Never to be overlooked again: Hannie Schaft, resistance fighter during World War II
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
It is April 17, 1945. Two Nazi officers let a 24-year-old woman walk ahead of them towards the sand dunes along the Dutch coast. She wears a blue skirt and a red and blue sweater.
She is Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, but you might not immediately recognize her: her trademark red hair is dyed black.
As she walks, one of the officers fires his gun at the back of her head. The bullet ricocheted off her skull and did not kill her. The other officer then shoots her, also in the back of the head, this time from closer range.
This is how Hannie Schaft died, a few weeks before the end of World War II in Europe. She had been arrested about a month earlier and sent to a prison in Amsterdam, during a random check in Haarlem, her hometown in the Netherlands, when she was found with a gun, illegal newspapers and resistance movement pamphlets, in her pannier. At first it was not clear to the Nazis who they had arrested, but it soon became clear that it was the woman they were looking for, the woman known as the ‘girl with the red hair’, who had shot and killed several Nazis. and employees.
She was born Jannetje Johanna Schaft on September 16, 1920, into a middle-class leftist family, of Aafje Talea (Vrijer) Schaft, a housewife with a progressive streak, and Pieter Schaft, a teacher. Hannie, a name she took when she became a resistance fighter, had an older sister, Annie, who had died of diphtheria. As a result, she had a protective childhood, says Liesbeth van der Horst, director of the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, which has an exhibition about Schaft with her glasses, a version of the weapon she carried and a photo of her and her. a fellow resistance fighter.
“She was a serious, principled girl,” said Van der Horst in an interview. “She was a bookworm.”
She added that despite being shy, Schaft was “proud of her red hair” and how it helped her stand out.
After high school in Haarlem, Schaft studied law at the University of Amsterdam, hoping to become a human rights lawyer. She was a student when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, plunging the country into war and targeting Jewish citizens. Although Schaft was not Jewish, the occupation set her on the path to political activism.
“As the Nazi regime’s policies grew harsher against Jews, its own sense of moral outrage grew stronger,” said Buzzy Jackson, the author of “To Die Beautiful” (2023), a novel about Schaft’s life. “She started wanting to do more.”
She started out as a volunteer for the Red Cross, rolling bandages and making first aid kits for soldiers and helping German refugees. When the Nazi regime forced all students in the Netherlands to swear allegiance to the occupiers, Schaft, like many others, refused and had to drop out.
She maintained the friendships she had formed with two Jewish girls in college, helping them obtain fake IDs to evade Nazi checkpoints and hiding them as the Nazis continued to deprive Jewish citizens of their basic rights.
By the end of the war, more than 100,000 people—nearly 75 percent of all Dutch Jews, the highest percentage of any Western European country—would be deported to concentration camps and murdered.
The resistance, van der Horst said, was not one organized movement, but rather a jumble of overlapping networks.
Schaft joined the Resistance Council, a communist group, where she met two sisters, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who became her good friends and would survive the war. (In March, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation known that it had found two letters that Truus Oversteegen had written to a friend, in which she mentioned Schaft.)
The armed resistance was an extremely dangerous undertaking, in which many fighters were arrested and executed. It’s unclear how many attacks can be attributed to Schaft, but researchers say there were at least six.
In June 1944, Schaft and a fellow resistance fighter, Jan Bonekamp (with whom she reportedly had a romantic relationship), attacked a high-ranking police officer for murder. As the officer got on his bike to go to work, Schaft shot him in the back, knocking him off the bike. Bonekamp finished the kill, but was injured in the process. He died shortly afterwards. Schaft managed to escape on her own bicycle and that is how she did her resistance work.
Schaft was also involved in the killing or wounding of a baker known for betraying people, a hairdresser who worked for Nazi intelligence, and another Nazi police officer.
Before confronting her goals, Schaft put on makeup — including lipstick and mascara — and styled her hair, Jackson said. In one of the few direct quotes attributed to Schaft, she explained her reasoning to Truus Oversteegen: “I shall die clean and beautiful.”
Dawn Skorczewski, a lecturer at Amsterdam University College, said Schaft’s involvement in the resistance was special because few women in the movement took up arms.
“It’s unusual for a woman her age to start killing Nazis in alleyways,” she said in a video call.
Once the Nazis went looking for “the girl with the red hair,” as she was described on their most wanted list, Schaft disguised herself by dying her hair black and wearing wire-frame glasses.
The Nazis raided the home of Schaft’s parents and arrested them, hoping she would turn herself in, but they were released nine months later, according to the Resistance Museum.
After Schaft was caught, she confessed to her resistance activities. But there is no evidence that she gave the Nazis information about her fellow resistance fighters.
After the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945, Schaft’s body was exhumed from a mass grave with hundreds of other people the Nazis had executed. She was the only woman among them.
Later that year she was buried in the Erebegraafplaats in the seaside resort of Bloemendaal, together with hundreds of other resistance fighters. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands attended the service, according to documents in the National Archives.
The name of Schaft is well known in the Netherlands. Streets and schools have been named after her, and in 1981 she was the subject of a scripted movie called “The Girl With the Red Hair.” (Janet Maslin panned the movie in The New York Times, writing that Schaft’s story was “undoubtedly more exciting in reality than on screen”.) An Amsterdam-based post production company plans to polish and re-release the original film for the Netherlands Film Festival in September.
Her story continues to be uncovered by investigators – a challenging task as resistance fighters worked undercover and often left behind little evidence.
As Jackson, the author of “To Die Beautiful,” noted, “The reason we know about Anne Frank is because she left a diary.”
Schaft, on the other hand, made it a point not to put anything in writing. “That goes for most people in the resistance,” Jackson said. “There aren’t many records to look at.”