5. Sansom’s Network Was Tracked Down by One of the Abwehr’s Best Investigators
Odette Sansom’s and Peter Churchill’s nemesis would prove to be a seemingly unprepossessing German investigator with an unlikely background. Sergeant Hugo Bleicher, who had recently taken down the Allies’ then-largest network in France, had sought to join the Kaiser’s navy in his youth, but was rejected due to poor eyesight. Drafted into the army when he turned eighteen in 1917, he was sent to the Western Front, where he was captured by the British almost immediately upon his arrival. After WWI, he went to work for a German firm in Spanish Morocco. When WWII began, he was drafted into the army once again, and sent to France after its conquest as an undercover cop.
There, he demonstrated a talent for interrogating and turning captured agents – without torture, but by appealing to their egos, or otherwise spotting and targeting their psychological weak spots. He became a celebrity among the Gestapo and the Abwehr – German military intelligence – when he used those skills in 1941 to turn a captured agent, and convinced him to snitch on his comrades. The result was the unravelling of a network named INTERAILLE, then the largest Allied network in France, and the capture of over 60 undercover agents. In early 1943, German authorities, concerned about increased Resistance activities in southern France, put sergeant Bleicher on the tail of SPINDLE, Odette Sansom’s and Peter Churchill’s network.