student that had dropped out of school because so at the time in germany uh or the greater reich whatever you want to call the occupied territories we don't have to give it the appropriate title you do not in fact have to hand

it to the greater german reich so if you were to go to college you had to sign a pledge of loyalty to germany and she refused to do so um like it's one of the reasons why like the white rose group dropped out of college because they refused to swear loyalty to the nazi party a lot of our nuclear scientists that came to the u.s were the same same yeah so she joined uh like so now that like well i guess i can't go to law school and so i guess i'll be a hit man like you do a career yeah normal career um i mean that's my backup if podcasting falls through i mean you know it's it's an open business you might be a little less successful than a bunch of hot dutch teenagers but dream big hey there's someone out there for

everybody all right there's somebody's kink might be a giant hairy Armenian man and we're not here to kink shame them. But then you're going to find that one person and then you have to murder them because you're an assassin now. Fuck, you're right. This is a self-defeating plot. So Haneshaft joined the Oversteagans

in conducting what they called liquidations, which is a much cooler word to be used for the word assassination. What's coming out of a mouth of a 17 year old girl. Like, uh, we're going to go commit liquidations now, mom. Bye.

Uh, it's deeply weird. Um, uh, Freddie was apparently the best of the group, uh, as she was the youngest. Okay.

Yeah. And she looked out of her And she went out of her way to look even younger. She said that she put her hair up in braids, which is a normal children's hairstyle in the Netherlands. I don't know enough about girls' hairstyles

to say. It's going to be the equivalent of pigtails and a schoolgirl uniform. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Just cartoonishly childish. If I saw an adult person with pigtails and a schoolgirl uniform yeah that's a good way to put it yeah it's pretty much childish like if i saw an adult person with pigtails i would think them to be i don't know much younger than the the age that they're supposed to be so yeah her goal was to make herself look even younger and more inconspicuous um because she didn't want to draw attention for what she was about to do next. Uh,

so did she just carry around like a giant lollipop, like a giant strike lollipop, pigtails and like a teddy bear. Um, so while looking the most inconspicuous and young as she could, she jumped on her pedal bike right around town until she could find it. A drunk soldier, like wandering off on their own, away from everyone else. And then she would shoot them in the fucking back of the head.

And then speed off on her sick heavy. Picture her on, like, a fucking big wheel. Just, like, the fucking, it's the most Dutch drive-by on Earth. Yeah. And, I mean, this is this is all like the funniest fucking shit like this is the funniest hit i've ever talked about on the show i think um but what happened next is equally insane uh the girls would hit up the town bars and wait for germans to hit on them like they would before like now that they were really good at this they knew how to hustle better like when um when they were when she was when freddie was riding around town and

shooting people she didn't really care who she shot like normally that the drunk soldiers wandering home were like you know lower enlisted ncos whatever because like officers would have a car come pick them up uh so like they decided to up their game they took they took they took this amateur shit and went pro so now in the bar they would shoot down lower ranking soldiers and hold off until someone with higher rank tried to spit game at them again just still happens yeah yeah 100 like i'm not gonna go home with a fucking pfc i'm gonna wait for like a staff sergeant to hit on me or whatever at least e6 or above only get the fuck out yeah you had me at tricare um now once a high enough ranking soldier normally not like a junior officer

or a high ranking nco would hit on them they would you know play the normal you wanted to go take a walk move um that they would lure them out into the woods and shoot them and bury them in a shallow grave they did this multiple times a night oh my god and nobody fucking realized like hey anybody who leaves with one of those three hot teenagers doesn't come back you know damn well that still wouldn't talk someone out of it like say you're like say you're in a bar in killeen outside of fort hood and like someone's like hey i heard if you like if you told any like sailor or whatever that you served with like hey any like anybody who's gone home with one those three

girls like nobody's ever seen them again and someone's like i can change him i can yeah yeah there were people in honolulu we used to get told all the time that they were like chinese spies i don't know if that's true i don't fucking care but there's always like all right don't go don't go on random dates with chinese women you meet in bars in Honolulu. And every fucking week, someone would be like, man, I met this really hot chick in Honolulu. She's from Hong Kong. It's weird that she kept scanning my cell phone for things. She was really into me.

