Dan Snow's History Hit - Nazi's Most Wanted: Assassin Hannie Schaft

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Known among the Nazis as "the girl with the red hair," Hannie Schaft was a resistance fighter so deadly that Adolf Hitler personally ordered her capture. She was a 24-year-old Dutch student when the Nazi forces occupied the Netherlands in 1940. Fuelled by a desire to protect her country, Hannie became an integral part of the Dutch Resistance, at a time when speaking out was dangerous and resistance could cost lives, Hannie displayed unyielding courage and determination. She and other women fighters were able to transport weapons in bicycle baskets, plant bombs and eventually lure Nazi officials and conspirators into honeytraps before assassinating them, as most didn't believe women were capable of committing such acts. She was eventually caught, tortured and executed.Her life and bravery were extraordinary and historian and historical novelist Buzzy Jackson joins Dan to tell Hannie's incredible story. Her life is the subject of Buzzy's new novel 'The Girl with the Red Hair.'Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreDiscover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Harnie Schaft was a teenager. She was a 19-year-old student when the Germans invaded Holland in the spring of 1940. It was the end of the world as she knew it. Soon, she was unable to continue her studies, and she decided to shelter Jewish friends in her parents' house and join the Dutch resistance. Alongside an incredibly brave group of young men and women, they conducted targeted assassinations and sabotage. She became

infamous in Holland. She was put on the most wanted list by the occupying Nazi authorities. To tell us more about Harnie Schaaf, here is Dr. Buzzy Jackson. She got her PhD in history from Berkeley and is now a historical novelist. She spent six years researching Honeyshaft for a new novel, The Girl with the Red Hair. It's quite the tale, and you're going to have to stick around to the end to see how it works out. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. Enjoy. Thanks for coming on the pod, Buzzy.

Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Tell me, was there anything in this young woman's early life that marked her out as someone who would be a hero of the resistance? Well, that's the funny thing about Hanne Schaaf. Her early life marked her out to be maybe just what she wanted to be, which was a lawyer originally. She was quiet, studious, kind of shy. But I will say she was always interested in justice and I think what we would now refer to as human rights. She talked about this a lot with her parents over dinner. Her parents were pretty socially progressive and interested in politics. And everything in her life, really, up until the time she went to law

school, was focused on becoming a lawyer for the League of Nations. Sadly, the League of Nations collapsed the year before she started law school and just before the Germans invaded the Netherlands. So eventually, she had to shelve those dreams. So she's growing up in Harlem. The idea that one day she would experience occupation, tyranny, atrocities just must have been so far from her mind as she was growing up in that pretty lovely setting. Yeah, I agree. I mean, she grew up in a pretty middle class home. Her sister unfortunately died of diphtheria when she was quite young. And I think that in a way, ironically, that was kind of the biggest fear that she and her family had growing up is that maybe they might lose another child to a disease.

Ironically, her parents were very protective of her when she was growing up because they had already lost a child. And so a lot of her family and friends later would say one of the things they remembered about Hani as a little girl was how overprotective her parents were. things they remembered about Hani as a little girl was how overprotective her parents were, scared of her getting a cold, getting any kind of sickness in case something bad would happen to her. Well, something bad happened in the spring of 1940. The Germans invaded the Netherlands and Netherlands fell within two days. What was her first experience of war of occupation? You know, I think her first experience was similar to, you know, many of the people in the Netherlands at that time, which was the Germans came into the Netherlands in a little bit of a different way than they came into some other countries.

There was no Kristallnacht kind of shock and awe campaign, certainly not against Jews initially. And I think, you know, the Germans wanted to fold in the Dutch as a kind of little sibling of the German Reich. They saw the Dutch as people who were like them. And if they came in in kind of a subtle way, they hoped that the Dutch population would just gradually come around to their way of thinking and join the cause. So what is it with Hany? Why did she just absolutely not come around to the cause? Was it just this upbringing you mentioned, justice? And what does she do? Well, I mean, that was one of the reasons I was so fascinated by her is because she starts out as this very ordinary person with ordinary kind of goals. She starts out in law school and at law

