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

15.

WAR IN THE SHADOWS

A WORLD WHERE THERE IS NO MORE ROOM FOR HUMAN BEINGS, FOR JOY, FOR ACTIVE LEISURE, IS A WORLD WHICH MUST DIE.

—Albert Camus

AT the time Fourrier and Pintard began recruiting clients to escape Occupied Paris, Nazi Germany looked almost invincible. The swastika flew over capitals across the continent: Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and after April 1941, Belgrade, Sofia, and Athens. London, many believed, would be next, fulfilling Marshal Philippe Pétain’s prediction that Britain would soon be a corpse.

On June 18, 1940, General Charles de Gaulle had entered the London BBC studios and issued a powerful appeal to his countrymen: “The cause of France is not lost.” All French officers, soldiers, and workers should join him at once in the continued struggle, he said. “Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not and shall not die.”

Few people in France actually heard that landmark broadcast; fewer still had answered the call. In fact, no prominent military officer, politician, or businessman had signed up to de Gaulle’s cause, except for the governor general of Indochina, Georges Catroux, and, almost one year later, the forty-one-year-old left-wing prefect of the département of Eure-et-Loire, Jean Moulin. Most of de Gaulle’s earliest supporters were Bretons, estimated in July 1940 to represent some two-thirds of his small army of seven thousand patriots.

After the conquest of France, the Nazis had tightened their grip over the occupied zone, pouncing on any sign of unrest. When morale hit new lows in the winter of 1940–1941, as temperatures fell below freezing for a record seventy times, which was fifty more than average, the Resistance gained few additional recruits. By the spring of 1941, when Petiot first told Fourrier about his supposed organization, all of Paris and its surrounding region could have produced fifty fighters, as Charles Tillion recalled with some exaggeration, “capable of using any weapons at all.”

Resistance to the German Occupation in Paris had, of course, lagged behind resistance in cities in the south, like Lyon, Toulouse, and Marseille. There were, after all, some thirty thousand to forty thousand Nazi troops stationed in Gross-Paris, not to mention the Gestapo, SD, and French affiliates who patrolled the streets, forcing opposition to the regime, at first, to take symbolic forms.

On November 11, 1940, Armistice Day, several thousand Parisian students, waving the illegal tricolor and singing the banned “La Marseillaise,” marched down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Étoile, where they placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The French police, wielding batons, tried to control the crowds. The Nazi occupying authorities then took over, attacking with rifle butts and eventually opening fire. Rumors swirled of a massacre. Although there were no known deaths, more than one hundred people had been arrested and many people injured when German authorities fired on the demonstrators.

Early acts of defiance in Paris took place in many subtle ways. When newsreels were shown in cinemas, for instance, the portrayal of German victories or images of the Führer sparked such spasms of coughing that they forced the owners to keep on the lights. In February 1941, Liliane Schroeder reported how her mother was nearly arrested for powdering her nose during a newsreel. Similarly, Parisians expressed their opposition to the Occupation by wearing particular colors on certain days, like black ribbons and black ties on the first anniversary of the German conquest, or red, blue, and white on Bastille Day 1941, which led to some 488 arrests.

Churchillian “V” signs of victory gradually adorned walls and pavements around Paris, the French police counting a thousand such markings on April 7, 1941. Anti-German slogans were scrawled on walls, official German posters were slashed, and handwritten stickers denouncing the Occupation were pasted around town, four hundred of them, for instance, found by the police in one week in January 1941. Students liked to creep up behind a German truck at a traffic light and pin to it a small typewritten sticker that carried the words “Vive de Gaulle.”

French protests, however, soon took a different turn. On the morning of August 21, 1941, a twenty-two year-old French communist named Pierre-Félix Georges (code name “Fredo” or “Fabien,” later “Colonel Fabien”) killed a German naval cadet, Alphonse Moser, as he boarded a train at the Barbès-Rochechouart métro station. The Nazis responded ruthlessly. Kommandant von Gross-Paris, General Ernst Schaumburg, announced a new policy of creating a pool of “hostages” from all Frenchmen arrested or taken into custody and then choosing a number of them for execution “corresponding to the gravity of the case.” Six hostages were shot in reprisal for the murder of Moser.

