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

14.

DESTINATION ARGENTINA

IF THE AMOUNT OF DOUGH EDITH DONATED FOR ALL THESE GOOD CAUSES IS ANY INDICATION, SMUGGLING PEOPLE ACROSS THE BORDER WAS A GREAT WAY TO MAKE A LIVING.

—Simone Berteaut, on her sister Edith Piaf

ON the evening of March 19, 1944, Pablo Picasso’s play Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught by the Tail) was performed in private at his friends Michel and Zette Leiris’s fifth-floor apartment on the Quai des Grands-Augustins. It was a dark surrealist farce that featured a star-studded cast: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Picasso’s former lover Dora Maar. Albert Camus narrated, describing the largely imaginary sets—that is, except for a large black box that served alternatively as a bed, a bathtub, and a coffin.

Picasso had written the play three years earlier, beginning, as he recorded in a notebook, on the evening of January 14, 1941, and, in the tradition of surrealist automatic writing, finishing it three days later. Reminiscent of 1920s avant-garde theater, the play revolved around deprivation and indulgence, or more specifically hunger and sex. Michel Leiris, who had selected the cast, played the lead role of Big Foot. Sartre was The Round End; Raymond Queneau, The Onion; and Jacques-Laurent Bost, Silence. Simone de Beauvoir played The Cousin, while publisher Jean Aubier was The Curtains.

When Gertrude Stein had read the script, she suggested that Picasso stick to painting. But the photographer Gyula Halász, better known as Brassaï, after his native Transylvanian village of Brassó, thought otherwise. He praised Picasso’s virtuosity, comparing the composition style to a “verbal trance [that] gave free rein to dreams, obsessions, unavowed desires, comical connections between ideas and words, everyday banalities, the absurd.” This play, he added, displayed the painter’s “humor and inexhaustible spirit of invention … in their pure state.”

The audience, filled with painters, writers, playwrights, surrealists, and even Argentine millionaires, seemed to agree. They applauded loudly and congratulated Picasso on his success. Afterward, the cast and audience retired for a celebration, fueled by wine and desserts, including a chocolate cake brought by the Argentines.

As the play ended at about eleven, just before that night’s curfew, Leiris had invited the cast and several friends to stay the night. They sang, listened to jazz records, and admired Sartre playing the piano. Camus and the host acted out various scenes, enhanced in part with wine served warm with cinnamon. The party ended at five in the morning. Simone de Beauvoir was overjoyed: “A year before we would never have dreamed of gathering together like this and having a noisy, frivolous party that went on for hours.”

This was the first of the fiestas, as Michel Leiris dubbed them, that would take place in the spring of 1944. Beauvoir described another one not long afterward, at surrealist Georges Bataille’s house in the Cour de Rohan:

We constituted a sort of carnival with its mountebanks, its confidence men, its clowns, and its parades. Dora Marr used to mime a bullfighting act; Sartre conducted an orchestra from the bottom of a cupboard; Limbour carved up a ham as though he were a cannibal: Queneau and Bataille fought a duel with bottles instead of swords; Camus and Lemarchend played military marches on saucepan lids, while those who knew how to sing, sang. So did those who didn’t. We had pantomimes, comedies, diatribes, parodies, monologues, and confessions: the flow of improvisations never dried up, and they were always greeted with enthusiastic applause. We put on records and danced; some of us … very well; others less expertly

.

Beauvoir, looking back, remembered being “filled with the joy of living. I regained my old conviction that life can and ought to be a real pleasure.”

ON March 19, Commissaire Massu began questioning the hairdresser Raoul Fourrier and the makeup artist Edmond Pintard individually about their involvement in the alleged escape organization.

Raoul Fourrier, a short man with white hair in a black beret, was brought into the commissaire’s office on the third floor first. Slumped into an armchair, Fourrier appeared nervous, cautious, and highly distrustful. He spoke in a low voice, as his eyelids fluttered and his fingers clutched the armrest. When the subject of Petiot was broached, Massu noted that the sweat beaded on Fourrier’s forehead and then disappeared into the wrinkles of his thick neck.

