Great Spies of the 20th Century

13 and 15 May, Barbie and his henchmen received reliable information about resistance activities and arrested almost all of the regional FTP operatives. Only a few men escaped, one of whom was their leader, Guimpel, who owed his survival to the extraordinary courage of his wife. One morning, militiamen and two Gestapo soldiers came to his house in Lyon. His pregnant wife, Manon was alone and opened the door. She clearly knew about her husband's work in the Resistance, as she was also active in the movement. When the men began to question her about her husband, she calmly replied that he had gone away. The men then decided to wait in the house and hold her at gunpoint, until her husband returned. When Manon Guimpel heard a noise outside on the stairs and the key turn in the lock, she screamed, ‘Boris, save yourself!'. Her husband ran back down the stairs as the soldiers rushed out and shot at the fugitive from the landing. Even though he was wounded, Guimpel managed to escape with his life. His wife was under no illusion about what would happen to her and she was indeed arrested, tortured and deported. However, she fortunately managed to escape and later rejoined her husband at the end of the war. A real tale of love and the Resistance!

So who was the traitor? It was not long before the FTP had their suspicions, and their main suspect was a man who worked for the CMZ. His nickname was Boulanger, although his actual name was Lucien Iltis, an Alsatian born in Germany to a French father and a German mother. However, it was not just his origins that lead to him being suspected, but also his mysterious past that had already been a source of intrigue to his FTP comrades.

Yet it was Boulanger who was to carry the main weight of suspicion after Barbie's raids. Firstly because he was not actually arrested and then later as he had managed to disappear shortly after the wave of arrests had taken place. It was not until later that he was found and even then, under very strange circumstances.

Meanwhile, events were accelerating in May 1944 and it was not the moment to investigate who was behind the betrayal. The survivors were lying low and trying somehow to reconstruct the broken network, especially as they were about to embark on several military operations that would accompany the future liberation. Boulanger was temporarily forgotten. At least until 1945.

At that time, an important communist leader called Andre Marty, a leading figure in the famous ‘Black Sea Mutiny' and a member of the National Assembly, decided to look at what had happened in the decapitation of the CMZ. It is likely that Marty, who was extremely ambitious, wanted to build up compromising files on certain party executives. He naturally wanted to protect himself in case of any disturbances and he was well-placed to understand that during the war, many messy events took place. After all, many militants were arbitrarily shot, but it was not always traitors who were executed.

Naturally, the former Black Sea mutineer first addressed Georges Beyer, the man responsible for the meteoric rise of Boulanger within the FTP. Beyer was a former leader of ‘Service B' and held a high position in the PCF.¹⁶ He also became a senior official in the Ministry of War, an appointment no doubt due to his brother-in-law, Charles Tillon, who was the head of the FTP and a communist minister who worked for de Gaulle's resistance. Beyer also spoke to one of the former executives of ‘Service B', Andre Teulery, who was asked to go to one of the French barracks situated near Lake Constance, where he was told he would find Boulanger. It is odd that Beyer clearly knew where Boulanger was hiding. This was a man who was suspected of being a traitor and supposedly responsible for the collapse of the CMZ! However, if Beyer had this information, then it is likely that those in the higher echelons of the party knew it too. Yet without Marty's curiosity, nothing would have been done. The former mutineer also understood that if Beyer had not voluntarily shone a light on what had happened in Lyons, it is certain that he would have been ordered to.

Teulery went to Germany to meet Boulanger and hold him to account. Before this happened however, Beyer was involved in a car accident while travelling to Lyons in what looked like an attempted murder. It is strange that this should have happened in Lyons, precisely where the CMZ had been decimated by Klaus Barbie.

Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer

¹⁷

BEYER, Georges, alias Bernard (1905-1976) was a chemical engineer. He was a union representative of the Federation de la chimie de la CGT and official representative to the International Labour Office in Geneva. Demobilised in 1940, he joined Charles Tillon in Paris and became technical commissioner for the FTP and in this role worked as the coordinator for Service B. He was responsible for security issues from 1945 until he was ousted from the Communist Party Central Committee in 1950.

[The same authors also write]

In 1945 Georges Beyer was a member of the Communist Party’s central committee, while at the same time working for the war department as assistant to General Alfred Malleret-Joinville. Assisted by men like Bob Guimpel and Jean-Pierre Vigier, Beyer was responsible for the military members, meaning that he closely followed the pro-communist elements within the army, as well as more general security matters that affected the army. Contrary to popular belief, he never stopped looking for information and all known witnesses have testified to this fact.

Many of Beyer’s relatives would not have hesitated to confirm that he would never have accepted the inquiry that Marty entrusted him with. Whatever the case, in spite of Beyer’s car accident, Teulery went to Germany and had no difficulty in locating the Alsatian, ‘Boulanger’, which it turns out was one of his many pseudonyms. He was also