school, crucially, she meets two people who will really change her life. And that's Sonia Frank and Feline Polak, who were two girls her own age, so around 19, 20, and they were Jewish. They were probably the first Jewish friends she had had. And the main thing to her was not that they were Jewish, they were just her, probably her first best friends. They were all in law school together. And, you know, at a certain point, I think Hani started to realize that things were changing and getting a lot worse for Sonia and Feline than they were for Hani. Certain things were happening to Sonia and Feline's families and certain kind of pressure on them. And in fact, at a certain point, Sonia and Feline were kicked out of school because they were Jewish and Hani actually taught them classes after her own classes

would go over to their house and teach them what they had been missing. But this started to really wear on Hani, obviously. But it was really in 1943 when the Germans finally demanded that every student in the Netherlands sign a loyalty oath to the Nazi Party. And that would require that not only they swear fealty to the Nazi Party, but that they would also join the German military at the end of their school service. To the great credit of 75 to 80 percent of Dutch students, Hani and others refused to sign the loyalty oath. And the consequence was that they were kicked out of school. So at that point, Hani is about 22 years old. Literally everything she's worked for in her young life up to this point

is now out the window as a possibility. And I think it was a real wake up call for her that things were about to get very, very bad for her friends, Sonia and Feline. And at that point, she persuaded them to go back to Harlem and hide in her parents' home. And that's also when she joined the resistance. How do you join the resistance? Presumably there isn't like a storefront, right? So like, what do you, how can you be sure that you're not, there's going to be double agents? Like, how does that work? Yeah. I mean, I was curious about that too. And it seems like her path to the resistance was somewhat typical in the

sense that she started out not necessarily working for the resistance, but while still in college doing volunteer work for like the Red Cross, places like that, and really helping refugees. Because of course, Europe and the rest of the world was being overwhelmed with refugees, Jewish people, mostly from Germany, places like that, fleeing rising fascism. And I believe that it was there while doing that kind of, you know, smaller kind of work, like putting together medical kits for people and sending food and these kinds of resources to people who really needed it. I think there she met with people who are closer to the resistance. It's sort of one step closer, right? Because you're working and you're volunteering with people who are like-minded. As far as we know from the research, that was where

she met somebody who put her in touch with a resistance cell in Harlem, where she was going back to live. And that was the Rod Von Verset, the Council of Resistance. She joined up right away. And I think one of the things that probably made it possible for her to take action and become active so quickly was that there were already, unusually, two other young women in this cell. And that was Truce and Freddie Overstegen, who were around her age and were sisters. And they became close friends of hers. sisters, and they became close friends of hers. And these three young women have become the stuff of legend in the Netherlands and around the world. Tell me what kind of activities they got up to. Well, Truce and Freddie were from a different kind of background than Hani was, and they came from a really socially active family. But none of them had ever used a gun before, for example. And immediately they got weapons training that was intended partly for self-defense in case of emergency, but pretty quickly became clear that these three girls were willing to perform assassinations if needed against Nazi officers,

against Dutch collaborators, people they saw as the enemy, essentially. But that's not all they did. There were few women in the resistance relative to men, but they played a really crucial role because they were just unsuspecting. You know, the Germans would allow young women like this to go through checkpoints without being checked as rigorously as a man would. And that meant that the girls were asked to do things like transport weapons. And we're talking about, you know, guns hidden in the bicycle basket to do things like planting bombs and eventually assassinations as well, simply because they sort of passed under the radar of the Germans

who didn't really believe women were capable of doing these things and being sent out on these violent missions. How do we know, given how secret this stuff is, how do we know that they did assassinations and things? Partly because of the people who survived the war, who worked on this stuff, like, for example, Truce Overstiegen, who wrote a wonderful memoir that's hard to find in English about her work. And also we know because many of the assassinations that they performed were immediately met by retribution from the Germans, who would often pluck out just 10 random civilians and execute them in retaliation. So there was a very clear sort of connection. And it was one of the

things the girls had to weigh every time they took on or considered taking on one of these jobs was, we know people are going to be punished in retaliation. Is it worth it to take out this person? And that's why they chose those targets very carefully. Can you tell me about one particular episode or an assassination? Sure. yeah. One that she did, and I should say many of them were done as what we would think of as a drive-by shooting. But of course, when we talk about drive-by, we're talking about driving by on a bicycle. And usually a rickety bicycle, sometimes with wooden tires.

