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

18.

NINE MORE

If YOU START ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT EVERYONE WHO DIES, YOU’RE GOING TO BE A VERY BUSY MAN.

—Marcel Petiot, attributing the words to Dr. Paul

AFTER Paulette Grippay’s black satin dress, Massu now made a second connection between the testimonies of witnesses and the contents of the suitcases found at rue Le Sueur and in Neuhausen’s attic. This was the collection of Sulka silk shirts with the monogrammed initials “A.E.,” which were identified as belonging to Adrien the Basque Estébétéguy. Confirmation came from a tall, stocky man who arrived at the quai des Orfèvres in a new white Bentley: Henri Lafont.

Lafont was undoubtedly one of the most powerful men in Occupied Paris. This was an unexpected position for a former small-time crook who could not read or write. Abandoned by his mother at age thirteen, immediately after the death of his father, Lafont had eked out an existence on the street, stealing café chairs for resale, writing bad checks, and drifting in and out of reform schools and detention centers. His first prison sentence, begun May 15, 1919, was for theft. Ten more incarcerations would follow by 1934, for similar charges, totaling about eight years in prison.

By then, too, Lafont had worked briefly in a number of jobs: errand boy, dockworker, mechanic, car dealer, and chauffeur. He enlisted for two years in the Thirty-ninth Régiment des Tirailleurs Algériens and, later, after finishing his military service, gained work under his alias, “Henri Normand,” as manager of a canteen for the Préfecture de Police. He had the chance to meet and befriend many policemen. In 1939, with war on the horizon, Lafont tried to reenlist with the army. His application was refused because of his criminal record. His many experiences, both on the street and in prison, however, would bear fruit during the Occupation.

Indeed it was during a prison stay that Lafont met a man who would later introduce him to the German authorities: Max Stocklin, a tall, cultured Swiss national who had been arrested in the late 1930s for his work as an informer for the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr. When the Germans arrived in France in June 1940, Stocklin’s espionage contacts released him, and he soon recruited Lafont into the Abwehr’s champagne-swilling set then settling into the Hôtel Lutétia at 45 Boulevard Raspail in preparation for its tasks of arresting French Resistants.

By the end of June 1940, Lafont was placed in charge of a new Abwehr creation called a Dienstelle, or purchasing bureau, known informally as an “Otto agency” after the Abwehr’s Hermann “Otto” Brandl, who helped establish them. These agencies bought objects in bulk, using funds provided by the French according to the Armistice, and then sold them to Occupation authorities, thereby facilitating the German exploitation of the French economy and, in the process, greatly enriching agency leaders. Lafont’s bureau, located on rue Tiquetonne, was responsible for buying food and later clothing, furniture, and objects of gold.

Within two weeks, Lafont had established a second branch of his purchasing agency on rue Cadet, in the seized former headquarters of the Freemasons. This one would concentrate on Jewish property. Other offices opened, including a large one on rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine that focused on the purchasing of wheat, butter, and livestock of Normandy. His profits soared. Beyond that, as with the other Otto agencies, Lafont was making contact with a diversity of Frenchmen, from bankers and lawyers to art experts and black market dealers. Many of these people would later prove helpful as his own star rose in Occupied Paris.

Lafont’s real break came that same summer when he succeeded in infiltrating a Resistance cell that had eluded the Abwehr for six months. With the help of his underworld contacts, Lafont found the group’s leader, a Belgian named Lambrecht, in Bordeaux, in a matter of days. Then, too, with his underworld methods, including a propensity to crack a whip in a man’s face and repeat “you will talk” in his surprisingly falsetto voice, Lafont managed to learn the names of the entire organization. The Germans then arrested some six hundred Resistance fighters in Paris as well as in Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, and other parts of the continent.

The leader of the Abwehr in France, Colonel Friedrich Rudolph, an old-fashioned Prussian officer and First World War veteran, was impressed with the resourceful new hire, though he was also appalled by his vicious methods. The German leader agreed to continue employing Lafont “on condition that he does not have to see him.” The Abwehr headquarters in Berlin cabled congratulations to the Paris office for its success, and Lafont’s supervisors hosted a celebration in his honor, culminating with a visit to the brothel One Two Two.

The Abwehr had found Lafont useful indeed. In August 1940, with the approval of a high-ranking Abwehr officer, Captain Wilhelm Radecke, Lafont had been allowed into Fresnes prison to recruit criminals for the expansion of his gang. One of the first of the twenty-seven men Lafont handpicked was Alexandre Villaplane, the captain of the French national soccer team that won the first World Cup in 1930, defeating Mexico 4–1. Villaplane had fallen on hard times in the Depression and resorted to rigging horse races. Another man he selected was Adrien the Basque, whose Sulka shirts he now identified.

