Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

12.

THE GESTAPO FILE

HE SAID TO ME THAT HE WOULD SOON BE SHOT AND THAT, IN THIS CASE, HE ONLY REGRETTED ONE THING: HE HAD NOT DONE ENOUGH.

—Renée Guschinow, describing a conversation with Marcel Petiot

THE Gestapo had certainly known Marcel Petiot. As Massu now learned to his astonishment, the German secret police had suspected him of operating a secret organization that helped Jews, downed Allied pilots, and deserting German soldiers escape Occupied Paris. According to one of the estimated twenty thousand Parisian informers, this clandestine organization was headquartered in a beauty salon at 25 rue des Mathurins, a street known for its many theaters and brothels, located just around the corner from the grand department stores Galeries Lafayette and Printemps, on the Boulevard Haussmann.

The hair salon, decorated in the faded elegance of a previous era, was run by Raoul Fourrier, a short, stocky sixty-one-year-old hairdresser and wigmaker. He was assisted by his friend, the fifty-six-year-old makeup artist and former cabaret performer Edmond Marcel Pintard, who had acted under the stage name Francinet and played small roles in a number of silent and early talkie films. Pintard’s task in the organization was to frequent bars, bistros, cafés, and nightclubs, looking for people interested in leaving Nazi-occupied Paris. Once he had established contact, he would refer potential clients to the hair salon, where details of passage would be arranged.

Both Fourrier and Pintard were believed to be serving under Marcel Petiot, who, to Massu’s further surprise, had actually been arrested by the Gestapo and held in prison for almost eight months. The German file detailed the campaign that the secret police had waged in the spring of 1943 to capture Petiot, the rumored Resistance leader and enemy of the Third Reich.

One branch of the Gestapo was particularly involved in the pursuit: IV B-4. In the Nazi bureaucracy of terror, the Gestapo was Department IV of the SS Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptsamt). Section B dealt with “sects” and subsection 4 with Jewish Affairs. Since March 1942, Gestapo IV B-4 had worked in every stage of the Nazis’ “Final Solution”: arresting Jews, seizing their property, and deporting them to death camps in the east. The office in Paris, like all other branches in Occupied Europe, answered to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin.

A commissioner in the bureau, Dr. Robert Jodkum, a solidly built man in his late fifties with a crew cut, thick glasses, and pale blue eyes, was anxious to obey. As former secretary and interpreter for SS Hauptsturmführer Theo Dannecker, the resident Nazi “Jewish expert” in Paris, Jodkum now served under Dannecker’s successor, SS Obersturmführer Heinz Röthke. Although also nominally under Sturmbannführer Loperz, Jodkum was effectively in charge of this anti-Jewish service.

Jodkum, a former pork butcher, was one of the rare civilians to obtain such prominence in the Reich Security Main Office, which had been established in 1939 to bring together the seven departments of the SS under one security office. Jodkum was, moreover, under pressure for his alleged leniency on the Jewish question. Apparently he decided to prove himself with an energetic pursuit of Petiot’s rumored escape organization, believed to be engaged in the “contraband of persons.”

Jodkum’s plan was not simply to storm the hair salon and start arresting people. Instead he decided to send in a plant, or mouton (literally a sheep or stool pigeon), who would pose as a man desperate to leave Paris and seeking the organization’s services. That way, the Gestapo could infiltrate the organization, learn its procedures, and then, at the opportune moment, seize its ringleaders, intermediaries, files, and assets. Plotting carefully, Jodkum selected Yvan Dreyfus for this role. Dreyfus was a thirty-five-year-old former silk merchant from a Jewish Alsatian family who had come to Jodkum’s attention due to an unfortunate turn of events.

Back in 1939, when the war began, Dreyfus was working in the United States, where he had previously studied engineering. His friends, concerned about the danger to him as a Jew, urged him to stay there in safety. Dreyfus had resisted. “I am a Frenchman,” he said, unable to abandon his country in a time of need. He returned home to France and enlisted in the army. He arrived just before the German Occupation.

After the army was demobilized, Dreyfus found that the silk business had been decimated, and he turned to selling radios and electronic equipment in Lyon. In early 1943, wanting to join de Gaulle’s Free French Army in London, Dreyfus decided to hire a passeur, or guide, to lead him and four of his cousins out of Occupied France. But they were betrayed and the men were captured at Montpellier, imprisoned at Nîmes, and eventually sent to Compiègne, a notorious transit stop on the way to the Nazi death camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.