So this is a hard thing to do anyway. a hard thing to do anyway. Hani dresses up in kind of very cute dress, puts on makeup, makes herself look, you know, sort of a femme fatale kind of scenario. And Truce dressed up as a young man to allow them to sort of walk through the streets together and get very close to a bar where they knew Nazi officers would hang out at night and come out crucially drunk. They hid in an alleyway waiting for this specific Nazi officer to come out. When he did, Hani stepped forward, asked him for a light for a cigarette. He walks over and he's attracted to her, you know, and she flirts with him a little bit. She spoke fluent German, so that helped a lot. She kind of backs her way into this alley, so that helped a lot. She kind of backs her way into this alley, comes in close to him as if to give him a kiss, and then pulls her little pistol out of her purse and just shot him point blank in

the chest several times. And then Truce runs out from the shadows. They drag the body away and they run off. And that was their first assassination. It went perfectly. Nobody ever suspected that they did it. But over time, she got so good at this that occasionally people would see her fleeing the scene and did see her red hair. wild young woman with red hair in the Netherlands who's attacking his officers. And he sent out personally a message to his underlings in the Netherlands that they were to find this woman. She was the most wanted woman in the Netherlands and they didn't know her name. So they just called her the girl with the red hair. At least in Dan Snow's history, we're talking about a hero of the Dutch resistance honey shaft more after this I'm Tristan Hughes host of the ancients from history hit where twice a week every week we delve into our ancient past I'm joined by leading experts academics and authors who share incredible stories from our distant history

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Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Do we have any idea how many people they might have assassinated or how many jobs they carried out? There's probably around six that we can attribute to Hani Schaaf. And then Truce had her own jobs and also Jan Bonacombe, who was a very important figure in the resistance and in Hani's life, was responsible for yet more. Do we know what effect that had on her? Did she change? I mean, this is incredibly dangerous, incredibly traumatic, and sort of often killing people at close range. This is pretty terrifying. One of the things about and the challenges of researching Hanne Schaft is she did not leave a diary behind. And she didn't, of course, give any interviews. She wasn't a famous person. And

it would have been risky for her to keep records. There are letters that she wrote back to Feline and Sonia hiding in her house, back to her friends. She didn't tell her parents much about what she did, but from some of these letters and from conversations she had with her colleagues, you could see that initially I think she was kind of excited and almost surprised herself that she was capable of doing these things. And then over time, it did begin to wear on her, just as it wore on all of them. And they wouldn't accept every job. They considered every job separately. For instance, once she got the opportunity to kidnap the children of the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Hitler's main man in the Netherlands. And she refused that job because

she said, in the resistance, we don't hurt children, we don't kill children, and we don't involve children. I'm not going to take that job. On one notable assassination attempt, she went with another colleague. He was shot during the event. They were on bikes. And ultimately, he didn't make it. And she did survive. And at that point, she really had a kind of a major depression, I would say. She actually had to stop for a little while and just kind of go underground and recover mentally from what was happening. But the war was still going. And ultimately, she was convinced both by her colleagues in the resistance and I think her own conscience that she had to keep going.

You know, I think these women and men in the resistance really saw themselves as soldiers. There was no Dutch military left. It had been destroyed. And like a soldier, they kind of just had to keep marching on. Do you think she thought she'd survive or do you think she felt that this was hopeless, but she had to keep soldiering on anyway? That's a great question. I actually think from, you know, the records that we have that she had a pretty fatalistic outlook towards the end of the war. One time she was getting ready to go out

on a job with truce and she was taking a long time because she was once again dressing up as kind of the attractive femme fatale. And she was taking too long. Truce said, come on, we're going to be late. And Hani turned to her and said, look, we might die tonight. And if I die tonight, I'm going to die beautiful. to die beautiful. You know, that's the kind of place she got to in her life where she was, I think, saw herself as it was a life and death situation. She also sometimes said to her friends who would talk about what would happen after the war. She said, well, if I don't make it there with you, you know, make sure they drape my coffin in the national flag, you know, things like this

and really talked about her death in a way that not everybody in the resistance did. I think she was well aware of the very real danger she was facing. That danger became even more obvious in 1944, didn't it, with the botched assassination attempt. Tell me about that. Yeah, they were on bikes and they were riding through the town of Zandam in the Netherlands, a place where if you go today, there's a marker there where the event happened. It's a very small cobblestone street in the middle of town. And they're doing this attack in the middle of the day, partly

