The Nazis' MOST Wanted Spy Was an American Woman With a Wooden Leg

The Gestapo called her the most dangerous of all Allied spies. She was an American woman with a wooden leg.

Her name was Virginia Hall. A hunting accident took her left leg below the knee, and the State Department told her a one-legged woman could never be a diplomat. So she became a spy instead.

Working for British intelligence, then America's OSS, she built resistance networks across France. She placed agents, ran safe houses, coordinated sabotage, and fed the Allies a stream of intelligence the Germans could not trace.

The Gestapo obsessed over her. Klaus Barbie himself hunted the limping lady. When the net closed, she escaped over the frozen Pyrenees on foot, roughly fifty miles in the snow, on a prosthetic leg she nicknamed Cuthbert.

They never caught her. She kept fighting until France was free, and became one of the most decorated spies of the war. The deadliest agent the Nazis feared was the woman they underestimated.

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