Hearing of his arrest, the Dreyfus family of course wanted to buy his release, if it was at all possible, and sure enough, a French lawyer with the right connections appeared. This was Jean Guélin, a former Lyon attorney and mayor of a small commune in Deux-Sèvres, until he lost his position for black market dealings. Now in Paris, Guélin operated a lucrative purchasing agency that sold scrap iron to Occupation authorities. He also engaged in a number of other ventures, including directing the Théâtre des Nouveautés, not far from Fourrier’s hair salon, and also for the last five months, with his colleague Marcel Dequeker, the Théâtre Édouard VII. Both Guélin’s restaurant, Zardas on rue de Sèze, and his apartment on rue de Longchamp had been confiscated from Jewish victims.

Well informed of the wealth of the Dreyfus family, Guélin approached the Gestapo commissioner with a proposal to release the prisoner. A ransom, Guélin added, could be split three ways between Jodkum, the Third Reich, and himself.

Such ransoming of individual Jews was on the increase in both Occupied France and Europe. Six months earlier, Heinrich Himmler had (with Adolf Hitler’s support) allowed IV B-4 offices to free certain people deemed a low “security risk” in exchange for a fee. Some offices in Europe had drawn up lists of rich Jews to ransom, such as the Frielingsdorfs Liste of the Netherlands’ IV B-4. At least four hundred individual Jews purchased their freedom in that country alone, raising a total of 35 million Swiss francs. The money was in part used to finance Third Reich operations as well as line the pockets of Nazi officials who brokered the deals.

Jodkum accepted the proposal to sell Dreyfus’s release, but added the stipulation that the prisoner had to perform a service and infiltrate the escape route. From previous surveillance, the Gestapo knew that the underground organization could easily be contacted in the cafés and bars of the 9th and 10th arrondissements. Getting accepted, however, was more difficult. The organization was believed to take many safety precautions, including rigorous background checks, conducted allegedly by a French police officer, and a number of interviews, to ensure that a potential client posed no security threat.

If the applicant gained admission, the time and date of the departure would be set at a later meeting at an undisclosed location. The traveler would usually be notified three or four days in advance. At the time of the rendezvous, a member of the escape organization would meet the client and escort him or her to a secret hideaway, thought by Gestapo informers to be a “hotel or a doctor’s office.” All ties with family and friends were at this point severed. Departure was believed to take place about every three weeks.

Charges were typically assessed at various stages of the journey to freedom: an initial payment of 50,000 francs, an additional fee of 400 francs for each night in the organization hotel before departure, and another 90,000 francs for the false papers that were handed over at the railway station. (The fees, actually, differed depending on the person.) All the client’s money and jewels were entrusted to the escape organization for safekeeping until the client reached the Spanish border. The organization under scrutiny was believed to send its clients to Irun, a Basque border town in Gipuzkoa (Spanish: Guipúzcoa), and then farther by train, to a port in Portugal, where a neutral ship took them to South America. Clients arrived with diplomatic papers identifying them as commercial agents of the Republic of Argentina.

One Gestapo report summed up the organization: “The management of this underground railroad for the escape of persons from under German control must be assumed to be found or sought out among France’s leaders or upper classes.” It enjoyed the support of a foreign embassy, and the organization was, the report concluded, “remarkably efficient.”

TO secure the prisoner’s release from the concentration camp, Dreyfus’s wife Paulette was forced to pay a ransom, which included 100,000 francs just to open the dossier and a series of other fees to cover “unexpected costs” along the way that eventually surpassed 4 million francs. Yvan Dreyfus was then coerced into signing two important documents.

The first guaranteed that he would inform German authorities of all the information gained about the clandestine organization; the second required him to swear an oath that he would never act in any way against the Third Reich. Paulette Dreyfus, who had been led to believe that the ransom would purchase her husband’s unconditional freedom, was horrified. Guélin reassured her that it was a mere formality designed to satisfy Gestapo bureaucracy. He then asked for another 700,000 francs.

Yvan Dreyfus, a staunch patriot, was at the mercy of his captors. Signing the papers thrust in front of him by the men in brown leather jackets was the only way to leave the concentration camp. His cousins, moreover, were still held by the Germans, and his wife had been lured into Paris from Lyon to complete the negotiations. The German negotiators had made it clear to Dreyfus that any failure to cooperate would be construed as an act of hostility toward the Third Reich.

On April 9, 1943, Dreyfus signed the papers, and, shortly afterward, his wife paid the final installment of the fee at the Madeleine métro station. Dreyfus was released and the couple went to dinner to celebrate. Guélin also tagged along. On May 18, 1943, two Gestapo agents demanded that Dreyfus fulfill his end of the bargain.

