Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social worker who was credited with saving dozens of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland, has died of cerebral arteriosclerosis at the age of 96.

Ms Pritchard, who was recognised in 1981 by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, is said to have fed, clothed, hidden or otherwise aided as many as 150 people - many of them children. She even pretended that some of the children were her own, looking after them for months on end.

When her house was searched by a Dutch collaborator, she shot him with his own revolver before he could alert the Nazis.

“I would do it again, under the same circumstances,” she told an interviewer years later, “but it still bothers me.”

She credited a local undertaker with helping dispose of the corpse by burying it in a coffin with another body. “I just hope that the family would have approved,” she said.

After the war, Ms Pritchard worked for the UN as a social worker in displaced-persons camps before meeting her husband, Anton, whom she married in 1947 and who fathered their three children.