She didn't ask me what I did for work. Yeah, she made me fucking a Faraday cage. It's fine. It'll protect you from the 5G. Yeah, so they hit multiple places up a night. Just STIs at speeds you wouldn't believe. Though the Germans

were not their only targets. The hit squad would also be deployed against Dutch collaborators they would hunt down and shoot people who did business with the Nazis people who were suspected of turning over their Jewish neighbors were otherwise helping the Nazis though their real favorite target was

members of the Dutch SS who they saw as below human oh fuck those yeah they wouldn't even try to hit on them they would like break into their homes and kill them in their sleep they don't even get to die thinking they're gonna get laid fuck those yeah in one situation true said that she was walking back from the grocery store when she saw a dutch ss soldier who's rumored to have murdered a couple's child in retribution for aiding a jewish person even though it was not an organized hit she dropped what she was doing and shot the man down the middle of the street just pulled a gun out of her bag and killed a man like i was gonna go pick up some poke at the corner store but now

i have to gun down this fucking nazi god damn it for people who are unaware i don't think that there's any poke in the netherlands uh but there should be but there should be uh now i'm gonna go to after we're done recording i'm gonna go get poke they're gonna get poke for lunch though they would not it's the one joy this island has to offer okay and uh kalua pig is where it's at um if i don't you see and that's why within two years of being on this island i'm going to have a heart attack yeah it's a tradition uh though the the group would not accept every mission in one situation the commander of the resistance ordered them to kidnap and murder the children of a nazi official and they refused yo no they had no problem they are both women and

children they aren't going to kill other women or children other resistance people were not so resistant to that mission uh it was considered like an equal trade because the nazis were doing that to them as well uh i i will say i i disagree with the murdering of children uh whether or not they're nazis Are you going to take a hard stand on child murder? Bold. Yeah. They had no problem with murdering adults all day long. Even like this, like the spouses of Nazis were perfectly fine targets for them. But honey argued that they started offing kids.

They're no better than the Nazis. And the commander actually canceled the mission at the request, which probably means they just gave it to somebody else and then they did it uh but sure sure sure we're not gonna kill those kids hey honey won't do it we need you to go kill those kids and someone's like yeah all right i'll kill those kids whatever kill the fuck out of those children uh the team was incredibly effective but the nazis never really caught on to what they were doing. Not really. They instead assumed that teams of men were kidnapping soldiers and killing them, which, to be fair, was also happening. But the Teenage Hit Squad was so effective, it allowed the rest of the resistance of the area to focus on operations like blowing up railways, like straight up military actions while the girls stepped nazi bodies in the woods it's when you sexism so hard you refuse to admit that the woman with a gun in

your face is gonna kill you yeah um unfortunately they finally went one step too far or at least honey did unlike the overstiegen sisters honey stuck out because she had bright red hair um she was witnessed leaving that obviously a communist yeah she was so communist it grew through her roots uh she but also she's just a soulless ginger um she was witnessed leaving the scene of a of a hit of like just they just saw a girl with red hair uh like leaving the scene of a murder and soon like every fucking nazi in the netherlands is on the lookout for the girl with the red hair and was places like the

most local wanted person in the area and it would have been hard for Nazis to find her based on the information alone they also had spies in the resistance when a member of the resistance was wounded and brought in what they thought would be a friendly hospital they had no idea

it was just staffed by Nazi spy nurses. Yes, Nazi spy nurses were a thing that existed. Nazi spy nurses. Alright. Sure. Anyway, while treating the wounded man, they overheard Schaaf's name and managed to put the two and two together. Soon, Nazi authorities kicked

open the door of her parents' house and arrested them, throwing them in a concentration camp. This, however, still did not stop the team from doing their mission, open the door of her parents house and arrested them throwing them in a concentration camp this however still did not stop the team from doing their mission though it did force Shaf to finally dye her hair black oh wait so she wasn't home when that happened oh right

they're just trying to get to her through her parents like when those like hey if you come turn yourself in we'll let your parents go which one honey is smart enough to know jokes on you she's a teenage girl. She fucking hates her parents. Those motherfuckers would let me pierce my nose or whatever. Also, I think

everybody in the resistance was smart enough at this point to know if we turn ourselves in, you're just going to kill all of us. And my parents do not want me to turn myself in to be tortured. I would assume. Also, they told me this was just a phase. The communist insurg me this was just a phase. The communist insurgent thing is just a phase.