After an early silence, Fourrier told Massu that he had been a patient at Petiot’s clinic on rue Caumartin for seven years, and it was there that the doctor first alluded to the escape organization. The time, he believed, was May 1941, because they had been discussing the case of some unfortunate young cyclists who had been punished for crossing the line of demarcation. Petiot had then let it be understood that he knew how to pass Frenchmen into the unoccupied zone and then into South America. It was a dangerous operation that could be infiltrated at any time by the Gestapo. He kept a packed suitcase ready in case he should ever have to leave in a hurry.

Perhaps Fourrier, with his contacts at the hair salon, knew some people who would want to take advantage of this escape opportunity. Fourrier was surprised by this question, he said, claiming that he had always tried to avoid any action that would bring him into conflict with the authorities. But, as Fourrier put it, “the doctor is a charming man, seductive even.” He convinced the hairstylist that he was an active member of the Resistance helping fellow patriots escape “the vengeance of the Germans.”

At the same time, Petiot promised Fourrier a “nice commission.” Defensively, Fourrier told the commissaire that he had hesitated at the thought of his own personal gain. He was after all a patriotic Frenchman. Massu, unconvinced, returned to the subject of the organization. Fourrier freely admitted that he had agreed to help Petiot find recruits, and he sought out the assistance of his old friend, Edmond Pintard, who had many more contacts throughout the Parisian demimonde.

Fourrier told Massu of the client Charles Beretta, a safe choice since this man was already known from the Gestapo file. Since being released by the Germans in January 1944, Fourrier said that Petiot had twice tried to recruit him. When he refused, Petiot became angry and blamed Fourrier for causing their arrests by recommending Beretta.

After a short break in the interrogation, Massu asked about other people Fourrier had referred to Dr. Petiot. One of the first clients, he said, was known in the underworld as “Jo the Boxer,” “Iron Arm Jo,” “Jo la Ric,” or “Jo Jo.” A handsome, dark-haired thirty-something man with a broken nose and prominent scars under his chin, “Monsieur Jo,” as Fourrier called him, often dressed in a flashy style, with baggy, high-waisted, and tight-cuffed pegged trousers, and a long, loose coat with wide lapels and padded shoulders. He had been recruited by Pintard at a small bar on rue de l’Echiquier, in the heart of a notorious prostitution district along rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis.

Fourrier later picked him out from a series of police photographs. His real name was Joseph Réocreux, and he was, as Massu put it, “no choirboy.” Jo the Boxer had a long criminal record that ranged from robbery to procurement, with several terms in prison, from Lyon to Saint-Julien-en-Genevois in the Haute-Savoie on the Swiss border. He had four or five warrants out for his arrest, but there was a more pressing reason why he wanted to leave France.

Jo the Boxer had fallen out with the leader of one of the most violent and notorious criminal gangs in Occupied Paris: Henri Lafont (real name Henri Chamberlin). Alias “Henri Normand,” “Monsieur Henri,” or “The Boss,” the forty-two-year-old Lafont ran the group known informally as La Carlingue or the French Gestapo. The official name was Active Group Hesse, after a German SS officer under Helmut Knochen who’d looked after its foundation. Lafont’s men would not only engage in the usual racketeering and run bars, restaurants, and nightclubs; they would also kidnap, rob, ransom, and torture “enemies of the Third Reich”—and indeed they would often be rewarded by German authorities for their attacks. Lafont would ride through Paris in his white Bentley, always the latest model and usually with a mistress at his side. He seemed to prefer aristocrats and dancers.

In his palatial office on the second floor of 93 rue Lauriston, which was filled with the dahlias and rare orchids that he obsessively collected, Lafont ruled over a brutal and increasingly profitable criminal empire. He had an extensive network of agents and informers who kept him updated about affairs. Lafont insisted on order and discipline, demanding that his men remain régulier with him, that is, showing at all times, as one former member of the gang put it, “discretion, efficiency, team spirit, and a strict regard for instructions.” Jo the Boxer had broken this rule. He was donning a Gestapo uniform and, on his own initiative, committing a string of burglaries, thereby defrauding both the Third Reich and his own organization. Punishments in the cellar of Lafont’s gray stone building were more feared in the underworld than the tortures of the Gestapo.

