Hannie Schaft, resistance fighter during World War II | Hacker News Reader

Hannie Schaft, resistance fighter during World War II

nytimes.com

42 pointslermontov30 comments

Hannie Schaft is definitely not overlooked, at least, not in the Netherlands. We have lots of stories about her life and streets named after her as well as a monument. She almost made it through the war, but was executed after being arrested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannie_Schaft

There are many other Dutch resistance fighters whose stories will never be told, they're dead and there is nobody alive anymore that still remembers them or their significance. Many of them found their end in the dunes executed by the German occupiers of the country, giving their lives for doing what's right: to defend your country from an attacker, even after the country had formally capitulated. And there ware also many who resisted the Germans in much harder to conceal - but no less effective - ways, such as the factory workers that were conscripted from the able bodied to work in munition, vehicle or aircraft factories and who sabotaged the lines and the products. All this right under the noses of the German overseers.

I know a few such stories and am still quite impressed, even so many years after hearing them first, with the degree of risk that people were willing to take just to slow the machine a tiny little bit. Towards the end of the war even the slightest (perceived) infraction was enough to get a bullet to the neck and yet they continued doing it.

They mean "overlooked by the New York Times obituary section", not overlooked by society in general. It's part of a series where they go back and write obituaries for people who didn't get one written at the time of their death.

I think they have their work cut out for them then, if they've managed to get as far as WWII resistance people from NL there's a couple of million more pages to be filled.

Then it's good that they've started!

The ocean is large, but we can drain it drop by drop.

> There are many other Dutch resistance fighters whose stories will never be told, they're dead and there is nobody alive anymore that still remembers them or their significance.

I still have a letter signed by Eisenhower (as general of the army, not as president, and it's not hand-signed, at least I don't think so) thanking my great-grandmother, which I knew very well (she lived until 99 years old) for her "gallant service in assisting the escape of Allied soldiers from the enemy", the same as this one (but with the name of my great-grandmother):

https://hermitagefineart.com/en/lots/2023-june-manuscripts/7...

I still, barely, know why: she and her daughters as well as my grandfather and great-uncle were part of the resistance and at some point they hid, for months, a british pilot that had been shot down. I think I still have a part of his parachute (parachute which they did hid too). My great-uncle was part of the belgian resistance "G group", blowing stuff as I understand it. After the war he became director of the national bank of Belgium (which I think was related to the help he gave the country during WWII).

Nobody of my family got shot but many of their friends did. My uncle got name after one of their friend who died to a nazi firing squad.

But I'm the last generation who got to listen to these people tell the tale themselves: when my daughter shall turn 26, WWII shall literally be a 100 years old event. What will that mean to her?

I'll try very hard to explain her how some people chose to do the right thing at the risk of their lives and that I'm handing to her precious items (the letter and a few other stuff) from another era, not to be entirely forgotten for there are certainly lessons of courage there.

Roughly the same situation here. Tons of stories, all of the tellers who experienced them first hand have died. My mom, who is now 80 has no memories of that era, she was too young to understand what was going on. The only one still left is one uncle of mine, who I visit regularly.

I think this is part of the reason why there is a cycle of war: because living memory dies off and then the horrors of war are no longer seen as clearly. On the plus side that allows old grudges against former enemies to be forgotten. Though, when clueless German tourists ask to be directed to the old center of Rotterdam they are still playing with fire (yes, it happens).

Your family did an amazing thing there. About five years ago I took a Canadian woman and her kids on a trip through France to locate the grave of their uncle. It took a few days to locate it and when we finally found it it really moved me: the grave looked as though it had been set a week ago, perfectly maintained, a fresh bunch of flowers on top of it from some unknown stranger. Really amazing.

Keep telling their stories.

For people wanting to get a feel about what happened in The Netherlands in WWII and with the resistance, there are two movies that are quite good.

The Forgotten Battle (2020) is about a few soldiers on their way to Arnhem, but their plane goes down over Zeeland. They get in contact with German soldiers and also with people from the resistance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Battle

Blackbook (2006) is about two young Dutch women who are friends. One is in bed with a German, the other is part of the resistance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_(film)

Soldier of Orange is possibly one of the best Paul Verhoeven movies.

From her Wiki entry:

> Because the Dutch communist party celebrated her as an icon, her popularity decreased, to the point that the commemoration at Hannie's grave was forbidden in 1951.[5] The commemorators (who were estimated to number over 10,000) were stopped by several hundred police and military with the aid of four tanks. A group of seven managed to circumvent the blockade and reached the burial ground, but were arrested when they tolled the bell.

Either something important has been lost in translation, or this is all incredibly ironic.

The number of actual Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese fascists that ascended to power after WWII by leveraging the US's and UK's fear of communists is quite staggering. A quick review of the far-right regimes the US and UK supported throughout the Cold War backs this up.