But the severity of the punishment did not deter further attacks. The day after the announcement, two German officers were killed at Lille and then two more the following day in the Nord. This pattern was repeated throughout the autumn of 1941. An officer was gunned down at a métro station ticket window, a soldier knifed exiting a brothel; incendiaries, stolen from the Nazi depot, were tossed into a German hotel. A hand grenade was lobbed at a Nazi canteen; a bomb exploded at a German bookstore on the Place de la Sorbonne. Trains were derailed, cables were cut, and fuses in factories sabotaged. In December of that year alone, the German army estimated that there had been some 221 attacks against officers, soldiers, and property.

Resistance groups were now on the rise in Paris and elsewhere, especially after the Red Army repulsed the Nazi invasion and began to pursue the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Inside France, a new German policy further swelled the ranks of Resistance. In February 1943, the Germans implemented the hated STO (Service du travail obligatoire), which required all Frenchmen aged twenty-one to twenty-three to serve two years of compulsory labor in Germany. By the end of the war, some 650,000 Frenchmen would be sent to the involuntary work program in war-related industries. To avoid this fate, young men fled to the countryside, leading to the spontaneous creation of bands of maquis, named after the Corsican word for thick scrubland and soon carrying connotations of a bandit or outlaw.

From remote bases in hills or mountains, many of the emerging “armies of the shadows” engaged in sabotage and attacks on German and Vichy authorities, ranging from disruption of railways to guerrilla-style raids. As they needed food and funds to survive, not to mention strike German targets, some gangs raided farms, robbed shops, and attacked people suspected of collaborating or profiteering on the black market. Some maquis became popular legends, like L’Hermine in the Drôme with his black cape and coat of arms. Other Frenchmen denounced them as criminals masquerading under a noble cause.

The STO was extended several times in 1943 and 1944, eventually making all men aged eighteen to sixty and childless women eighteen to forty-five liable to forced labor. As the number of defaulters increased dramatically in 1943 and 1944, and many law-abiding citizens came to their aid against this law widely regarded as arbitrary and unjust, the Germans threatened harsher punishment for evasion. “All close male relatives, brothers-in-law, cousins over age of 18 will be shot; all women similarly related will be sentenced to hard labor.” Children under the age of seventeen would be packed away to an “approved school.” The brutality and exploitation at the heart of the Occupation was evident to an increasing number of Frenchmen.

By the time Petiot was locked up in the Gestapo prison, the Resistance had gradually moved beyond individual acts of opposition and sabotage to become, as the socialist Jean Texcier put it, “a good occupation for the occupied.” Resistance newspapers and pamphlets all over Paris sounded the call to action. Albert Camus, who joined the editorial staff of Combat in the autumn of 1943, put it this way only days after the discovery of Petiot’s crime in March 1944: “Total war has been unleashed, and it calls for total resistance. You must resist because it does concern you, and there is only one France, not two.” Sympathizers, he warned, would be punished just as active Resistants. Now was the time to act.

AS the story of Petiot’s “murder house” broke, Albert Camus was holding rehearsals for his first play, Malentendu (The Misunderstanding). The plot revolved around owners of a hotel who recruited, entertained, and then robbed and killed their guests—a Petiot-esque project that would debut in June, ironically at the Théâtre des Mathurins, just across the street from Fourrier’s hair salon.

The piece was in fact inspired nine years before when Camus read a short item in the Associated Press about a young man who returned home to Yugoslavia only to be killed by his mother. Camus added the element of the disguised return and the twist that the family had, in his absence, transformed the hotel into a profitable slaughterhouse. Camus set the story instead in the distant Bohemian town of České Budějovice (Czech Budweis), which he had visited eight years before. His new lover, the actress Maria Casarès, played the sister.

