BLEICHER, HUGO (1899–2000?). An exceptionally adroit Abwehr
agent working in wartime France, Hugo Bleicher served in World
War I and afterward became a businessman. Because of his knowl-
edge of French and Spanish, he was recruited by the Abwehr and
assigned to Paris during the occupation. Frequently posing as a
potential defector under the pseudonym Colonel Henri, Bleicher
penetrated several networks of the British Special Operations
Executive. Among those arrested as a result were Peter Churchill
and Odette Samson. Bleicher also recruited Mathilde Carré, who
not only betrayed members of Réseau Interallié, a French-Polish
intelligence network established by Roman Garby-Czerniawski,
but also became his mistress. In June 1945, Bleicher was arrested
by the Dutch police in Amsterdam and placed in British Camp 020
to avoid his immediate return to France. He was later convicted
by an Allied court. His memoirs, Colonel Henri’s Story, were
published in 1954 to refute lingering claims of excessive brutality
on his part.
BLITZ. The third of a series of “concentrated blows” to eliminate
enemy espionage networks in the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), Operation blitz (Lightning) took place between early De-
cember 1954 and spring 1955. The first stage involved the arrest of
members of various resistance groups, notably the Kampfgruppe
gegen Unmenschlichkeit, the Untersuchungsausschuss Freiheit-
licher Juristen, and the Ostbüro der SPD. The second stage, code-
named Frühling (Spring), was even broader and struck especially
at the British MI5 using information supplied by Kim Philby and
George Blake.
On 12 April, the GDR Council of Ministers announced the arrest
of “521 spies and subversives.” A massive propaganda campaign
followed in the press, accompanied by numerous show trials during
the summer. Of those arrested, the majority (149) occurred in East
Berlin, while 10 arrests were made in the highly sensitive Wismut
organization. Despite the success of the operation, GDR officials had
to confront the fact that the number of working-class persons appre-
hended was significantly larger than those from the lower-middle and
middle classes. See also FEUERWERK; PFEIL.
42 • BLEICHER, HUGO