The most famous member of the gang was Pierre Bonny, a former police detective who had once been praised as the most talented policeman in the country. This was, of course, an exaggeration. In 1935, one year after helping solve the notorious Stavisky Affair, a financial scandal that nearly caused the collapse of the republic, Bonny’s own police career ended in a charge of corruption and a three-year prison sentence. After his release, Bonny scraped by operating a fledgling private detective agency that mainly shadowed unfaithful spouses. A short, wiry man with a dark mustache, Bonny brought a rigor and meticulousness, not to mention an administrative skill, to Lafont’s gang when he joined in 1942.

During this time, Lafont became a naturalized German citizen and also joined the SS, thereby switching his allegiance from the Abwehr to new patrons in the Gestapo. Lafont continued soliciting tips, following up on denunciations, tracking down hidden gold and currency supplies, and infiltrating Resistance groups. As the Allied bombing raids increased in 1943, Lafont would also hunt downed parachutists, airmen, and arms caches. No one knows how many people Lafont’s gang tortured and killed, or how much profit was earned from these activities. Lafont’s power would grow beyond his wildest imagination.

By May 1941, Lafont’s gang had moved from old headquarters on avenue Pierre-1er-de-Serbie to 93 rue Lauriston. At his highly sought after Saturday night dinners here, elite Nazi officials, SS men, industrialists, press barons, artists, film stars, and high-society women and men gathered over the finest delicacies available in Occupied Paris. In the cellars below, meanwhile, French Resistants and other enemies of the Third Reich were brutally tortured.

There were many questions that Massu would have liked to ask Lafont. For one thing, one of Adrien the Basque’s brothers, Emile Estébétéguy, and a member of the gang had claimed that Lafont had decided to punish Adrien by sending him to Marcel Petiot, knowing that the “escape agency” was actually a death factory. Was this possibly true, and if so, was there a connection between Lafont and Petiot? At the moment, Massu could not simply confront the gangster. As German police number 10 474R, Lafont was untouchable.

A PROMISING new lead about other possible Petiot victims, meanwhile, came from an anonymous letter of late March 1944 to Massu’s office. It described a family of Jewish refugees from the Netherlands who arrived in Paris in September 1942, only to attempt to leave a couple of months later with the help of a physician who promised them passage to South America.

There was nothing in this letter, Massu acknowledged, that could not have been fabricated based on information published in the newspapers. But the details had a ring of authenticity. The doctor had emphasized precaution and vigilance: not speaking to anyone about the organization, reliance on last-minute calls supplying details of the rendezvous, and of course, the careful instructions to bring along personal valuables in two suitcases.

The author had only referred to the victims by their initials and age: Madame W (about age sixty-three), her son Maurice W (about thirty-six), and his wife L.W. (about forty-six). Wanting to pursue this lead further, the commissaire released the information to the newspapers, asking for anyone with knowledge of the letter to contact him. He promised to protect the identity of the letter writer.

A few days later, a woman walked into his office claiming to be the sender. Given her knowledge of the letter’s contents, which had been closely guarded, Massu was convinced that he had the right person. Her name was Ilse Gang. She now provided the police with additional details of the missing family. “Madame W” was Rachel Wolff (born Rachel Marx), sixty-year-old widow of Salomon, or Sally, Wolff, once owner of the lumber company Incona C.V. Her son, “Maurice W,” was thirty-six-year-old Moses Maurice Israel Wolff, and L.W. was his wife, Lina Braun Wolff, a forty-seven-year-old divorcée from Breslau with a son by her first marriage in Tel Aviv. Lina was one of Gang’s oldest friends. Originally living in Königsberg, Germany, the Wolff family had fled to Paris when Adolf Hitler had come to power. In 1936, they had moved again, to Amsterdam.

But Amsterdam had not proved the safe haven it had historically been. After the Nazis conquered the Netherlands in the spring of 1940 and tightened their grip with racial laws in June 1942, German occupying authorities had proceeded to wage a campaign of terror against the Dutch Jewish community. The concentration of Jews in Amsterdam, coupled with the relative lack of hiding places, made the Nazi house raids, roundups, and ultimately the deportation of Jewish men, women, and children to extermination camps the worst in Western Europe. Seventy-eight percent of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands would be deported, compared, for example, to twenty-five percent in France.

As for the Wolffs, their family business had been seized by the Nazis. They sold what remained of their onetime wealth at a fraction of its value and, in July 1942, fled for their lives.