She'll grow out of it and be a nice conservative one day. Yeah, but Schaft eventually took a mission away from the Overstiegen sisters, joining with another resistance member and smuggling copies of the local communist newspaper, what was called The Truth, when they were stopped at a military checkpoint her and her partner were both arrested and subjected to horrible amounts of torture um and like they weren't fully aware that it was shoft because like she refused to give their

name um she died yeah like it's like outsmarting the fucking teens from Scooby-Doo here. And during the torture, Schaft never broke her silence, but her partner did. Divulging the Nazis had finally captured the girl with the red hair. So Schaft was brought to the local sand dudes outside of Bowman Dahl, I believe the town is called, and shot by two men. But they only managed to wound

her. Wounded? Schaft apparently said I shoot better before they finished her off that's pretty bad it reminds me of uh like I fuck I forget what movie is like how you do is like good enough to fuck your mother or something like that it's like yeah she got shot

by two men with rifles and then like on her deathbed her last words were I shoot better and then they finished her off this happened on April 17th 1945 only three weeks before the liberation of the Netherlands yeah

at the end of the war officials found the remains of 422 members of the resistance who'd been executed at the dunes 421 men and one woman she was the only woman who was executed there um badass now the overstegan sisters survived the war though they were largely shunned by the state due to the fact that they were communists um because of course uh can't fucking win yeah and like honey is the person that you see movies made after uh even though she was a communist as well but i think because she died before she could continue to talk about being probably yeah um nice though trues brought their story to light

in the 1980s uh when her book not then not now published, Trues ended up becoming the face of the team with Schaft becoming the martyr. Trues did speaking tours and lectures, and she was eventually named Righteous Among Nations, an honor bestowed upon non-Jews who put their lives at risk to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.

She was also awarded the Officer of the Order of the Orange Nassau or Nassau, I think. I'm not sure. An award given also awarded the officer of the order of the orange. So, or NASA, I think, I'm not sure, uh, an award given out by the queen of the Netherlands, a Royal family. I did not know existed.

And that's the best kind of Royal family. Really? The ones that I, I don't agree with giving to the, the frothing hordes. Um, now finally, after all of this,

Freddie was awarded a medal by the prime minister in 2014 for her service jesus better late than never you fucking assholes um truce said truce finally died in in 2016 and freddie in 2018 um now before her death freddie finally addressed the question that people have been asking her since the end of the war how many nazis did you kill and that's really not the question i was asking but it's a good one and she answered quote you shouldn't ask a soldier how many people he shot yes yes actually yeah like that's like one of the one of the more interesting things is like you know everybody always treated them as like this weird side story to the greater you know uh world war ii story or the greater resistance story and the two sisters

never saw themselves as anything other than soldiers um well that guy with the fancy hat recruited them off the barge so as far as they knew they were officially in the army and like who knows what um honey would be saying if she had lived until 2018. But like, you know, they were they were absolutely soldiers. They just happened to ride a pedal bike into battle and honey trap motherfuckers. Yeah, that's like one of one of my favorite partisan stories from World War Two, because you never see it coming. You never see the 14 year old with a fucking handgun on a huffy. Fucking bicycle.

Yeah. Pulling a gun out of her flower basket to shoot in the back of the fucking head. Like, oh, look, a teenager with flowers. What's she gonna say? Fuck Nazis. She's like dropping bodies in the street. Kids are alright. Kids are gonna be fine, it turns out.