because there was a curfew at night. So it was more suspicious to be seen out at night. She and a colleague are riding their bikes through this little town. They see their target. She rides by, shoots him. This is a Dutch collaborator they were aiming at, a police officer named Ragut. She shoots. She can't tell if she hit him, but she keeps riding, as is the plan. Her colleague rides behind. She hears two shots behind her and she thinks, great, we got him. She keeps riding out of town. When it's finally time for her to turn back and look at her colleague, he's not there. And it turns out that the other two shots she heard were from the police officer they were

attempting to assassinate. And he hit her colleague, Jan. Ragut actually did die in this assassination, Jan. Ragout actually did die in this assassination, but it was botched in the sense that her resistance colleague was taken into custody by German authorities. And he was in pain. He was given what they said was truth serum and was told that two of his friends from the resistance were there who were in fact German nurses pretending to be resistance workers. And just before he died, he gave up quite a bit of information about his fellow resistors, including Hani's name and her address, her home address, which is where her parents lived and which is where she was hiding her two friends. And so this was a real calamity because they not only lost this resistance fighter, but suddenly her own family and her two friends were in danger. And in fact, the Germans showed up at her parents' house.

Somehow her friends, the Jewish girls, got out before they arrived. The parents were still there and were taken to a concentration camp, one of the three concentration camps that existed in the Netherlands during World War II. But Hani was still on the loose. She was on the loose and feeling incredibly guilty and feeling incredibly dejected. You know, she felt she had lost everything and endangered the lives of the people she was doing this for, in a sense. Her parents were being held because they were trying to get information from her parents about their daughter. And that was a point where Hani really had to decide, am I going to keep doing this or do I turn myself in to save my parents, potentially? And ultimately, she decided and was

kind of encouraged by her colleagues to keep going. And she did keep going. And ultimately, she decided and was kind of encouraged by her colleagues to keep going. And she did keep going. And fortunately, her parents were actually released from that camp after a couple of months. And they did survive the war because the Germans, fortunately, did not find the Jewish girls hiding in their house. They were already gone. So they didn't weren't able to arrest the parents on harboring Jews, which was punishable by death. So Hani, she continues her work. Presumably she doesn't go and hang out with her parents that often. So she sort of has to cut her ties, I guess.

Absolutely. Yeah. She was very careful about not telling her parents really much of anything that she was doing. They knew that she worked in the resistance. Obviously, they agreed to shelter her two friends. So they were doing resistance work themselves in that way. And she knew that anything she told them could put them at risk. And also, you know, she's coming from that childhood where her parents were already worried about her safety from a very young age. So she just, I think, felt a lot of guilt during the war just for making them worry so much. She went back sporadically to check on them and to let them know she was okay. But after they were taken away by the Germans, she never saw them again. We're into 1945 now. The war is dangerously close to ending. How's Hanni doing at this point?

Well, it was a really tough time in the Netherlands. Over the winter of 1944 and 45, there was a famine in the Netherlands. It's known now as the Hunger Winter. And tens of thousands of Dutch civilians died during this time just because all the routes for getting food in and out had been blocked by the Germans. And even a lot of the humanitarian aid had been blocked by them. So people are starving in the streets, including Hani. There's photographs of her from this time. She's very, very thin. And it's also important to remember that we know the war was ending in 1945, but they didn't know that. They knew the Germans were not doing as well, although they were constantly bombarded with propaganda that the Germans were still winning. And finally, in the spring, in March of 1945, Hani was doing another one of her jobs.

She was transporting underground newspapers, resistance newspapers, to a drop-off location. She was stopped at a bridge. In March. Wow. We're weeks now before the end of the war. That's right. Yeah. And I do think there was a sense in the country that, like, surely this had to end soon.

The German soldiers on the ground were demoralized, but still doing their jobs. And to that extent, stopped her. And for the first time ever in the war, when she had done this a thousand times before, she was stopped and her bike was searched and her satchel she was carrying. They found underground newspapers and they found a pistol and of course arrested her on the spot. Did they know she was the legendary girl with the red hair? At first they didn't because she had dyed her hair black. She was wearing glasses.