Camus was coming to terms with his new life in Paris. At first, he had found the occupied city a dismal gray, like its pigeons and statues, and a stark contrast to the sun, sea, and shimmer of his native Algeria. He missed his favorite café, which was decorated with a guillotine and a skeleton and had a flamboyant manager who wandered the establishment with a dildo in his hand. And Camus also missed his wife, Francine, though he continued to have love affairs.

For a time, Camus had considered taking advantage of an escape agency to cross into Spain and then return to Algeria. He certainly had experience with clandestine departures. Before coming to France, Camus had helped men and women pass into Morocco with the hope of joining de Gaulle in London. Camus, however, soon abandoned the idea of leaving Paris, no matter how appalling the impact of the German Occupation was on intellectual life—Henri Jeanson compared it to living in a “madhouse run by the lunatics.” Camus instead concentrated on his work, which in the spring of 1944 also included writing at night on his new novel, The Plague, which would be set in a city overrun by rats.

As Camus put the final touches on his play about the murderous hotel owners, Jean-Paul Sartre was preparing for the opening of his No Exit, a one-act play that would debut on May 27, 1944, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. The story took place, appropriately enough for the Occupation, in hell. Sartre had first picked Camus to direct and play the lead male role of Garcin. The rehearsals, which had begun at Christmas 1943 at Camus’s or Simone de Beauvoir’s apartment, were suspended in February, when the actor playing the lead female role, Olga Barbezat, was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Fresnes. At this point, either Camus backed out of his commitment or Sartre decided to replace him. The result was the same. No Exit was staged with an established director and a professional cast.

The German-controlled press lambasted the play for its “immoralism,” but Sartre’s No Exit would prove to be a major success, particularly with the young. “Hell is other people” was the line most cited. Sartre later explained that he only meant that people judge themselves with criteria given by other people, and therefore, if and when relations sour, humanity falls into a state of “total dependence” resembling hell. Sartre’s popularity soared. After this piece, he became, in the words of Jean Paulhan, “the spiritual leader of thousands of young people.” The scholar Guillaume Hanoteau agreed. Looking back at the postwar flourishing of Parisian intellectual life, Hanoteau credited Sartre’s No Exit with inaugurating the “golden age of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”

The Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the SS, and other elite Nazi officers and selected collaborators, meanwhile, were enjoying their own day in the sun. It was a sumptuous world far removed from the privations of everyday life replete with shortages and regular power outages. The officers were also avoiding the carnage of the Eastern Front: sipping champagne in the silk-lined suites of the Crillon or at the Ritz, dining by candlelight under the chandeliers of Palais du Luxembourg; and of course enjoying the fashionable soirees at the German embassy hosted by its Francophile ambassador, Otto Abetz. The spectacle of his social events prompted Céline to dub him King Otto I.

Germany’s waning fortunes in war, if anything, strengthened the desire of its officers and soldiers to enjoy Paris. German officers were regular visitors to the cabarets and brothels. Madame Fabianne Jamet (real name Georgette Pélagie) remembered them at hers, One Two Two, with fondness: handsome young SS men showing perfect manners; Wehrmacht soldiers shouting “Heil Hitler” as they raised their champagne glasses; Luftwaffe pilots coming in for a last drink and fling before embarking on a bombing mission in the Battle of Britain. She recalled the latter passing around a tube of a stimulant designed to increase their concentration and confidence to face the Spitfires and anti-aircraft guns, and confessed that she started using the drug herself.

The French criminal gangs, on the other hand, were “horrible creatures.” The gangsters in their fashionable jackets bulging with concealed weapons would lounge around downstairs with their women, “emptying magnum after magnum and boasting to one another about their exploits.” Worse, they were unpredictable and often unruly, like the hooligan who got drunk and started juggling hand grenades. These “vile, disgusting thugs,” Jamet added, “threw their money about on champagne and girls as though there was no tomorrow.”