8. Return of The Limping Lady (Season 2)

Good Assassins

iHeartPodcasts and Diversion

History, True Crime

4.8 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Virginia Hall’s prison cell in northeastern Spain was something out of a nightmare. Hall imagined the moment in which the Spanish police would hand her over to the Gestapo and their glee at having finally captured "The Limping Lady." Hall knew the Nazis wouldn’t risk letting her escape. They’d transfer her to a secret facility, interrogate her, torture her, and kill her. Or sometimes the Nazis kept their prisoners alive and attempted to leverage them against the Allies. Months of psychological torture would give way to more physical punishments. Dousing with freezing water. Electric shocks. Beatings and cutting. This was the way of the Nazis. Virginia's Hall's American nationality was maybe the one thing that could save her. In late 1942, Spain was still considered technically neutral in the war. The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had offered Hitler Spain’s allegiance in return for aid in nation-building. There was a division of Spanish volunteers fighting for the German army, but Spain still remained reluctant and fickle. Andrew Orr says, "Franco's regime is ideologically complex and people still fight over whether or not it was fascist or just really authoritarian and traditionalist. Regardless of how anyone's individual sees it, the regime was very friendly to Nazi Germany and especially fascist Italy because Italy and Germany had backed Franco in the civil war. So Spain tended politically to like the Axis powers a lot." But Virginia Hall’s capture by the Spanish was too big a threat to the British. Hall knew too much, and the Nazis could assume that the British would change battle strategy once the Special Operations Executive, Hall’s intelligence agency, discovered she’d been captured. Hall’s information would be useless to the Axis Powers, and so she was as good as dead.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Joshua Topolsky and I have a new podcast called What Future.
0:04.5	But I want to tell you that I'm being forced by my producer to record a promo telling you about my show.
0:10.1	And I'm not trying to force you to listen to it.
0:12.6	And maybe you're not interested in internet culture and the future of life on planet Earth.
0:18.1	And why John Carpenter movies are so good.
0:20.6	You may just want to listen to a podcast about, I don't know, sports or whatever Joe Rogan talks about.
0:26.6	And that's fine, you know, no judgment.
0:28.4	But if you like what you're hearing and I know that you do, you can listen to all of what future on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:39.9	Truth is stranger than fiction and reality TV stars know this better than anyone.
0:45.6	But what you may not know about them or even believe is actually criminal behavior.
0:51.1	I'm Kaelin Miller keys and on my new podcast True Crime Reality, I will be joined by reality TV stars as they dive deep into the details of a crime they have a direct connection to.
1:01.5	Listen to true crime reality on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:11.0	My name is Nando Villa and I host the new podcast, the best soccer podcast in the world.
1:15.6	And I assure you it is.
1:17.6	This new podcast tells stories that spill well beyond the field from legendary players to silly hairdo's to heart-wrenching finals.
1:24.6	If you're into football, I don't think there can be a better expression of it than the war.
1:28.6	All episodes will be in English and in Spanish.
1:31.1	Listen to the best soccer podcast in the world as part of the Michael Dupt podcast network available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:48.6	Diversion audio.
1:50.6	A note, this episode contains descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some audiences. Please take care in listening.
2:02.1	This series is based on historical characters and real events. Some dialogue has been imagined for dramatic purposes when no primary source material is available.
2:13.1	Virginia Hall's prison cell in San Juan de las Habedasas, small town in the northeast of Spain, was something out of a nightmare.
	...

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