2. The Death of Old Lives (Season 2)

is available. Poland has been again overrun by two of the great powers, which held in bondage for but we are unable to queen of the After Germany conquered Poland on September, just twenty six days after they invaded, Hitler announced his plans to continue westward, setting his sights directly on France. It seemed at first that many French were unbothered. The severity of the news took some time to sink in. Germany's goals seemed impossible, but Virginia Hall was hesitant to

write off the Nazis power so flippantly. In the early days, this became the subject of much debate. What Hitler wants is impossible, Virginia. It doesn't matter if it's impossible, Claire. People are dying and they will keep dying so long as the Nazis believed the so called impossible is possible? No, I am not saying we shouldn't fight. We should. I just think that, given with my brother has told me the Germans aren't a true threat, it doesn't mean we

shouldn't squash them. If they managed to cross the border, a victorious Nations still counts there dead. You don't have to be so preachy, Virginia. What do you want to fight? Well, I think we should. They won't allow it. Then we find a way. I'm Steven Talty and from diversion. This is good Assassin's Season two. Being killed would be the easy part. Being tortured would be the hard part. Our intel suggests she is behind many of the prison bricks

all over the country. She is dangerous, so sabotage plus a little espionage paramilitary operations make things blow up. The message for Captain Bobby, and I believe I have found the nest of the Limping Lady. Episode two, The Death

of Old Lives. Exhausted by the debates and weeks of inaction, Virginia Hall and her best friend Claire de Latour decided to enlist in one of the few ways women could at the time, by joining the Service Sanitaire de l'armi and the organization akin to the Red Cross that provided

medical assistance to French soldiers on the battlefield. Being an ambulance driver was widely seen by French women at the time as the most militarized role they were allowed to have, because the French Army did not allow women to join until just days before the collapse of the French Army.

That's Andrew Or, a professor who runs the Institute for Military History at Kansas date University, and so someone like Hall is engaged in the outer edge of what the French will let a woman get away with in terms of national defense. So this was a group of very highly motivated women who were pushing the boundaries of what they could get away with to help defend against Nazi Germany.

It would be a grueling endeavor and it would separate them totally from the peaceful lives they've been living before. In just four weeks, Virginia and Claire were given basic medical training, learning how to apply tourniquets and bandages on some of the worst wartime injuries recorded in human history. They were supposed to work in the echoes of gunfire long after the battle was over, but often found themselves closer to firefights and exploding shells than they ever expected.

They were also given self defense lessons, but no weapons. Guns were in short supply and out of the question for civilians. Only soldiers carried guns instead. Virginia kept a knife on her and learned to use it in secret, aided by the wounded soldiers she rescued. At the end of their training, Virginia and Claire were given jobs as ambulance drivers and stationed near the Magino line. They were

about to witness hell. It's not like they were turned on lights and sirens and going seven minutes down the street to your local hospital. Right. These ambulance riots were often long. They're going super slow because the roads are terrible. That's Dr Justin bar the surgeon and historian of medical military history from episode one. Sometimes they're actively getting shot at by the Germans, and so you're dodging our tolaries shelves yourself. It's not like it's a nice little spring

later ambulance, right. These people are just piled in the back of the truck, which is bouncing on potholes. So they're screaming because their legs are broken. So every time you go over a pothole, some poor kid behind you is shouting out in pain. So I'm sure they had a tremendous psychiatric toll on on the driver's On top of that, Virginia found it tough to drive with the

prosthetic leg. Though she had grown used to it over the years, she struggled to manage the speed of the car and the weight needed to push down the accellery. Virginia began tending to men not unlike herself, applying tourniquet after tourniquet too bloodied stumps and mangled limbs. She hoped she could bring some solace to them, displaying an able bodied role model who was still on the battlefield serving the country. Instead, most of the men felt like she

was patronizing them. Oh, don't trash you make it worse. In her preparation, Virginia was trained specifically with saving lives. The rehabilitation aspect of recovery was a second thought. We can't do anything for them, Sah, shut up, gets them home on their own. It only took a few months for the work to become overwhelming, both physically and emotionally.

