The Spy of the Siegfried Line, Armand Chouffet, Aerial Photographer

.On 20 June 1940, the day Panzergruppe Guderian arrived in Franche-Comté, three Abwehr officers — German military intelligence — went to Montéchéroux, a small village in the Doubs. Their mission: to arrest Armand Chouffet, one of the French pioneers of aerial espionage. An agent of the French intelligence service from 1935 to 1940, the aviator had taken hundreds of aerial photographs of the construction works ordered by Hitler along the Siegfried Line, facing the Maginot Line. Taking off from Montbéliard aboard a Potez 43, he would land at Luxeuil or Strasbourg before flying on discreetly in another civilian aircraft, a Caudron Simoun, whose registration was changed with each mission. What the enigmatic Chouffet did during the Occupation remains a mystery. Arrested in his village on 10 August 1944 for breaking the curfew, the man was identified and handed over to the Abwehr. In that autumn of 1944, the Trouée de Belfort — a border zone with Switzerland where the clandestine Bruno-Kléber network and Allied services operated — was one of the withdrawal routes for the Nazi armies. The Abwehr chose not to execute Chouffet, but to make use of him. The discovery of previously unpublished archives enables the author to bring to light a forgotten figure of French intelligence and to attempt to shed light on his role during a troubled and complex period.