She was kind of trying to do whatever she could to hide her appearance. But once she was taken into custody and under the bright lights of the interrogation, one of the Nazi officers who had certainly got the memo about the girl with red hair, walked up to her and plucked a piece of one of her hairs out of her scalp and saw she had black hair, but she had red roots. And he said, I think this is the girl with the red hair. And they tortured her and tried to get her to admit it. She never did. She never admitted her name. She never admitted she was the girl with the red hair, even though as, you know, weeks went on, her red hair continued to grow in. And at that point, they knew they, that the war is ending. There are actually treaties already being signed between the Axis and Allied powers about how they're supposed to take care of the prisoners they already have. And they're not supposed to execute anybody.

They're not supposed to torture anybody, keep everyone in a holding pattern. Unfortunately, the Germans did not comply with that. And Hani was thrown into prison and tortured for weeks to try to get information out of her, which she never gave. And do we have accounts of that period of her life through the German records? Yeah, we have some records of some of her fellow prisoners who were in there with her. They immediately started to realize who was in there with them. And she was a bit of a folk hero at this point. So even though she would not even to her fellow prisoners divulge her name, they would

call her Hani in the prison. And she could tell really the other prisoners were cheered by her presence there. I don't know the exact torture methods that they used. And I based many of them in my book on records of things they did to people in that prison, which might've been the same things they did to her, such as pulling out fingernails, that kind of thing. One thing we know that they did do is one morning they pulled her from her cell and they said, you're going to be shot today. And they marched her out into the main yard of the prison and had her stand against a brick wall, like a sort of firing line situation. And then a man came out

with a camera and took her photo. And they said, oh, we just meant shooting your photo. It was like a form of psychological torture in a way. And actually those photos exist online. If you want to find them, anybody can look them up and you just see this incredibly thin, defiant young woman standing there in front of what she believes is going to be a firing squad, just staring directly into the camera, absolutely unblinking. They're quite remarkable photos. They're quite amazing. But eventually, extraordinarily, they do decide to execute her. Yeah. Yeah. A few weeks later. And again, as you're saying, this is in right before the end of the war. We're in April now, April 16th. They take her from her cell. They put her into a truck.

And this time they don't say what they're doing, but they just say, just come with us. They throw her in the back of a truck. They start driving. She doesn't know what they're doing, but they just say, just come with us. They throw her in the back of a truck. They start driving. She doesn't know where they're going. She's in essentially a windowless van. But at some point they stop to pick up one more person and they open the back of the truck and throw in a shovel, which is to me such a chilling detail because at that moment she must have known where they were going.

And that was the great sand dunes on the edge of the North Sea in a place called Blumendal. This was where, as I'm sure Honey knew, they tended to take resistance fighters for execution because they could bury them anonymously in the sand with the hopes that no one would ever find them again. These three men then got to the dunes. They start marching her up the sand. She, of course, had to know what was coming. And as she's walking out there, the three men behind her, one of them shoots her from behind. It grazed her head. She fell to the ground and kind of looked at this blood on her hand, stands back up, turns around and looks at these three men and says,

I can shoot better than you. At which point they all pick up their guns and then she is executed in the dunes. And a few weeks later, the war is over. If she'd held out for another two weeks or two and a half weeks, that's a crazy thought. It is, it is. It's a similar story with Anne Frank. She died just a few weeks before the end of the war as well. It's so incredibly tragic. Is Honey well-known in the Netherlands today? She is.

In the Netherlands, she's quite well-known. And when I first found out about her seven years ago, when I started working on this book, you know, she was somebody the Dutch knew about. when I first found out about her seven years ago, when I started working on this book, you know, she was somebody the Dutch knew about. But when I personally tried to find a book about her back in 2016, there was nothing in English about Hani at that time or the Overstiegen Sisters. And I was shocked because I thought their story was so incredible and more amazing than any novel. How could she not be better known? But that was one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was because I felt like she's really one of the great overlooked heroes of World War II. And, you know, I felt very

passionately that the world needed to know about her. And the Dutch are very proud of her, of course, as they should be. And I think they're glad that the rest of the world needed to know about her. And the Dutch are very proud of her, of course, as they should be. And I think they're glad that the rest of the world is finally getting a chance to learn more about her and the Overstegan sisters as well. Well, the world knows more about her now. Thank you, Buzzy Jackson.

What's the book called? It's called The Girl with the Red Hair. Thank you for coming on the podcast and telling me all about it. Thanks so much.