Perhaps more than any other single factor of World War II, the Nazi persecution and extermination of Jews, gypsies and other groups is seen as the war's greatest tragedy. The number of deaths is staggering: six million Jews, four million Soviet POWs, three million non-Jewish Polish civilians, one million Serbs, more than 100,000 German and Polish mentally ill or physically retarded, and hundreds of thousands of gypsies and slave laborers from western Europe and the Balkans. These figures, forever etched in human history, cause us to struggle for understanding: how and why could such massive deaths have occurred? Stories of the incredible courage exemplified by those who struggled against Hitler's Third Reich are told and retold. I believe that such stories give us hope to overcome the adversaries we encounter in our everyday lives. Certainly, we think to ourselves, if common men and women were able to rise above and conquer those fiendish barbarians, we should be able to master the challenges facing us. When reduced to its most simple theme, Wolves at the Door exudes that kind of hope. It is a book about a woman of privilege and means, living with an enormous handicap, who exchanges her life of comfort for one of risk, joining in the fight to preserve mankind. Interspersed with Hall's story will be pertinent details of the war in Europe, Allied strategies and the homefront. Virginia Hall was born in 1906 into a milieu of wealth and privilege in Baltimore, MD. Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in1931 to follow her dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. She began her career as a clerk at the American embassy in Poland. The next stop was the American consulate in Izmir, Turkey, where Virginia's life took an unexpected turn: she accidentally shot herself in the left foot on a hunting expedition. Gangrene set in and Hall lost her left leg from the knee down. Despite her handicap, she had hoped to continue her State Department career as a Foreign Service Officer, but left in disgust in 1939, when her career was roadblocked. According to a bizarre regulation for Foreign Service employees, "any amputation of a portion of a limb … is cause for rejection in the career field." Hall remained in Europe and was in Paris when Hitler's war machine rolled into Poland in 1939. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, she left for London. Hall was working as a code clerk at the American embassy when she was recruited by the British paramilitary service known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Their mission was to undertake sabotage and subversion, and to form secret military forces in German occupied Europe. The SOE was to initially act as an intelligence gathering operation, but would eventually, in the words of Winston Churchill, "set Europe ablaze." In the SOE Hall learned skills that her wealthy Baltimore contemporaries could not have conceived of. She became an expert in weaponry, communications, resistance activities and security. Because of her command of the French language, her first assignment was to establish resistance networks in unoccupied France, the first female SOE agent to do so. When the United States entered the war in 1941, Hall's job became much more perilous. Her country was now a Nazi enemy and she had to be constantly vigilant to avoid Gestapo officers. Captured spies were imprisoned, beaten and tortured. Some were then mercifully executed while others faced slow, painful deaths. The Nazis were unlike any foe previously encountered by Great Britain or the United States. They fought with little regard for the rules of gentlemanly warfare. Their fundamental belief, blut und boden (blood and soil) was that a healthy nation was one of a people with common blood, living on its own soil. This belief excluded many groups, including the six million Jews living in Europe. Hitler's Endlösung followed. It was the Final Solution: the extermination of all Jews. Against such an ominous backdrop, Hall managed to locate drop zones for the money and weapons so badly needed by the French Resistance. Under the very noses of the Gestapo, she helped escaped POWs and downed Allied airmen flee to England. And despite the vast numbers of Nazi sympathizers throughout France (many of whom were paid by the Germans for information or the delivery of spies), Hall secured safe houses for agents in need. It is difficult to determine which is most remarkable: the fact that Virginia Hall achieved all of this in spite of her handicap; or her motivation for risking her life in such a fashion. This motivation was not borne out of family obligation - the Halls were not Jewish nor did they have relations living under Nazi brutality. Neither was she filling empty hours waiting for a husband or lover to return from the war. Had she so chosen, Hall could have remained firmly ensconced in Baltimore society, courted by wealthy young men, literally a world away from the peril and misery of war torn Europe. It becomes apparent that Hall's extraordinarily courageous work with the French underground came from a selfless and extremely high standard of personal conduct. Her sense of right was challenged by the Nazi onslaught and it evoked a commitment to help defeat the Axis power. The more she saw, the more revolted she became, determined in her work against them. The Nazi intelligence organization was also adept, and a profile soon developed of a treacherous individual suspected of espionage. This spy's most noticeable trait was a limp and wanted posters soon appeared throughout France offering a reward for the capture of "the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her." By winter of 1942 Hall had no choice but to flee France via the only route possible: a hike on foot through the frozen Pyrénées Mountains into neutral Spain. The escape was arduous and Hall's artificial leg (which she had nicknamed "Cuthbert") became very painful. In a radio message to London during the journey, she mentioned that Cuthbert was giving her trouble. Forgetting her leg's nickname, London replied, "If Cuthbert is giving you trouble, have him eliminated." From Spain, Hall made her way back to London, anxious to return to her work in France. This work had not gone unnoticed by the American counterpart of the SOE, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who recruited her soon after her return. Hall was now a member of the elite American undercover agency that employed 21,000 people around the globe, 4500 of them women. Most of these women worked in non-combat areas, serving in vital positions. A small percentage actually went into the field to work at overcoming the Axis power. And that was exactly what Hall wanted. Hall returned to France in the spring of 1944. The problem of her visibility was solved with a clever disguise: she went from being a trim, 38-year-old American woman to an elderly and robust French peasant. She transformed her limp into a shuffle, camouflaged her leg under ample woolen skirts, and again took up her one-woman campaign against the Third Reich. As the Nazi stranglehold on Europe had now become more tenacious, Hall's work became more militant. She organized, armed and trained three battalions of guerilla groups preparing them for work in sabotage. Together, they destroyed bridges and supply depots, bombed caravans of troops and weaponry, and continued to rescue Allied servicemen in need. Perhaps the most important, and the most dangerous, of Hall's work at this time were her radio transmissions. Unbeknownst to her or her resistance fighters in the spring of 1944, the greatest invasion in history was looming just weeks away and her reports of Nazi troop and headquarters locations proved invaluable in the D-Day planning. But Gestapo radio pinpointing had vastly improved since Hall's last duty in France and she was forced to be constantly on the move to avoid capture. The stress of knowing there was a price on her head and that she was the most hunted spy in Europe was immense, but her duty was to those who depended upon her and she persevered. As the war continued and the battle lines shifted, the work of Hall's resistance forces took on added importance. They provided daily intelligence on local conditions, confused the retreating Nazis and destroyed their supply and communication lines. As a result, Hall's organization was credited with killing over 150 Germans and capturing another 500. And she personally undertook the search and capture of a double agent whose treachery had resulted in the death of members of her group. This remarkable woman remained in France to see General DeGaulle and his troops march through a liberated Paris, and later to celebrate VE day - Victory in Europe. Her selfless acts of courage saved the lives of thousands of Allied servicemen and French citizens alike. Her belief in "liberty for all" was what motivated her to take on nearly impossible odds. She never thought of herself as special, but to those whose lives she saved, she was an angel. Her story should never be forgotten.