By this time, Guélin had already made arrangements for Dreyfus to meet the purported leader of the escape organization, “Dr. Eugène.” He accompanied Dreyfus to the rendezvous, which was indeed a hairdresser’s salon on rue des Mathurins. Guélin described the evening:

We climbed a dirty, dark staircase, and passed through a succession of rooms in the hair salon, until we came to the one where Monsieur Fourrier was … Dreyfus asked him if he could obtain a passport for him, and Fourrier escorted him into a neighboring room, where in the shadow between the curtains, I saw a rather tall man who spoke with them

.

Dreyfus was informed that this was the first of several meetings because the organization needed to verify his credentials and evaluate his application. For the next interview, he was instructed to bring ten photographs for the false passports and papers: five full-face and five profile. He was also asked to pack his valuables in two suitcases. The fee was 200,000 francs.

After the background checks and the interviews, which were counted as numerous in the Gestapo report, though in reality there were probably no more than two or three, Dreyfus was selected to leave Paris on May 20, 1943. He was told to arrive at the salon on that day, and he would then be taken to a secret location to receive vaccinations and await departure. Gestapo agents planned to follow him, catching the members of the organization in the act of accepting payment. Once this was accomplished, one Gestapo report noted, they could search the headquarters, identify the people who furnished the false papers, and, of course, seize the organization’s assets, which were assumed to consist of “many millions of francs.”

At the appointed time, Dreyfus made the connection with Dr. Eugène, and the two men left the hair salon headed toward the Place de la Concorde. Somewhere on the Champs-Élysées, likely inside the métro station, they managed to elude the Gestapo agents and disappear. Dr. Eugène was evidently quick on his feet. Had Dreyfus, convinced of the doctor’s services to the Resistance, tipped him off about the trap?

Jodkum, furious at the failure, prepared to infiltrate the organization a second time. An agent quickly secured a meeting for four days later. But before that occurred, another German organization intervened.

UNBEKNOWNST to Jodkum, a separate subsection of the Gestapo had also been investigating the alleged escape organization. Parallel organizations with similar and indeed rival aims were notorious in the Third Reich, but this only partly explains the duplication. Jodkum had investigated the agency for its rumored assistance to Jews hoping to escape Occupied Paris. The second organization, suboffice IV E-3, which dealt with military security and counterintelligence, was concerned because of its alleged help to German soldiers who preferred to desert, rather than risk a transfer to the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union.

The leader of IV E-3 was Hauptsturmführer Dr. Friedrich Berger. Like Jodkum, Berger had also recruited a mouton to infiltrate the group, Agent VM-X (V-Mann “X”), or Charles Beretta, a small man who looked more like a university professor than the hardened black market racketeer he was, who had been released from prison camp in 1940. Beretta worked as a tailor when he met Dr. Berger and, seduced by payment and privileges, began to cooperate with him. By January 1943, Beretta had been placed in charge of some lucrative purchasing agencies on behalf of the occupying power.

So while Jodkum’s team prepared for a second strike at the underground escape network, Berger sent Beretta into the hair salon, posing as a prisoner of war on temporary leave who feared being sent to a German work camp and wanted desperately to flee abroad. He also told Fourrier that his wife was held at Drancy and he wanted to raise enough money to buy her release. He pleaded for last-minute inclusion in the escape party.

After passing the series of interviews and background checks, Beretta was taken into a back room of the salon. Like Dreyfus, he handed over the ten photographs for his false papers. He saw his forged passport, or something purporting to be it—“the doctor showed it, but did not let me take it and study it closely,” he said. Beretta was asked to bring two suitcases and a blanket. He submitted a diagram showing a layout of the premises.

Although he had not learned the identity of the doctor, Beretta described him as a man approximately “thirty-five to thirty-eight years old, height about 175 cm [5′7″ to 5′8″], brown hair, thin, clean-shaven, wearing a navy blue and white striped suit. Nervous. He has the habit of rubbing his hands constantly.”

Beretta played the part of an aspiring fugitive, feigning financial distress and negotiating the fee of 100,000 francs down to 60,000. He paid an initial 10,000 and promised the last 50,000 the following day. When he showed up to complete the transaction, he handed over the first 45,000, all supplied by the Gestapo with serial numbers duly noted. He delivered the remaining 5,000 in a telephone booth outside Café de la Renaissance, near métro Strasbourg-Saint-Denis. At this point, the hairdresser said that Beretta would leave Paris in a party of eight. He claimed to have a list of names in a book in his pocket.

