In this work, a dual-active bridge dc-dc converter with auxiliary-resonant commutated pole is presented. The paper focuses on the control strategies of the auxiliary-resonant commutated pole to allow soft turn-on and soft turn-off of the main switches, and thus increasing the efficiency of the converter. These strategies are developed for a high-power IGCT-based dual-active bridge dc-dc converter. Two boosting strategies, constant time magnetization and constant current boosting, are presented and tested. Besides its main objective to reduce the switching losses, the ARCP also allows balancing of the dc-link voltages in case of imbalanced loads. Strategies for boost current control and active dc-link balancing are introduced, presented and experimentally verified on a small-scale laboratory setup.