There were very few Dutch who defied the Nazi occupiers; this is not to judge because I was never in that situation, and I wouldn’t know what I would have done. However, it is a fact that there were only a few who offered Resistance.
Hannie Schaft was one of those few. Born Jannetje Johanna (Jo) Schaft on 16 September 1920. She became known as “the girl with the red hair” (Dutch: het meisje met het rode haar). Her secret name in the resistance movement was “Hannie.”
On March 1, 1945, Hannie Schaft and her friend Truus Oversteegen executed NSB police officer Willem Zirkzee in Haarlem. On March 15, they wounded Ko Langendijk, a hairdresser from IJmuiden who worked for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), a Nazi intelligence agency.
Hannie was eventually arrested at a military checkpoint in Haarlem on March 21, 1945, while distributing the illegal communist newspaper de Waarheid (literally ‘The Truth’), which was a cover story. She was transporting secret documentation for the Resistance. She worked closely with Anna A.C. Wijnhoff. The Dutch police brought her to a prison in Amsterdam. After a lengthy interrogation, torture, and solitary confinement, Schaft was identified by her former colleague, Anna Wijnhoff, by the roots of her red hair.
On April 17, 1945, Hanna Shaft was executed by Dutch Nazi officials. Although there had been an agreement between the occupier and the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (Dutch Resistance) to stop executions, she was shot dead three weeks before the end of the war in the dunes of Overveen, near Bloemendaal. Two men, Mattheus Schmitz and Maarten Kuiper, a Dutch policeman, took her to the execution site. Schmitz shot her in the head at close range. However, the bullet only grazed Schaft. She is said to have allegedly told her executioners: Ik schiet better! (“I shoot better!), and Kuiper delivered a final shot to her head. After the war, the court sentenced Kuiper to death.
The officials buried Hannie Schaft in a shallow grave in the dunes. On November 27, 1945, the government reinterred her body for a state funeral at the Dutch Honorary Cemetery in Bloemendaal. Dutch government members and the royal family attended the ceremony, including Queen Wilhelmina, who referred to Hannie Schaft as “the symbol of the Resistance.”
Sources
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21465/hannie-schaft
https://www.tracesofwar.com/sights/3571/Hannie-Schaft-Memorial.htm
History of Sorts 
Leave a comment