As Fourrier described the events for Massu, Edmond Pintard had arranged for Jo to meet with Marcel Petiot at Café Mollard near Gare Saint-Lazare. Over a few glasses of brandy, they discussed Jo’s departure from Occupied Paris. Despite agreed protocol, however, Jo had not come alone. He brought along François Albertini, or “François the Corsican,” a thirty-four-year-old pimp from Vescovato Corsica with a prominent scar on his face. They were joined by two women, both prostitutes and mistresses: Lucienne or Claudia Chamoux (Lola, Lili, or Lulu), the older of the two and described as “dark-haired and elegant,” and Annette Basset, “Annette Petit,” “La Poute,” or “Little Bedbug,” a twenty-one-year-old from Lyon.

Petiot, known to his clients only as “Dr. Eugène,” refused to send four people at once on the escape route. He called the challenge, Fourrier recalled, “difficult, even impossible,” and insisted that the gang depart the country in two groups. As Jo had become suspicious of the doctor, apparently made uneasy by the look in Petiot’s eyes, which he told a friend “gave him the chills,” François the Corsican went first, accompanied by Jo’s girlfriend Claudia. The gangsters switched women, most likely to keep each other honest. Fourrier could not recall the exact time of the departure, though Jo and Annette had probably left at the end of October 1942.

But when the time for his departure neared, Jo the Boxer still had doubts. Pintard had tried to cheat him, he sensed, as indeed he had, arbitrarily doubling the departure fee and hoping to pocket the difference. Petiot, on hearing of these shenanigans, exploded, saying that this was a patriotic organization, not a commercial one, and threatened to end his working relationship with Pintard. This show of anger, however, had not removed Jo’s suspicions about the physician. And when news of François and Lulu’s arrival in South America proved slow to arrive, the gangster became more distrustful and restless.

At some point that autumn (neither Fourrier nor Pintard could recall the exact time), Petiot had produced a card or letter, purportedly written by François, relaying news of their arrival in Argentina. Pintard took it to the reluctant client, who then agreed to depart. Jo arrived, as planned, at Café Mollard, near Gare Saint-Lazare, with not one, but two women, Annette and a prostitute, whose name Fourrier could not recall. Rumors in bars referred to her as “Yoyo” or “Yvonne.” She was never identified.

Although Petiot usually balked at taking more than one or two people at a time, he agreed on this occasion, likely inspired by the fact that Jo could not be allowed back on the streets with the inside knowledge he had gained about the organization. He may also have been persuaded that the gangster carried a sizable fortune, which indeed he did: an estimated 1.4 million francs, some sewn into the shoulder of his suit, and an array of other valuables, such as signet rings, a gold watch, and gold, concealed in the heels of his shoe. Annette also wore a great deal of jewelry, not least a large emerald ring studded with diamonds. It was believed that the three planned to start a brothel in the new world.

From his window Fourrier watched them leave, headed in the direction of rue Tronchet. He never saw Jo, Annette, “Mademoiselle X,” François, or any of the gangsters and their mistresses afterward. Weeks after the departure, Pintard saw Petiot wearing Jo’s gaudy gold watch. It had been a gift, the doctor said.

“Really, did you not doubt what happened to the people you sent to Dr. Petiot?” Massu asked.

“Not at all,” Fourrier said, claiming that he had always believed that the physician was sending people to freedom. Massu, after the interview, felt a sudden need for a shower.

DESPITE the commissaire’s skepticism, Fourrier was not necessarily lying. Clandestine escape agencies were rampant in Occupied Paris, and several of them were run by doctors. There was, for instance, the network Vengeance, founded by Dr. Victor Dupont of the Red Cross and Dr. François Wetterwald, which worked to help Allied pilots evade capture and cross into Spain and Portugal with General Charles de Gaulle’s London-based intelligence service, Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action (BCRA). Another doctor, Sumner Jackson, the Maine-born head surgeon at the American Hospital in Paris, at Neuilly, concealed Allied pilots as patients in his hospital.

Many of the escape networks of the French Resistance worked with Allied intelligence organizations. Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), founded in the summer of 1940, after the Fall of France, with the famous charge by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze,” had established Section DF to focus on helping downed Allied pilots and other agents trapped behind enemy lines evade capture. At the time of Fourrier’s interview, Section DF was smuggling Allied soldiers out of France at an average rate of one agent a day.