The old woman bent her gray head against the frigid wind blowing in from the English Channel as she struggled along the rocky Brittany seaboard. The French province had 750 miles of coastline, all of it inclement during the month of March. And on this particular March day in 1944, the wind seemed set on toppling her over. She was determined to stay her course, however, and shuffled on.

The old man traveling with her also struggled. He appeared less steady than she was and occasionally took her arm to regain his footing. It was obvious from his gait, even to the most casual observer, that his left leg was painful. To make matters worse, the wooden sabots they wore were not suitable walking shoes for hiking along such a rutted road.

Each carrying a battered suitcase, they struggled against the cold wind for a little more than five miles before finally arriving at their destination: the port city of Brest. There the elderly couple made their way to the railroad station and purchased two second-class tickets for Paris. When the time came to depart, they sat in adjoining seats, her bulky woolen skirts taking up a great deal of room on both sides. The train ride took nearly six hours, and it was late when they arrived at the Montparnasse station on the southwestern edge of the city.

Paris looked nothing like it had when the old woman had been there on a previous visit. It had been the spring of 1940; national spirit ran high and the tri-color flew proudly from many buildings. Even the spring sun made an effort at encouragement, shining resolutely through the smoke of burning structures and exploding shells. The French army was fighting furiously to repel the better trained advancing Nazi forces. Under the leadership of 72-year-old General Maxime Weygand, the French had hastily prepared defenses. The old woman had done her part for the war effort - she had transported wounded French soldiers as an ambulance driver. But the Germans had no intention of being deterred and just before they dealt their sledgehammer blow on June 5, the old woman left the city. The French line soon crumbled and by June 14, Paris had been declared an "open city," a request to the enemy to cease fire upon it. On the 21st, Hitler himself was at Compiègne, located a dozen miles outside the capital, and the precise spot where the Germans had been forced to surrender to the French at the close of WW I. The Führer had malevolently chosen the same location to dictate his harsh terms for this surrender.