Now, Sarah, we do a thing on the show called questions from the legion and we have a very special question i think i think you know what question the legion wants to want the answers to joe so for people who are unaware if you donate to the show you get access to our show discord and like the the discord itself has kind of created its own in jokes um and like bits that i'm very good at making up stupid bits it turns out and and one of those is the idea of consensual cannibalism um are you okay if somebody says it's fine with you eating them do you think that's okay you got no okay all right

you have to set it up you have to set it up I don't know how to set this up properly this is not a question like otherwise people think you want to kill folks and then eat their flesh and I don't want to kill anybody are you saying like you're more of like being you're okay being like a human vulture

so like like And I don't want to kill anybody. Are you saying you're okay being a human vulture? I have no idea how this guy's talking either. Ooh, dead body. You gonna eat that? No, Sarah, nobody's gonna eat that. If somebody you knew like all right let's so nobody can accuse me of trying to steal limbs from people if i were to have like my leg amputated because i got in a car wreck but but the flesh wasn't diseased or anything and for some reason queens and eva decided like queen's hospital and eva decided to let me my limb, and I barbecued my leg meat

and offered and offered you a taste of my barbecued leg flesh that I had provided consensually. Would you turn it down? Yes, I would turn that down. Why? Why? I don't want to... I'm healthy

enough? My doctor said I should eat as much long pig as I used to. Oh, yeah, whatever. You just said you've been chowing on Kahlua pork. It's short pig. It's fine. I'm at least as healthy as a pig. That's your new podcast tagline, at least as healthy as a pig.

I'll stand by that uh then like we will close out this episode with what i call the plug zone which is a zone that we rarely use anymore uh because we don't really have new people on the show often so sarah you have a podcast that's because you hate women it's fine actually that's why i didn't vote for warren it's because i hate women um sarah you have you have a podcast that's because you hate women it's fine actually that's why i didn't vote for warren it's because i hate women um sarah you have you have a podcast consider this an area to to plug your podcast well uh yeah man i not know how to do the like self plug i'll do it for nate because nate's been working with me and he's very kind and he deserves more money um yeah i started a podcast called it came from the sea it's me and another veteran friend of mine named sam and occasionally another veteran friend of mine named dan talk about things that are not related to the military uh it's mostly ocean science um sometimes it's a little bit of like ocean policy and ocean

politics as well and it's pretty cool i hear yeah i mean i i think it's very cool simply because most of the time like voices from stem that you hear are like dudes talking about blockchain and shit even like a lot of the ocean podcasts that i found are just just dudes with big lib energy and i'm not saying like stem needs to be a leftist space, but STEM kind of needs to be a leftist space because a lot of people are really into the science and don't like to think about the implications. Yeah, the same thing could be said for history. And, you know, it's nice seeing. I mean, it's coming from the opposite spectrum. the opposite spectrum it's nice seeing people that work in research and stem and stuff like that who like haven't completely divorced themselves from humanity uh like what like it seems like what a

lot of schools want stem majors to be is like weird psycho scientists that with no liberal arts education so you end up like losing your empathy and humanity um and like that's obviously not what's happening here so it's like it's like it's all those people like oh you shouldn't get a liberal arts degree you should everybody should major in stem as you cut away like history and literature and everything else no yeah i think it is really important because we so I. Yeah. I graduated right when the George Floyd protest took off and there was kind of this like schism in the College of the Environment at the school I went to where there were people who were like, no, we need to pay attention to the like to the Black Lives Matters movement because it matters in STEM, too. And then there were the old guard that were just like, oh, no, we just ignore race and it's fine.

Just just don't talk about it. And it's fine. That's the most uniquely. It might not be uniquely, but it's like the most American stem response I've ever heard of. Mm hmm. Yeah. But Sarah, thanks for coming on the show. You can get all of this leftist ocean podcasts and more over at the It Came From the Sea. And normally we end the show with like a neat quippy thing from our episode.

We're like, until next time, don't do this. But I don't think I can legally say until next time, ride around your pedal bike and shoot Nazis. Until next time, buy a barge and turn it into a commune. There you go. Buy a barge and turn it into a commune. There you go. Buy a barge, turn it into a commune. Solid. And we'll see you next time.