I think there's a case to be made that if Hitler wasn't specifically going after the UK's sphere of influence, and if Japan had not attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, the pro-fascist elements in each the US and UK might well have forestalled WWII entirely. Considering how the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking went, it's unsettling to think that neither of those were cassus belli for what we understand to be the good guys during that war.

All of that to say, banning the commemoration of Shaft is unsurprising in the extreme if you know anything about the frequent infernal deals that happened during the Cold War.

To be fair to the US, the reason Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor was because the US backed it into a corner over the Rape of Nanking. Japan had the option of ceasing its war in China voluntarily, or running out of oil and ceasing it involuntarily. Or of invading US-controlled sources of oil in the Pacific.

Which is not to say that fascists in the US were not trying their damned hardest to seize power. [1]

Nobody was prosecuted for their involvement in the plot, of course.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

This is a bizarre take.

The Rape of Nanking was not the cause of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s expansionism was. The US was trying to contain Japan even before the Nanking massacre.

The US didnt control the oil Japan was after, the Netherlands and the UK controlled it.

The 'Business Plot' took place almost a decade earlier, the Rape of Nanking happened in the winter of 37/38 and was in a horrific way just one more step in the Japanese expansion strategy.

Pearl Harbor happened almost to the day 4 years later, in December of 1941. The main reason it happened as far as I understand it is because the Japanese had their sight on resources in the Dutch East Indies (notably: oil) and the US had effectively blocked them from doing so. There were other reasons besides, but the Rape of Nanking had as far as I know nothing to do with it in a direct cause-and-effect relationship.

So I think you are mixing up a bunch of unrelated historical facts to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

Incidentally, the attack on Pearl Harbor was probably one of the biggest own goals in the whole of WWII, it was meant to dissuade the US and to force it further into isolationism, instead it galvanized the nation into becoming one of the major players at the end of WWII. It also sped up the development of atomic weapons, just two months before Pearl Harbor there was the beginnings of the Manhattan Project but it was still very low-key, after the declaration of war against Japan and Germany it all went into overdrive.

The facts are entirely related. FDR was keen on opposing fascism, but neither Congress, nor the US public had much interest in it. The atrocities in China galvanized support for anti-Japanese policies, which eventually terminated in the oil embargo, which precipitated Pearl Harbor.

If Japan has only attacked the DEI, the US was unlikely to have sat around on its hands - and it would have had both a Pacific fleet, and the Phillipines to operate it from. Japan's imperial ambitions were unattainable from the moment that the oil embargo was in place.

You are making a direct link between Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking:

> the reason Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor was because the US backed it into a corner over the Rape of Nanking.

The timing doesn't work, and no historian of that era that I'm aware of has made such a direct link, though, of course, like everything it is connected but only in the much larger scheme of things. Historians generally seem to agree on the fact that the Japanese invasion of French Indochina to try to embargo all imports (including US imports) into China is what led to the oil embargo.

You're welcome to persist in your own view of history of course, but the fact that the Rape of Nanking preceded Pearl Harbor and the Oil Embargo that led up to it does not automatically mean that the one caused the other.

Schaft.

At the time NL was still reeling from WWII and the fear of communism, which has its roots in the failed attempt to call for a socialist revolution in NL in 1918 caused a ton of confusion about who, fresh after WWII the enemy was and had been. The Dutch resistance was extremely adept at covering their tracks, and what was hard to uncover for the German authorities was no less so for the Dutch authorities after the war.

It took many years - decades in fact - just to sift through all of the documentation and to figure out who had played what role. Some of the worst war criminals in NL could either escape or died from natural causes before they could be brought to justice, in some cases they managed to stay ahead of the law until the 70's and 80s', for instance:

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Menten

As well as members of our royal family:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Bernhard_of_Lippe-Biest...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Claus_of_the_Netherland...

So there was a ton of confusion all around and being a registered communist and a resistance hero made for a difficult mixture during the early years of the cold war. It took until Harry Mulisch in the 70's before the record was finally set straight. Keep in mind that during all of these years there was the CPN, the Communist Party Netherlands that very much wanted to remodel NL after the Russian communist model. Rumors about the CPN being funded persisted for a long time but no proof of this was ever presented.

We had an absolutely fantastic person called Loe de Jong who pretty much spent his whole life on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands...

Another piece of information against which this should be seen is that there was a lot of friction in the country with respect to the way the various colonial wars were going, here clearly the Dutch were the aggressors and we were committing war crimes all over the place. So the Dutch authorities were a bit nervous about anything that looked like it might lead to an anti-war organization.

From a formerly Communist country, that fear was thoroughly justified, especially during the times when Stalin was alive.

