Hannie Schaft(1920 — 1945)

Hannie Schaft was nicknamed “the girl with the red hair” (het meisje met het rode haar) by the Germans, who were actively hunting for her. To throw them off the trail during her missions, she dyed her distinctive red hair black and wore glasses, but her natural color ultimately betrayed her at the moment of her arrest.

A law student in Amsterdam, Hannie refused to sign the declaration of loyalty that the Nazis imposed on students in 1943. This refusal ended her studies and pushed her permanently into the underground and armed resistance.

Hannie often operated alongside the sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, two young resistance fighters. Together, they would sometimes lure Nazi officers or collaborators out of bars before gunning them down, extremely dangerous operations carried out by women under the age of 25.

Arrested at a checkpoint on 21 March 1945 while transporting underground newspapers, Hannie was executed on 17 April 1945, barely three weeks before the liberation of the Netherlands. According to the account that has come down to us, a first shooter only wounded her, and she is said to have shouted “I shoot better than you” before being finished off.

In 1951, the memory of Hannie Schaft became a political issue: the annual commemoration organized by former communist resistance fighters was banned and supervised by the army at the height of the Cold War. Yet Queen Wilhelmina had described her as a “symbol of the resistance.”