Virginia and Claire found their dreams, haunted by the dislocated bones and missing limbs of the blood soaked soldiers they loaded into their trucks, their clothes and aprons existed in a perpetual state of lingering. Gore Virginia found the pace of the work dehumanizing. Any of these major battles, they could drop off a thousand patients at your doorstep, and you have you have to get through them as as efficiently as possible, and patients would die waiting to have

surgery because you can only move so fast. Rarely did she learn these men's names, but she heard their screams in her dreams, and news across Europe kept looking bleaker and bleaker. Hitler added another to his bag of small nations. Today the fifth and fourteen months when the Dutch army laid down its arms everywhere except in the extreme southwestern part of the country, and this week the King of the bell Ducks asked commands in chief of the Belgian

process made an unconditional surrender on the Hawker's troop. Holland surrendered to Germany on May fourteenth in Belgium. On every Nazi victory stripped Virginia's morale and increased the odds of a German triumph over ants. Oh but I'm a thirty ninety. Virginia's volunteer work as an ambulance driver became much more personal. Working in a medical tent in the hot sun, she encountered a man whose entire head was bandaged, blood seeping

through the cause. I'll take this one, doctor, don't bother. Get that one down at the end there there's already blood coming through. It won't take me along to wrap it, I said, don't bother. It. Took a shell to his face. There's nothing there. He still has a pulse. You didn't hear what I said. It took a goddamn shell to the face. He's got nothing there to save, No eyes, no nose. Get down to the end of the line where his DAGs. I already have them. Jean Paul de Lator,

what's his name? Let now get down to the end. There's a line inside the man's boot. Virginia found a photo, laughing happily at the camera was a handsome young man in uniform. Standing next to him, laughing just as happily, blonde hair ruffled by a breeze, was Claire. And they're in the tent just feed away from Virginia. Claire's brother died just a few minutes later. It wouldn't be long before Germany could declare yet another victory. In Virginia's patients

was being pushed to a breaking point. She wanted to do more, She wanted to face the Nazis head on. After the break, Virginia's frustrations bubble up in a more public setting. Yeah, and within just a few days, the Germans have actually pierced through a natural barrier the forests of the Ardenne region, which no one was defending. The French were on the Machino line, a lot of the British forces were kind of towards the coast on the Belgian border. No one was expecting this to happen in

the Aldenne. That's Dr Ludovin Brock, a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster who specializes in World War two French history. And then they just they create this whole gap, this hole in the Aldenne, and then they just started pouring pouring in. In the photograph you to see lines and lines and lines of tanks coming into France. And the problem is that neither the French nor the British

can counter attack. The French resistance has collapsed, and the imagine no line has been broken, destroying all French resistance. Paris is an open city. A really important move during this major June period is the arrival of a man called Filipita, Marshal Philippita into the French government. He is a military hero from the First World War. He saved the French at Velda, so having him on board with any decision was going to be very important because the

French people really respected him. He was a military hero, like a real hero. But Peta, once he's there in this inner circle, he also comes to the decision that it is best to lay down arms. At June thirteenth nine, Paris was declared an open city. The Germans had successfully invaded France, sending the capital government of Paris fleeing a hundred forty miles to the town of Tour. Virginia increasingly believed her efforts to say wounded soldiers were in vain.

Over the course of a few days, she watched as French forces began to surrender, with Chief of State Philippe Paton issuing a countrywide broadcast. At June the broadcast ended with these words translated from the French. Last night I spoke with adversary and asked if they were propelled to help me between soldiers after the fight, with intact to find a way in which to end the hostilities. France became part of Germany's Empire Frances armistice allowed them to

continue operating under new stipulations. Germany would occupy three fifths of the country and have influence within the French government. And so with that the new authoritarian Vichy regime with Baton at its helm, was born. And one of the first things that he does is put in staff. Jused to exclude people from certain professions, exclude people who aren't French, and especially exclude Jews for instance. So the Jews are no longer to exercise certain professions as of October, and

all of these are not forced by the Germans. They also come from actually a kind of xenophobia and anti Semitism which had been swelling over the course of the nineteen thirties in France. Virginia couldn't ignore the rampant anti Semitism coming from the VG government, French citizens and the occupying Nazis anymore. On top of that, the Service Sanitaire de Lamais was soon disbanded, and Virginia found herself once

again without a job. With more and more Frenchmen becoming new recruits in the German army, she decided to leave for Great Britain, where she would plot against the Nazis in relative safety. Is anyone seated there miss? The train ride to London proved faithful for Virginia Hall. It was there she met an Englishman named George Bellows. Uh no, no, you're welcome to it, Ah, bless you. Hm rather nasty business, isn't it? What well the state of everything? I suppose

It's nice to see somebody living in reality. You wouldn't believe the amount of people I come across who seemed to think this is all some sort of unfortunate phase, as though occupations just dwindle away on their own. I don't know when I'll visit again. I used to spend all my summers in Paris, but the city isn't what it was. These areas afoot. I can't bear it myself. And of course the French would rather blame the depression, anything to keep the word fascism out of their mouths.

I'm sorry, I promise. I usually have a sense of humor whenever the world isn't ending. Oh no, please, you're in the company of a kindred spirit. I just don't know how it happened. In the beginning, everywhere I went there was such a united front against Hitler, and then he appears on our doorstep, and suddenly we have the same enemies. Well, I can't tell you how many friends I've watched go from staunchly anti fascist throwing out any

Jew who comes into their store. You're going to London, Yes, I could use a breather in a place where the air isn't stiff. Yes, m m hmm. I'd play to give you the name of a friend of mine. When you arrive, look up Mrs Tipton and her boarding house. I believe you were finding her excellent company. But Virginia arrived in London, she followed fellow suggestions, taking a room at the boarding house of Mrs Tipton and quickly becoming friends with what turned out to be a fascinating radical woman.

