[HN Gopher] Hannie Schaft, resistance fighter during World War II
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Hannie Schaft, resistance fighter during World War II
Author : lermontov
Score : 35 points
Date : 2023-07-12 04:49 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| zgluck wrote:
| https://archive.is/D2ecH
| Pelerin wrote:
| I suspect Virginia Hall's obituary was also Overlooked
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/books/review/sonia-purnel...
| neals wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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
| mpol wrote:
| 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)
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > 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
|
| Hard to sympathize with the dutch when they were colonizing and
| brutalizing indonesians, et al before, during and after ww2.
| People forget the dutch were a colonial power just like nazi
| germany.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| sparky_z wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| tekla wrote:
| In what universe is Hannie Schaft overlooked? Literally one of
| the most famous and well studied resistance members
| sparky_z wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| petsfed wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| petsfed wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Were 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2023-07-12 23:01 UTC)