On May 21, 1943, Beretta arrived at the hair salon for his scheduled departure. Fourrier and the makeup artist Pintard were there, but not Dr. Eugène. Berger sensed that the agency’s leader might have become suspicious, perhaps even had been tipped off about the raid. He ordered his Gestapo men to pounce. Agents exiting black Citroëns dashed into the salon and threw the men to the ground as they accepted payment.

When Jodkum learned of this arrest, he was livid. He would have preferred to watch the organization longer to discover its inner workings, not just its recruiters, who were easy enough to identify and arrest. Jodkum wanted the more shadowy agents who guided clients across the frontier, the officials who helped with the false paperwork, and, of course, the leader of the organization himself and the reputed treasure, all of which he feared would now be harder to seize. He blamed Berger’s panicked arrest for spoiling his opportunity. As a higher authority, Jodkum pulled rank and seized control of the interrogations.

The prisoners were handed over to Jodkum, with apologies. The hairstylist and makeup artist at first denied everything, but as questioning soon turned brutal, both men admitted working for a well-connected physician known as Dr. Eugène. He smuggled clients out of Occupied France across the mountains into the Free Zone, or abroad, passing through Andorra and then Spain, where they were put on a ship to Argentina. He also obtained false passports and other required travel documents for his clients. The doctor, they confessed, lived at 66 rue Caumartin.

WAS Marcel Petiot really Dr. Eugène, the man the Gestapo suspected of helping desperate people escape Occupied Paris? What implications, if any, did the Gestapo file have for discovering the identity of the remains at rue Le Sueur? And what had happened to Yvan Dreyfus?

By six o’clock on May 21, 1943, three hours after the arrest of the hairdresser and makeup artist, the Gestapo had stormed Marcel Petiot’s apartment and hauled him off to their headquarters in the imposing former French Ministry of Interior, at 11 rue Saussaies. They also arrested his old friend, René Nézondet, who had just arrived with theater tickets for the night’s performance of Champi’s musical comedy Ah, la Belle Epoque! at Théâtre Bobino.

Gestapo headquarters was an intimidating place even to its own officers. Former member Hans Gisevius described the atmosphere that prevailed in Berlin—and the tension could certainly apply to the office in Paris:

[It was] a den of murderers.… We did not even dare step ten or twenty feet across the hall to wash our hands without telephoning a colleague beforehand and informing him of our intention to embark on so perilous an expedition

.

His colleague, Arthur Nebe, entered and exited the building using the back staircases, “with his hand always resting on the cocked pistol in his pocket.”

Dragged past the armed guards, Petiot was taken to a room on the fourth floor for questioning. He would later claim that the Gestapo had beaten him savagely at one point after his arrest, every hour throughout the night. The first few days—“three days and two nights,” as he put it—Petiot was shuttled between this building and other offices, including a branch of the military espionage and counterespionage organization, Abwehr, at 101 Avenue Henri-Martin.

Petiot suffered a series of brutal interrogations. As he described it, they drilled and filed his teeth, and put his head in a vise (“skull crushing”), causing him to spit blood for days and suffer excruciating cases of vertigo for a long time afterward. He was also given “the bath,” the technique of stripping a prisoner naked and then submerging him, headfirst, with arms and feet bound in chains, into icy water until he fell unconscious, at which point he was revived and the torture repeated. He was eventually dressed and sent in his soaking wet clothes to shiver away in a cold cell.

Sometimes prisoners faced other savage treatment, such as crushing or twisting of the testicles, or electric currents running through the hands, feet, and ears, with one end attached to the rectum and the other to the penis. There is no evidence that Petiot received either of the latter, but these served, along with the lash, the whip, the bath, and the vise, in the arsenal of interrogation methods used in Gestapo offices in France and elsewhere in Occupied Europe. It was called “running a prisoner through the dance.”

Petiot was interned at Fresnes Prison, a white stone structure seven miles outside of Paris that was at that time the largest prison in France and indeed the continent. It was also a notorious holding place for Resistants, captured British agents, and other enemies of the Third Reich. Petiot was detained in cell 440 on the fourth floor of the first division.

The cells in the long corridors were small, with a chair, a table, and an iron cot chained to the wall and covered by a straw mattress often infested with fleas or other bugs. Near the table were an open toilet and a single brass faucet. Graffiti was sometimes scratched or penciled into the walls, offering a glimpse into the spirit of the prisoners—many of them marshaling their resources in expectation of the next interrogation.

