Spy story

The Nazis were closing in on a spy known as ‘The Limping Lady.’ She fled across mountains on a wooden leg.

The Nazis were coming. It was November 1942, and Virginia Hall, a spy based in Lyon, France, knew she had to flee. 

She was famous, after all — a Maryland-born operative with a wooden leg and a sobriquet, “The Limping Lady” — who was considered one of the most effective Allied spies leading the French resistance. She organized agent networks, assisted escaped POWs, and recruited French men and women to run safe houses, according to an account of her career on the CIA’s website. But she was being stalked by a pursuer of equal repute: Gestapo chief, Nikolaus “Klaus” Barbie, who went by his own moniker, “The Butcher of Lyon.” The Nazis believed Hall was Canadian, and Barbie once reportedly told his underlings, “I’d give anything to lay my hands on that Canadian bitch.”