01/12/2026
Audrey Hepburn is one of the most iconic movie stars of the 20th century, yet her experience with both the Dutch resistance and N***s in World War II is largely forgotten.
In stories of doomed World War II gallantry, little is as romanticized as Operation Market Garden. A technical failure by the Allied Powers to defeat the N***s in 1944, this invasion of the Netherlands left British paratroopers stranded around a bridge in Arnhem, far too removed from their tanks to hold the line. Nevertheless, the bravery of those Airborne “Red Devils” has lived on in pop culture, as have the Dutch resistance fighters who sheltered them. What has been largely forgotten is that among those courageous souls was… a teenaged Audrey Hepburn? For about a week, in fact, the future movie star kept a Red Devil hidden in the cellar.
This image, of wartorn tenacity, is hardly the type associated with Hepburn in the popular imagination. To this day, she’s remembered as the ultimate Givenchy girl, an ethereal presence who took her breakfasts at Tiffany’s, and always in a little black dress. Even when she was heartbreaking on screen, she was luminous—a woman who appeared to glide through a charmed, effervescent life.
That illusion had little to do with the real-life fires which forged her identity, or the experiences of a Second World War spent almost entirely under N**i occupation. In the autumn of 1944, she and her family kept a British paratrooper in their basement, the latest act in a series of defiances (after initial appeasement). By the following winter, they too would be living down there, wary to even crawl out of “bed” as the bombs fell on their small Dutch village of Velp.
Remarkably, much of that story’s been omitted from history, not to mention the books written about Hepburn and mid-20th century Hollywood. Not until the recent publication of biographer Robert Matzen’s Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II did the Hepburn family lore about the Red Devil even become public knowledge. But then not many were asking.
“I was researching my book on Jimmy Stewart in the Eighth Air Force, and I was in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, and saw a couple of things about Audrey Hepburn spending the war there,” Matzen tells us. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s very interesting.’ So when I came back here, I was poking around on the internet, trying to find things about that, investigating what happened to her during the war in Arnhem, and I couldn’t find anything. It had not been well-documented.” That’s now changed.
Throughout the decades, biographers who wrote about Hepburn used what little she would tell the press of her childhood for background—about the horror of the day the N***s arrived in the Netherlands, destroying a bridge she’d recently crossed, and the elation that came on the April morning when Canadian forces liberated Velp (it was the first time Audrey had a cigarette)—but other than the general knowledge that deprivations in the “Hunger Winter” contributed to Hepburn’s thin frame, the events of World War II have gone largely overlooked. This included Hepburn’s contributions to the Dutch resistance as a message courier for downed British pilots, as well as the less romantic fact that while studying to be a ballerina in the early years of the occupation, she danced for fascists.
There are many reasons these details became lost, but most of them have to do with Hepburn’s own personal choice of what to share from those harrowing days.
“She would say certain things that were not controversial, and I mined every single word of hers about the war,” Matzen says. “But she wouldn’t go to certain places, because they were controversial. She spent the war in Arnhem, which is occupied by the N***s, and she was a ballerina who danced, at times, for the N***s. It wasn’t that she supported the Germans at all, but if you wanted to dance in public, there were going to be Germans in the audience. After the war, how do you justify that in the press? It could easily be spun.”
