It is clear that the PCF leaders had no wish to find out more and the case was closed. However, in November 1946, the DST arrested a former Gestapo man called Johannes Leber, who was not only a former criminal inspector, but also specialised in intelligence. Leber soon revealed some very enlightening information about Boulanger, who according to him, was actually a Nazi agent. He stated that Boulanger had been arrested by the Wehrmacht in 1940 and then drafted into the French Army. However, as he was an Alsatian, he was quickly released and had afterwards returned to Strasbourg. The Germans kept an eye on him and soon discovered that Boulanger was a leading communist official, in fact, he was a Comintern agent. He was immediately re-arrested and transferred to Berlin, where he was asked to become a Gestapo double agent, a proposal Boulanger was quick to accept. He was tasked with infiltrating the Resistance in the south-eastern zone and Johannes Leber was to act as his contact.
Boulanger's role as a Comintern agent clearly helped him to infiltrate the Resistance. He was known at the highest levels of the communist party and came recommended by Moscow, so had no difficulty in reaching and being accepted by the clandestine movement. As a result, he was propelled on to the southern zone's staff of the FTP, while at the same time, remaining in contact with his soviet correspondents.
There is one question that arises from this: if Iltis/Boulanger joined the CMZ in 1943 and its subsequent collapse did not happen until 1944, why did it take so long? Surely it would have been relatively simple for him to denounce all the FTP leaders to his German masters in a shorter space of time?
After Leber's confession, Boulanger was quickly arrested in December 1946. The surviving members of the CMZ were now in no doubt as to who had betrayed their comrades. One of the survivors, Manon Guimpel, who had returned from exile eighteen months earlier, immediately wrote to the military court in Lyons to accuse Boulanger of obvious treason. What is even more surprising is the deafening silence from the Communist Party and its press. If Leber was to be believed, Boulanger was responsible for the arrest and execution of around forty high-ranking FTP officials.
At the time, the quest for ‘purification' was in full flow. Column after column in the communist newspapers continued to demand exemplary punishment for all traitors and collaborators. If the party was not going after Boulanger, then surely it was because they had been given higher orders not to. Yet this did not prevent certain former FTP members from loudly calling for justice, although even though the most level-headed of them were surprised at the silence of their communist friends. However, they were not about to accuse the party and instead turned their anger towards the authorities. After all, had not Boulanger been a member of the French police?
Now in prison, Boulanger became the subject of an investigation into his activities and the act of betrayal that he was deemed guilty of. The Alsatian fought back fiercely and eventually adopted a new form of defence: he no longer denied what he had done, but instead turned to the subject of his nationality. As he was born in Germany, to a German mother, he must therefore be considered a German national. This meant that he could not be accused of treason or collaborating with the enemy, even though he had deported or executed dozens of resistors. He instead claimed to have acted as a German agent in real police operations. According to the Hague Convention, a spy is nothing more than an army field agent. Rather hollow reasoning, it is true, but the result was that after a long legal battle, the case was dismissed in 1955. Boulanger declared innocent and released after serving nine years in prison. The FCP made no objection or comment and their indifference was significant, not to mention suspicious, especially if Boulanger has supposedly embarrassed the party.
He returned to Germany and continued to be surrounded in mystery. He was seen in Frankfurt and then disappeared, with everything suggesting that the former General Bermann moved to the GDR, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and where he had formally begun his career as a Comintern agent. It would appear that he never stopped working for them, even when he was pretending to work for the Gestapo, which if true, is rather astounding!
It would seem that ‘Boulanger' was really a double agent, whose real masters were to be found in the east, both before and during the war. This therefore means that when he betrayed the FTP, he was still acting as a communist agent.This is the great secret behind the whole story and one that was to prove very costly to those who tried to reveal it.
Remi Kauffer
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Born in Mannheim in 1903 of an Alsatian father and German mother, Lucien Wilhelm Boulanger worked as a labourer and had been a communist from 1918. He was technical secretary of the KDP (German Communist Party) and in 1929 enrolled as an officer in the Red Army at the Lenin Academy in Moscow. In October 1932 he began his clandestine life as Lucien Boulanger. As head of M-Aparat, the military wing of the German Communist Party, he was responsible for fighting the Nazi storm troopers. In September 1933, after his
