‘She believed you have to take sides’: How Audrey Hepburn became a secret spy during World War Two

On September 17, 1944, Hepburn was in church when the hymn was interrupted by the hum of engines. Operation Market Garden, a plan by Allied forces to seize nine bridges spanning the Rhine River, had begun, and when I ran outside and looked up, thousands of Allied troops were parachuting down.

Unfortunately, two heavily armored Nazi divisions were regrouping in the area. Nazi tanks rolled in front of the Van Heemstras family home. Hepburn and her family hid in the basement while the battle raged for nine days. When they showed up, the news was that the Nazis had won. Screams were heard from one of the buildings where the Nazis were carrying out reprisals: torturing and killing members of the Dutch resistance.

When Allied pilots heading to Germany had to make an emergency landing in the Netherlands, Visser Hooft sent Hepburn into the woods to meet a British paratrooper with code words and a secret message hidden in her sock. She made the meeting, but on her way out of the woods, she saw the Dutch police approaching. She bent down to pick up wildflowers, then flirtatiously showed them to the police. They were charmed and did not question her further. After that, they often carried messages of resistance.

“She was a firm believer that there was a struggle between good and evil, and you had to take sides,” Doty says.

“The Germans didn’t take children seriously. ‘Just get out of my way, boy.'” You know, the Dutch were practical enough to see that children, because they weren’t suspected of anything, could be the ones running the messages, the ones doing these things “It was exciting and dangerous, and they became heroes of the resistance,” adds Matzen.

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By February 1945, it was reported that 500 Dutch people were starving to death every week. Like many others, Hepburn and her family were suffering from severe food shortages. She became very ill with anemia, jaundice, and edema.

As fierce fighting once again raged outside their front door, Hepburn and her family hid in the basement for three weeks. Finally, on April 16, 1945, calm came. She smelled of tobacco, which was impossible to obtain in Holland during the war. She climbed the stairs from the basement and opened the door to see five Canadian soldiers smoking cigarettes and pointing machine guns at her. I immediately started speaking to them in English. Someone shouted: “We have not only liberated a city, we have liberated an English girl!”