Virginia Hall

I did this episode on accident.

I was gonna give myself a little bit of a break after all of the Virginia Hall nonsense, and after kind of feeling a bit of emotional whiplash from both my period and the network situation, my emotions were just all over the place this past week.

But I listened to a true crime podcast episode this past week from a show that I really, really enjoy called Love Murder, and they were covering the murder of a woman named Alison Baden-Clay.

And while Alison's story was very emotional and very fascinating, what I found really interesting was the story of her killer, her husband, Gerard Baden-Clay, who was related to some really, really impressive people.

Hi, I'm Madigan, and you're listening to Your Angry Neighborhood Feminist, a podcast that explores the world through a personal feminist perspective.

Welcome back and welcome to part two of the Virginia Hall story.

You have waited long enough.

I took an extra day because I wanted to try to condense my notes a little bit because I had over 60 pages of notes, and I think I really only ended up getting rid of like one page total.

So this is going to be a very, very long episode.

So let's just get into it right away.

Where we left off, Klaus Barbie, who worked for the Nazis, was trying incredibly hard to track down Virginia Hall, screaming, I'd give anything to get my hands on that limping Canadian bitch, even though she was not, in fact, Canadian.

Wanted posters went up of Virginia with the caption below her depiction, the enemy's most dangerous spy.

Definitely.

My very favorite book of hers is The Invisible Woman about Virginia Hall during World War II, but this is a close second.

Oh, that's

high praise.

You mentioned that she's based on a friend of yours.

There have been some notable female characters in the CIA, Virginia Hall, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy.

Is she based on either of them?

No, no, she's not.

The time has come.

I am finally bringing you part one of my episode covering the most dangerous of all allied spies, who just happened to be a woman named Virginia Hall.

Now, this episode took me forever and a day to put together because it was very, very involved.

There's not a lot out there on Virginia as far as just regular websites and biographies go, and there seems to only really be one book out there that really goes into detail about Virginia's life and everything that she accomplished in her life.

But of course, I looked elsewhere in regards to other aspects of the war and other characters mentioned in the telling of Virginia's story.

As I alluded to, I have a hefty bit of notes to get through on this one, so I'd say we better get going.

Virginia Hall was born on April 6, 1906, to Barbara Hall, a young and ambitious woman who worked as a secretary the century before, but who had married her boss, Edwin Lee Hall, known as Ned, who was a wealthy banker from Baltimore as well as a cinema owner.

Barbara was definitely a social climber, and this marriage catapulted Barbara's social status, and she no longer had to worry about whether or not she would go hungry or whether or not she would be able to afford the finer things in life.

She isn't even Madame Marcel.

The truth is that she's a late 30-something American named Virginia Hall, passing for a much older woman than reality thanks to the handiwork of the British Special Operations Executive.

They taught her how to wrinkle her appearance with makeup, and they even filed down her teeth to match the aesthetic of a born-in-the-last-century peasant's dental care.

Talk about committing to the bit.

But he becomes greedy.

When he breaks up one particular very well-known network, which involved a British agent called Virginia Hall, um he makes some mistakes he gets greedy he asks for too much money and the other begin to think he's you know he's he's uh he's losing his cover and he thinks the british are on to him um and so he gradually gets sidelined as does the advert in fact so the the politics of what's going on in occupied france at the moment is is also terrifying because 42 as you mentioned this is the roundups of jews This is where the brutality is at its worst with the night and fog decree as well, which means people being taken off to concentration camp with absolutely no formal process whatsoever.

And the more resistance there is, the more brutal the clampdowns become and the people who are taking power from the Abwehr are are, you know, the SS and the SDs.

Himmler gets his hands on the Abwehr and Oskar Eiler and his colleagues are more and more sidelined and culminates in 1944 when there's the attempt on Hitler's life and Canaris is arrested.