To escape Nazi detection, they adopted the name Wolters. The family had been helped in their escape, first into Belgium by several people, including a customs official who hid them safely in a convent near Charleville. A lawyer in Rocroi, Maître René Iung, had also assisted them in their flight and overlooked the money they carried (about 300,000 francs), which, being illegal in the Nazi-occupied country, was subject to confiscation.

When the Wolff family reached Paris in early September 1942 with their last name again changed, this time to Walbert or Valbert, they moved into the Hôtel Helvetia on rue Tourneux. They stayed a few days before moving on to the Hôtel du Danube on rue Jacob in the Latin Quarter. They would soon move again because, in October 1942, German authorities seized this building as well.

Gang had looked without success for a more stable apartment for the family. Eventually her friend, Dr. Rachel Gingold, a Romanian dentist at 21 rue Cambon, suggested that she contact one of her patients, a Romanian-born Jewish woman who would soon command much attention from the police, the press, and the public. This was Rudolphina Kahan, or “Eryane,” a cosmopolitan woman with dyed strawberry blond hair, who spoke a handful of languages, including Italian, German, French, and Romanian and, as one journalist put it, looked like “a spy on the Orient Express.” Finding this woman seemed a lucky break.

In the story that later emerged, Kahan not only found the Wolffs a room in her apartment building at 10 rue Pasquier, but also told them about Dr. Eugène, who helped people leave Occupied Paris. She knew of his operation because she, too, she said, hoped to flee. A meeting was arranged with the help of Kahan’s doctor and likely lover, Dr. Louis-Théophile Saint-Pierre, who in turn put her in touch with one of his patients, a pimp who worked several Montmartre bars, known variously as Robert or Henri le Marseillais (real name Henri Guintrand). This man introduced her to the actor and agency intermediary Edmond Pintard.

At a café in the Place de la Madeleine, Pintard met Kahan and then led her to a nearby hair salon. Dr. Eugène arrived ten minutes later and offered to take all three members of the Wolff family, making an exception to his rule of two at a time, probably because of the age of the mother-in-law. When he learned the price that Pintard had quoted (and arbitrarily doubled), he berated the makeup artist, threatening to end their working relationship. Apparently charmed by Kahan, the physician tried to recruit her for his organization. “We always need a woman like you,” he reportedly told her, offering her a commission for helping people escape and a promise, in turn, to arrange her journey later out of Occupied Paris.

The following day, Dr. Eugène met with the Wolff family in a room at Kahan’s apartment building. After a pleasant conversation about the arts, over tea, the Wolffs had been impressed with the physician, who had seemed, in the words of their lawyer, Jacques Bernays, “a man of vast culture and fine sentiments, whose magnanimity and character fully explained his devotion to the noble cause of clandestine passages.” Dr. Eugène told them to bring no papers, clothing, or anything that would reveal their identity. Valuables were to be packed in two suitcases or sewn inside their clothing. Maurice Wolff concealed a number of diamonds and other jewels in the shoulders of his jacket. The stakes were high. A single mistake would mean, the doctor said, “twelve bullets in my carcass” and “perhaps worse” for them.

In late December 1942, an old horse-drawn carriage pulled up to the entrance to Kahan’s building. The driver, an old man with an old-fashioned top hat and baggy winter coat a few sizes too large, put the Wolffs’ suitcases on the cart and opened the door for them. The carriage headed toward Place St. Augustine and then on to rue Boetie, Champs-Élysées, and L’Étoile. After turning onto Avenue Foch and then onto a side street, it stopped at the carriage entrance to No. 21 rue Le Sueur. The Wolffs entered the mansion, hoping to depart for South America.

Within two weeks, three additional couples who had recently arrived in Paris would follow the Wolffs, seeking the help of Dr. Eugène: Gilbert Basch (alias Baston), a twenty-eight-year-old former cosmetics executive in Amsterdam, and his twenty-four-year-old wife, Marie-Anne Servais Basch; Marie-Anne’s parents, Chaïm Schonker, another perfume executive, and his wife Franciska Ehrenreich Schonker, who lived in Nice (aliases included Stevens and Eemens); and Marie-Anne’s sister, Ludwika Holländer Arnsberg and her husband, Ludwig Israel Arnsberg (alias Schepers and Anspach). By January 1943, there had been at least nine people, using about a dozen pseudonyms, sent by Kahan to Dr. Eugène. All of them were wealthy Jews. None of them would be seen or heard from again.

Not long after helping the Wolffs, Ilse Gang told Massu, a woman with reddish-blond hair wearing dark sunglasses came by her apartment to inform her of the Wolff family’s safe arrival in South America and asked her if she wanted to follow them through the escape network. She had declined.