British Military Intelligence Section 9 (MI 9), founded and led by Norman Crockatt, focused on helping British prisoners escape from enemy prisoner-of-war camps. This remarkable organization was later joined by the American Escape and Evasion Section MIS-X of the Military Intelligence Department and another staff branch called P/W & X. All of these Allied organizations and the French Resistance groups made important contributions, not least in saving men from gruesome torture, helping preserve Allied secrets, and also facilitating the return of experienced soldiers for later missions in the war against the Third Reich.

But not all evasion networks concentrated on military personnel, and several were known to specialize in helping Jews leave the country. Between the time of Petiot’s arrest by the Gestapo in May 1943 and the end of the Occupation, the Zionist Armée juive, for instance, would help at least 313 Jews cross through the Pyrenees into Andorra and then on to Barcelona. Two hundred and seventy-two of them continued on to Palestine. Other organizations had further specialized, such as the Éclaireurs israélites de France (EIF or Jewish Scouts of France) and the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants, a Jewish children’s welfare organization, both of whom rescued children from the Nazis.

Virtually every claim Fourrier made about Petiot’s supposed organization conformed to well-known features of genuine evasion networks. One of the most common paths out of the country was indeed through Marseille or over the rugged Pyrenees mountains. Smugglers had long used the narrow, steep shepherd trails, as had refugees fleeing the Franco regime at the end of the Spanish Civil War. The German seizure of the unoccupied zone in November 1942, however, had forced passeurs to seek out more difficult, higher altitude crossings amid fog, grueling winds, and the risk of avalanche and snowstorm as late as May, not to mention the more active border patrols with trained dogs.

There was the emphasis on departing in groups of two, or at most three, as Petiot had told Fourrier. The town house at 21 rue Le Sueur, with its private courtyard surrounded by high walls, was moreover better suited for shielding escapees than many of the attics, cellars, churches, and other safe houses used by Resistance groups. As for the hair salon, some Resistance organizations were indeed known to use them as fronts, a good choice, actually, for a clandestine business that relied on personal contacts, word-of-mouth publicity, and inconspicuous arrivals and departures. Agent Rose or Andrée Peel (née Virot), who helped save more than one hundred downed British and American pilots in Brest, was only one example of a Resistant who worked out of a beauty parlor.

Argentina would not have been an unlikely destination either. For one thing, the South American country had long welcomed immigrants. With the immense pampas, a rich grassy plain sweeping westward to the Andes Mountains, and a flourishing beef industry, Argentina had enjoyed a rising prosperity but often lacked a sufficient labor force to exploit its resources fully. The capital, Buenos Aires, had grown sevenfold since the turn of the century, making it the third-largest city in the western hemisphere, behind New York and Chicago. Cosmopolitan residents of Buenos Aires called themselves porteños, or “the people of the port.”

The welcoming of foreigners was not only central to Argentine history; it was also written into its constitution. “The federal government shall promote European immigration,” Clause XXV stated, giving specific responsibility to its House of Representatives and granting each arrival full equality, with the option of becoming a citizen after only two years. Later legislation had offered additional incentives. The Immigration and Colonization Law of 1876, for example, promised arrivals a free five-day stay in a government hostel, assistance in obtaining employment, and if necessary, free travel to the job in the hinterland. The government would eventually help defer costs of the voyage and grant the first hundred people of each convoy one hundred hectares of land.

During the Great Depression, however, the government began to restrict immigration. In fact, the influx of illicit Argentine papers onto the black market in Occupied Paris was an unintended consequence of a series of new rules and regulations issued in Buenos Aires. In July 1938, a confidential act known as Directive 11 required Argentine consuls to “deny visas, even tourist and transit visas, to all persons that could be considered to be abandoning or to have abandoned their country of origin as undesirables or having been expelled, whatever the motive for their expulsion.” The target clearly was Jews fleeing persecution. Many other decrees followed. Jewish emigration to Argentina was halved within a year, and continued to drop. As the future vice president Vicente Solano Lima put it, “We don’t want the ghetto here.”