In cell 44 of the Second Division, American Sergeant H. Hilliard scrawled his name, the date “June 1943,” and the words “God bless America.” Guy Gauthier (alias André Nantais) of the Resistance network Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), locked in cell 205 of the Second Division, wrote, “Live Free or Die Fighting. France Free Yourself.” Cell 147 noted the death of “Mazera Dédé, innocent victim of the Gestapo,” while someone in cell 34 had drawn a heart with a pierced arrow and the letters R and L. He added not “Vive de Gaulle,” but “Vive le fin de la guerre.”

Like many other people arrested together, Marcel Petiot and René Nézondet had been separated upon arrival. Eight days later, Nézondet saw his friend again when both men stood outside the main entrance at Fresnes awaiting transfer from their cells for further questioning at Gestapo headquarters. Petiot was, Nézondet said, a pitiful sight. Handcuffed and chained at his ankles, Petiot “seemed to have great difficulty moving. He stood slightly stooped and patted his head constantly with a wet handkerchief.”

What, in the end, did Petiot admit to his interrogators? According to his confession, which he had been forced to sign, Petiot was not the main leader of the escape organization. He claimed to work for a patient in his medical practice named Robert Martinetti, or the “Martinetti Organization.”

Petiot had begun this work, he told his interrogators, one day in November 1941 when the alleged Martinetti informed him of the escape route to South America and asked if any of his clients wanted to use it. Months later, Petiot asked one of his patients, the hairdresser Charles Fourrier (his name was actually Raoul Fourrier), who in turn agreed to send him people wanting to leave Paris. Petiot met the potential clients at the rendezvous, usually at or near Place de la Concorde, such as outside the entrance to the métro at rue de Rivoli or, alternatively, in front of the station at Saint-Augustin. From here, he claimed to take them to Martinetti. The charge was at first 25,000 francs, though it later increased to 50,000 or higher, depending on the case.

Departures had begun in late 1942, Petiot said, pleading ignorance of most of the details about the organization, its escape route, and its hideaways. “All I knew, and all I was supposed to know, was Martinetti and delivering the travelers to him,” Petiot declared. Explaining why he was questioning Dreyfus if he were only a cog in the machine as he claimed, Petiot said that he had become skeptical of many people that Fourrier brought to him. He had taken it upon himself to examine candidates for their suitability.

“I never saw any of the persons turned over to Martinetti again,” Petiot said. He did not know how to contact the boss, who, he claimed, always instigated communications by visiting his office or calling him. This professed ignorance must have sounded suspicious to the Gestapo, but the files revealed no further elaboration.

As one cell mate, a British-trained Resistance fighter named Lieutenant Richard Héritier, later claimed, he had no doubt that Petiot was a member of a network active in the French Resistance. He was moreover shocked at the brazen disrespect Petiot showed the guards. He acted as if he simply did not care what happened to him. Curiously, however, Petiot was never deported, executed, or made a hostage to be shot in reprisal for an attack on German soldiers. In fact, on January 13, 1944, Petiot was removed from his cold, damp cell and released. Less than two months later, the bodies were discovered on his property at rue Le Sueur.

The file in front of Massu was silent on the mystery of his release. Was it because, as Jodkum later implied, the Gestapo had concluded that Petiot was a complete lunatic? Did the Gestapo manage, as it sometimes did, to “turn” prisoner Petiot and have him work for them? Would that explain the sense of invulnerability he seemed to feel as he repeatedly insulted the Germans? Had he, as Petiot himself later claimed, proved so stubborn that the Gestapo chiefs had calculated that they would learn more if they released him and tracked his activities?

The French police would later find out, thanks to Germaine Barré, an agent in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), that Jodkum had offered Petiot his freedom in return for 100,000 francs. Having heard the conversation herself, while awaiting her own interrogation, she recalled that Petiot had declined, claiming that he suffered from cancer of the stomach and did not care whether they released him or not. Jodkum then called Petiot’s brother, Maurice, who promptly paid the ransom.

But this testimony begs the question why the Gestapo would release Petiot in the first place, particularly at such a relatively cheap price. Did Petiot benefit from protection? If so, who or what was looking after him, and why? The Gestapo file was certainly helping Massu learn about the case, but at the same time, it raised many questions about the murder suspect, the identity of the bodies found on his property, and of course the motives of the crimes.

On March 15, 1944, with Gestapo file in hand, Massu ordered the arrest of the hairdresser Raoul Fourrier and makeup artist Edmond Pintard. Later that same day, as Massu was trying to make sense of the murky and increasingly puzzling case, a middle-aged man contacted the police after reading in the newspapers about the discovery on rue Le Sueur.