The girl with the red hair.
- Apr 6
- 2 min read
Last week we discussed public opposition to anti-Jewish measures in The Netherlands in late 1940. Three months later, in February 1941, a general strike occurred in Amsterdam. It had become obvious that Holland was not going to behave as a sister Germanic nation.
A fiercely anti-Semitic Austrian Nazi and lawyer, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was appointed by Hitler to head the occupying regime. His was a civil regime meant to run the government, but separate from the German police. In rapid succession, new measures were announced which stripped Jews of their jobs, homes, and possessions and which removed them from Dutch public life. The ultimate blow would come in July of 1942 when deportations began.
And so we find a two-year period during which an ordered, open Dutch society had become violent and oppressive. It is important to remember that some Dutch people were collaborating, some were profiteering, and others were resisting in innumerable ways, small and large. There was no centralized resistance, but rather small groups that carried out their own operations. One couldn’t just go somewhere and sign up, nor did one have any clear idea of whom to trust. Imagine the uncertainty and fear that individuals faced once they had made the decision to resist!
One such person was Jannetje Schaft, a 19-year-old college student when the Nazis invaded in 1940. She was a serious student, having been a quiet little bookworm growing up, but with a head full of shocking red hair. She was studying at the University of Amsterdam to become a human rights lawyer, but when the Nazis required all students to sign a loyalty oath, she refused and was expelled.
And this is when our little bookworm makes a dramatic transformation. She takes the name Hannie Schaft and begins by providing fake IDs to Jews. Where she ends up, however, is quite shocking. She became an assassin, shooting Nazi officers and collaborators in the head while nicely dressed, in full makeup, with her red hair carefully styled! It was only when she appeared on the Nazis most-wanted list as “the girl with the red hair” that she dyed it black.
She managed to evade arrest until the very end. She was captured in March, 1945 and freely admitted her role in the resistance while protecting her compatriots. On April 17, 1945, two Nazi officers marched Hannie toward the dunes on a windswept beach and shot her twice in the head. The Dutch were liberated 18 days later. Eighteen days.
(After liberation on May 5, 1945, Hannie Schaft’s body was recovered from a mass grave and moved to the Honorary Cemetery in Bloemendaal where she rests beside hundreds of her fellow resisters.)