In between rants about dictators and anti Semites, Mrs Tipton served tea and eggs, offering Virginia a modicum of normalcy in her uprooted life. But that normalcy, of course, was quickly shattered in a new and horrible stage of the conflict, the Nazis took their war right into the heart of London. More after the breaks getting on September seven, Germany began

to bomb London. The sirens gave little warning, but just enough for Virginia and her neighbors in the boarding house to find shelter in the basement outside hell rained down from above, obliterating street corners and setting massive fires to

chains of homes. Here's one Londoner's experience. No I distinctly remember being in the shelter hearing a rush of wind, followed by this noise that was the most deafening, frightening noise I've ever heard in my life, followed by a sense of the whole of your body being compressed in. Virginia found herself huddled between strangers, gripping their hands and holding on for dear life. As a ceiling threatened to

give way. She could practically see the bomb breaching, slicing through the roof like it was sheet cake, and landing at her feet. Just before detonating, She pictured her own complete eradication wiped from existence in the moment it would take her to gasp. While she had grown somewhat accustomed to the bombings of fields and planes in her work as an ambunance driver, the surreality of the city setting made the entire event feel more like a dream, or

rather a nightmare. But while the attack went on for hours, the dreaded bombs she envisioned never dropped through the roof. When the assault ended, Virginia took on a new identity, that of the survivor. It would be an identity she maintained for the remainder of her life, but was forged over the following fifty seven consecutive nights as the bombs came again. When those first attacks subsided, the English pressed on,

attempting normalcy again. They continued going to their jobs, raising their families, and attending church, always keeping one eye in the sky, but refusing to capitulate to Hitler's threats okay i say. On January fourteenth, Virginia made a trek out to a cocktail party of one Ms Vera Atkins, an anti fascist sympathizer. She'd been given Vera's name by George Bellows. The English guys she had befriended on her train ride to London. They're at Vera's party. Virginia made a bit

of a name for herself among the guests. And I'll say again what I have said to George a dozen times. The reason for the war is not simply a response to the economy. Hitler has targeted a group of people, men, women and children, and he's scapegoating them. He has a conspiratorial evil man who understands that people must be united in their hatred of something, and so he's picked an innocent people, a people he's effectively slaughtering by the thousands

and proclaimed they are the problem. He's calling his conquests of Poland and France financial successes, but the well of those countries live in poverty and misery. Hitler is not just an evil man. He's a fraud, a shameless fraud. And the sooner he's taken care of, the sooner we can return Europe to a prosperous continent. What Virginia didn't know was that their host, Vera Atkins, was a very well connected woman, and she didn't hold these parties just

to entertain. She admired Virginia's openness, her strength and her perspective, her knowledge of France and capacity for language. Virginia displayed all the hallmarks of an individual who could be seen as exceptionally useful in a time of war. And so after everyone had gone home later that evening, Vera sat at her desk and typed up a memo, I have counted a most interesting prospect, a woman whom I believe could make a valuable asset, requesting permission to bring her

into the full Listen to episode three right now. You have a badom of disloyalty, my son, have you also been disloyal to Germany? Not only does the French police help with the mass roundup of over ten thousand Jews in July, but it also transports Jews who are in turned into camps in the south of France win the free zone. You're not cross. Barby was the head of the Gestapo in lyon In so by this point, situation in France is pretty bad. Is quite tense to scold

to finally meet you, Hitler. If you have any questions for us about good assassins, if you're curious about some aspect of Virginia hall story, or have any comments on the podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Please email us at good Assassins at diversion audio dot com. Make sure you spell assassins correctly again, that's good Assassins at diversion Audio dot com. We'll try to answer your questions on a future episode. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and

Instagram at diversion pods. Good Assassins is a production of Diversion Audio in association with I Heart Podcasts. This season is hosted by Stephen Talti and written by C. D. Carpenter, Produced and directed by Kevin Thompson for Real Jet Packs Productions. Story editing by Jacob Bronstein, with editor real direction from

Scott Waxman, Additional research and reporting by Sophie McNulty. Theme music by Tyler Cash featuring the voices of michaela Is Caerdo, Raphael cork Kill, Lenna Klingerman, John Parkes, Andrew polk or Lock, Cassidy Manoel Falciano, Sean Gormley, Matthew Amnt and Steve Rautman. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Paul Goodrich, Sound editing by Justin Kilpatrick. Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman for Diversion Audio. Diversion Audio