As the difficulty of legally entering Argentina increased, officials in Argentine consulates around Europe seized an opportunity to profit. In Milan, the Argentine consulate was notorious for selling immigration documentation. “What price for an Argentine visa today?” was a question often heard outside its offices, recalled Eugenia Lustig, the Italian Jewish physician. The Argentine consulate in Hamburg was known to sell visas to Jews for approximately 5,000 Reichsmarks. An Argentine consul in Barcelona, Miguel Alfredo Molina, confiscated passports from Argentine citizens to resell for 35,000 pesetas each. Closer to Petiot, the Argentine ambassador in Paris, Miguel Ángel Cárcano, was also cashing in on the opportunity. Before his recall at the beginning of the Occupation, he was believed to have made one million dollars from selling Argentine visas to Jews.

This was sordid business. At the same time, it illustrates painful moral ambiguities at the heart of the Second World War. As the historian and grandson of a wartime Argentine consul, Uki Goñi, asked, which was worse: selling visas that allowed hunted Jews to flee Nazi tyranny, or remain “uncorrupted” and refuse to issue any immigration documents at all?

So when Petiot said that his escape organization had access to someone inside an Argentine embassy, it would not have sounded preposterous. But that, of course, is not the same thing as saying that he actually had the documents, or that they would have managed to secure their entry into that country. At the time Petiot claimed to have such power, Argentine diplomatic papers, both real and forged, were losing their value. Immigration was tightening against legal and illegal entries, even before the military coup of June 4, 1943, would restrict it to a trickle.

EDMOND Pintard, the tall, garrulous, extroverted fifty-six-year-old makeup artist and former vaudeville performer, stepped into Massu’s office on March 20, 1944. The commissaire later remembered how poorly the interrogation had begun, and how arrogant the detainee had been.

“Monsieur le commissaire,” Pintard said, with an exaggerated self-confidence. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. Edmond Pintard, theatrical makeup artist currently threatened with an indictment of complicity for … crimes.”

“Me, an accomplice of crimes, the Great Francinet? Yes, I mean the Great Francinet, known by all the directors of music halls of Paris, a specialist in songs for weddings and banquets. My name, Monsieur le Commissaire, was on the advertising columns in letters this large,” demonstrating by stretching out his hands, his fingers stained yellow by tobacco. “And if I am a makeup artist today, it is because I chose to retire at the height of my glory.”

“How much were you paid to be the recruiter of Dr. Petiot?”

“You dare …”

“I dare say that if you continue to tell me about your life, I am going to get angry. We are not at the theater here.” Massu pointed to the files on his desk, detailing the “innocent men and women who have been murdered by the careful attention of your friend Petiot. Murdered and perhaps tortured, before being cut up into bits and thrown into a lime pit. You have never smelled human flesh burning, have you?

“I asked you how much Petiot paid you,” Massu repeated. “I don’t believe that I heard your answer.”

Pintard would eventually say that, despite recruiting for the escape organization for about two and a half years, he had only been paid twice. The first time was 6,000 francs, and the second 12,500 francs. His friend, Fourrier, had paid him directly out of his own commission. Pintard had only met Petiot once or twice, he added, and dealt through Fourrier, whom he had known for almost twenty years. Like the hairdresser, Pintard said that he did not know of the town house at 21 rue Le Sueur until he read about it in the newspapers.

“Did you solicit in bars?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“And the other times?”

“People began to know me in the neighborhood. They came to me.”

When asked what exactly Petiot had promised his clients, Pintard explained that it was a safe passage to South America and official papers that proclaimed them commercial agents of a republic there. Like Fourrier, Pintard claimed to have believed that Dr. Eugène was a hero, a patriot, and a “great Resistant.” As for his own responsibility, he said he thought he was only “doing [his] duty helping other Frenchmen escape their enemies.”

At the end of the questioning, Pintard paused at the door. Massu asked if he wanted to say anything.

“Monsieur le Commissaire, if you would kindly ask the photographers to give me some peace. Everyone who knows me … I am ashamed.”

“I am unable to do anything. They are doing their job.”

Pintard opened the door, exiting to the blinding light of magnesium flashbulbs.