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| Chapter 1: Lying for the Truth | |
| On October 22, 1940, not far from a tiny French hamlet near Grenoble called Montagne, two hunters out with their dogs stumbled across something gruesome hidden in a small stand of woods. At the foot of a fine old oak sat, upright, the decomposing body of a man. The man had been dead for a long time, and he appeared to have been hanged. | |
| What the hunters found that day would become more than a legend of their town; it would take its place among the enduring mysteries of modern politics. For this was the body of a man named Willi Munzenberg, and Willi Munzenberg had lived and died as one of the unseen powers of twentieth-century Europe. When the hunters found it, his corpse was almost entirely covered with fallen leaves. Only the vile face and the popped stare of trangulation were visible -- that and the noose. The knotted cord around its neck seemed to have snapped, probably quite soon after he had been hanged, and when it broke, the body had apparently dropped to the base of the tree. There it had stayed, knees up, all through that summer of the French defeat, sitting oddly undectected until October began to cover it with the drift of autumn and the hunters' dogs, yelping and whining, discovered the thing. | |
| The French villagers knew nothing about Willi Munzenberg. Munzenberg was and is not a famous name, though this man's power had given him a potent grip on the working of fame. Since his radical youth in 1917, Munzenberg had been a largely covert but major actor in the politics of the twentieth century. As a founding organizer of the Communist International and a leader in the structure of Marxist-Leninist power outside Russia, Munzenberg had played an especially influential part in the conspiracies, the maneuavers, the propaganda, the secret policies and the public spins on opinion that had led to this very spot: here to the fall of France; here to Hitler's war on the West; here to these woods, and this death. | |
| October 1940 came in the bitter first autumn following the French debacle at the hands of the Nazi Wehrmacht. France was huddled in the morose stillness of defeat. The nation's downfall seemed complete; for the moment, the war had finished its vicious business in France and moved on. | |
| For the dictators, all was going well. Stalin had consolidated his alliance with Hitler. After years of secret contacts made behind a smokescreen of co-opted antifascism -- a smokescreen significantly created by Willi himself -- the two totalitarian secret services were working in a sinister collaboration that was defined by their ganster enmity, bound tight in a brotherhood of loathing. Poland has been successfully partitioned between the two; Finland was in Stalin's hands. The Nazis were driving west, and the war in all its horror was focused on England. | |
| For this was also the autumn of the Battle of Britain. All through the months since France had fallen, the Luftwaffe had been carpetbombing the cities of England. Every night the London sky was lit with tracers and fire; the air was filled with the shattering scream of bombs and the pounding of anti-aircraft defense. The prospect of an English defeat was imminent and real. | |
| But in that French valley of the Isere River, the only gunfire being heard was the occasional muted crack of a hunter's shotgun kicking its echo across the lovely wooded countryside. And through that countryside the two men from Montagne now rushed back into town, along with their dogs, to alert the gendarmerie to what they had found. | |
| Almost certainly, Willi Munzenberg had died in those woods five months before, on June 21, 1940. Whether he died by suicide or murder is not clear. June 21, 1940, however, was the day that the French government fell to the Nazis, and as we shall see, much rests on this exact coincidence of one man's death with the nation's fall. In those days of the French collapse, the countryside around Montagne had been filled with exiles and refugees streaming southward. Everyone was in flight. Yet Willi Munzenberg's flight differed from most. For one thing, it was being tracked by the secret services of at least three nations. It seems that even in those worst of times, certain important players were exceptionally interested in whether this one man, running, left France alive. | |
| The above text is an excerpt from Stephen Koch's Double Lives, published by Enigma Books | |