Stalinism is exactly as bad as Nazism, only Stalin was a bit more rational and also more patient than Hitler and didn't start WWIII.

I have joked often that the fact that still-colonial Britain and Stalin's Russia were the good guys tells you an awful lot about just how bad the Nazis really were

A lot of the non-European support for Hitler really did come down to "well, he's not British, how bad can he really be?" And a lot of the Eurasian support for Hitler and Tojo came down to "they're not Stalin, how bad can they be?"

What's interesting is that the brutality and Machiavellian political infighting of Stalin's era were sort of present from the beginning in Lenin's Bolsheviks (arguably down to the name), and I'm honestly not convinced that things would've been better if someone like Trotsky had come to power after Lenin's death instead. The stage was set for brutal oppression and criminal negligence almost from the beginning, and were certainly very bad even under Lenin. I don't believe the Reds won the Russian Civil war so much as the Whites' incompetence lost the war before the Reds' brutality caused a mass uprising.

> What's interesting is that the brutality and Machiavellian political infighting of Stalin's era were sort of present from the beginning in Lenin's Bolsheviks (arguably down to the name), and I'm honestly not convinced that things would've been better if someone like Trotsky had come to power after Lenin's death instead. The stage was set for brutal oppression and criminal negligence almost from the beginning,

The fact that the party took power through a coup, and then fought a horrific, five-year existential civil war meant that no matter who was running it, the culture of paranoia, desire for control, and repression would have prevailed, no matter who was general secretary. It would have certainly been worse, or better under different people, but the party's culture was pretty fixed by the time the 30s rolled around.

It took a generation of being fairly secure in their power for things to relax.

> I don't believe the Reds won the Russian Civil war so much as the Whites' incompetence lost the war before the Reds' brutality caused a mass uprising.

Was the White Terror significantly less brutal in its means? The Whites were a coalition of warlords that were quite happy to carry out pogroms, massacres, exterminations of jews, and other enemies of the counter-revolution.

> The Whites were a coalition of warlords that were quite happy to carry out pogroms, massacres, exterminations of jews, and other enemies of the counter-revolution.

I was more expressing that the day-to-day practices of war communism made "no pogroms or massacres" less of a value add than it might seem at first blush, even for Jews.

I've read that the two things that doomed the Whites were a lack of a coherent message re: after the counter revolution, and lack of a coherent strategy for winning the war, because it was just warlords. And even then, it was less that the Reds decisively won over the population so much as the Whites completely failed to.

I am, by and large, pretty far left, but the history of the Russian revolution makes me highly suspicious of anyone advocating armed revolt.

The dutch police used to be, up until fairly recently, quite hamfisted. My dad (along with the protest group he was in) even got labeled a terrorist in his youth for protesting this sort of thing. Things have changed for the better a lot since then.

Weird, I lived in the Hannie Schaftstraat most of my live. Never knew this. Did try to find out way back when, but this was before Wikipedia.

Given the number of towns that have a street named after her there is a pretty good chance of that happening. In some towns at the bottom right of the street signs you'll find a small legend of who the person was.

For instance:

https://ilibrariana.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/velsen.jpg

I suspect Virginia Hall's obituary was also Overlooked https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/books/review/sonia-purnel...

In what universe is Hannie Schaft overlooked? Literally one of the most famous and well studied resistance members

In the New York Times obituary desk universe. As the article introduction states, "Overlooked" is part of a regular series that goes back and writes obituaries for people who, for whatever reason, didn't get one at the time of their death.

In NL I would expect 95% or so of the people older than 30 to know her name. Tante Riek and other female resistance fighters are pretty much unknown in comparison and given the lack of records will likely remain so. But the Dutch resistance had quite a few women in it, for one they could get around a bit easier without the fear of being arrested and deported to work in Germany, for another they were mostly what was left with the men and the older boys already hauled off to the Opel factories and other war production.

By the end of the war the women in NL were running the country. Both my grandfathers had been in hiding for a part of the war, one of them got deported to Germany, the other made it through without being arrested and deported. Both had families with young kids, in fact my mom was born during the first years of the war and ended up severely malnourished as a result. Her slightly older brothers, just kids went to steal potatoes from the German warehouses and cargo boats in Hilversum harbor at night. Lots of harrowing stories from those days and if you had known my frail and elderly grandmothers you'd never know the kind of feats they pulled off. They hated the Germans to their death, nothing would ever change that.

To stop the children from betraying their father they were told that dad (my granddad) was in Germany, so the kids believed that the area near Loosdrecht was Germany, when they went to visit there with food. When the English attacked that area my oldest uncle was just returning from such a delivery and he fell in with the German soldiers that were moving along what is today N201. The German troops were strafed by Spitfires and to the day he died that was one of my uncles most vivid memories, to hiding in a ditch together with the German soldiers, and both equally scared.

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