Now, nearly four years later, blackout curtains kept the "city of lights" in the dark. Signs of war were everywhere: burned out buildings, abandoned military vehicles, shops whose contents had been looted. Even the sun was absent on this day, obliterated by steely clouds. But nowhere was the war more apparent than on the faces of the occasional passersby the old couple encountered on the streets. Fear and mistrust, borne out of the hell of brutal control under the Nazis, was common among French citizens.

The old woman did not feel fear. Rather, she was repulsed by the ravages of war that had destroyed the city. The further she and the old man trudged, the more that repulsion festered into anger and determination. She drew her shabby valise closer in an unconscious effort to guard its precious contents.

Despite their appearances, the feeble, elderly couple's true identities couldn't have been further removed from their current personae. He was Peter Harratt, code named "Aramis," a thirtyish American agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She was Virginia Hall, code named "Marcelle," the accomplished, thirty-eight year old spy who had built a reputation among colleagues and enemies alike while working with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Now also a member of the OSS, Hall was returning to France despite a price on her head and a Nazi pledge to "find and destroy her." Together with other OSS agents, they were to assist the newly formed French Forces of Interior in coordinating resistance efforts.

The couple's elaborate disguises had been created out of a necessity to camouflage Hall's more recognizable features. Her soft brown hair had been dyed a shade of dirty gray and was pulled into a tight bun, giving her young face a severe appearance. Her slender figure was disguised under peplums and full skirts, topped with large woolen blouses and a shabby oversized sweater, to give her a look of stoutness. However, Hall's most identifiable feature, the limp caused by her artificial left leg, couldn't be eliminated. But it could be altered. An accomplished actress, Hall taught herself to walk with a shuffle, a gait suitable for a woman of her assumed age.

The couple spent the night at a safe house, resting and enjoying a fairly substantial meal, considering the scarcity of food in Paris. The next morning, they made their way to the St. Lazare train station, passing numerous Nazi soldiers who paid them little, if any, attention. What, after all, would be the purpose of harassing an impoverished, elderly French couple? Still, Hall's heart fluttered slightly at each encounter; a combination of trepidation, knowing the fate awaiting her should she be caught, and exhilaration, knowing the damage her work would wreak on the Nazi war machine.

Their train journey northward to the city of Amiens took a little over two hours. After walking the three miles to a nearby village, Hall located a farmhouse belonging to Eugene Lopinat. Monsieur Lopinat was not a declared member of the growing French Resistance, but neither was he a Nazi sympathizer. He had been chosen by the Resistance for his reputation of being short on conversation and had been asked to find the old woman lodging. He had chosen a one-room cottage he owned at the opposite end of the village from his farmhouse, a shack with no running water or electricity.

Harratt had orders to install himself similarly further down the road and departed soon after Hall settled into her cottage. She was glad to be free of him. She thought he talked too much and was somewhat indiscreet, two qualities that could bring a quick and painful end to an OSS agent.

In exchange for rent, Hall was to work at Lopinat's farmhouse cooking meals for the farmer's family, taking their cows to pasture in the morning and retrieving them each evening. It was then that Hall's real work began. The suitcase she had carried since landing in Brittany contained a Mark TR3 radio set. Hall used the set to transmit messages to the London OSS office, giving coordinates of large fields she had located during the day while moving Lopinat's cows to and from pasture. The fields were to serve as parachute drops of agents and materiel in support of the French Resistance. The work carried high risks: Hall had to be vigilant of Nazi direction finders, instruments used to zero in on radio transmissions. She would need to relocate quickly if it became apparent that the Gestapo was moving in.

During the day, Hall kept the worn suitcase and its valuable contents hidden in the woodbin next to the fireplace of her cottage. Its location was imperceptible to a casual observer, although she had no visitors. Trained Gestapo agents, however, would tear the cottage apart for even the slightest suspicion of collaboration with the Resistance. Each time Hall returned from her day with the Lopinats and their cows, she carefully surveyed all sides of the cottage from a distance to make certain she would not be walking into a trap. For several weeks, all seemed secure.

Hall's feeling of security came to an abrupt end. Making her way to the Lopinat farmhouse one morning, she saw a small crowd gathered. Curious, she shuffled toward them until an appalling tableau came into view. Three men and a woman, all dead, hung from iron fence posts, spiked through the neck. The Nazi soldiers who stood guard over the grisly scene held the villagers at bay with their rifles, insisting that the bodies remain as a reminder to all who dared resist the Führer.

That night, Hall sent her last message to London from the little cottage. Its meaning would be understood by the few with a need to know: "The wolves are at the door." view abbreviated excerpt only...

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