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

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AT SAINT-MANDÉ-TOURELLE STATION

WHEN YOU KNOW WHERE THE APPLE IS PICKED, IT IS ENOUGH TO WAIT FOR IT TO FALL FROM THE TREE.

—Commissaire Lucien Pinault

“THE Mad Butcher was no Nazi propaganda myth,” United Press foreign correspondent Dudley Ann Harmon wrote on August 31, 1944. He was “a swarthy, sinister-looking [man] with the sadistic features of a Krafft-Ebing nightmare and the cleverness of a scientist.” The Liberation of Paris had finally put to rest the rumor that Petiot was a Gestapo fabrication. As one policeman remarked, he wished the murderer had been a myth: “He is only too real. We have identified 54 victims, and heaven only knows how many more there are.”

Paris-Soir was also estimating that the total number of victims was probably about fifty. Parisians, however, continued to attribute new murders to the serial killer. One anonymous letter accused Petiot of slitting the throat of a twenty-nine-year-old Italian woman named Laetitia Toureaux on a train on May 16, 1937—the first murder on the French métro. Another suggested that he planted the bomb that killed socialist minister of the interior Max Dormoy in late July 1941, and a third one claimed that he killed Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two anti-fascist Italian refugees, near Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, receiving payment of one hundred semiautomatic guns from Benito Mussolini. Each of these allegations was far-fetched, and the murders showed few, if any, of the characteristics that the police ascribed to the assassin of rue Le Sueur. A more likely suspect, in every one of these cases, would later emerge: a French fascist group, CSAR (Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action), known informally as La Cagoule, or the “hooded ones.”

As Paris was transforming itself again in the autumn of 1944, the French police were still no closer to finding Petiot. Perhaps he had fled to Germany with retreating Nazis, as many people believed, the New York Times reported. Other newspapers, like La patrie, suspected that Petiot had remained in Paris. Sightings of the murder suspect were again on the rise.

Possibly to lure Petiot out of hiding, the French police handed over the dubious tale of Charles Rolland to the young journalist and Resistance fighter Jacques Yonnet. On September 19, 1944, Yonnet published an article in Résistance, one of the many underground papers that had emerged as popular dailies in post-Liberation Paris. After opening with a disclaimer that he could not vouch for the truth of the allegations, Yonnet proceeded to outline Rolland’s deposition in vivid detail. He titled the article: “Petiot, Soldier of the Reich.”

A few days later, there was a dramatic breakthrough in the investigation. A long, handwritten response signed by someone claiming to be Marcel Petiot arrived at the newspaper’s offices, forwarded by attorney René Floriot. To verify its authenticity, the police obtained a sample of the physician’s handwriting and asked leading graphologist Professor Edouard de Rougemont to study the two specimens. The letter, he concluded, was genuine, and Petiot’s full rebuttal was published on October 18, 1944.

“Dear Mr. Editor,” Petiot began. “All accused persons should be considered innocent until proven guilty.… Because of law and justice I have the right to defend myself and to ask you to print my answer.” Indignant and scornful of the article’s many errors, Petiot accused the police of inventing the absurd so-called Charles Rolland and then having the “sick imagination” to attribute such worthless claims to him.

As a longtime member of the Resistance, Petiot said, he had fought valiantly against the Nazis, only to be arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, and imprisoned for almost eight months. Many high-ranking members of the Resistance, including some now holding “public office,” he said, were trying to find a way to reveal the truth about his patriotic activities without exposing themselves to danger. Petiot outlined his alleged services to the Resistance, which had for so long been slandered by the German-controlled press.

His code name, Petiot admitted, was Dr. Eugène, and his code number was 46. He claimed to have served in the secret Resistance network called “Fly-Tox,” which had concentrated on attacking the Organization Todt and stealing secrets from German industry. With no less bravado, Petiot next discussed his “liquidations,” as he called them, insisting that they were always “Germans and collaborators and Gestapo agents.” It was outrageous, he said, to call him a soldier of the Reich. The letter concluded:

The author of these lines, far from having committed dishonorable acts, far from having forgiven his torturers and still further from having helped them, adopted a new pseudonym immediately after his release from the German prison [January 1944]. He has also retaken his place with the Resistance with [another] new pseudonym and asked for a more active role in order to avenge the hundreds and thousands of Frenchmen killed and tortured by the Nazis. He always remained in contact with his friends, and fought for the Liberation to the best of his abilities, despite the dangers that his action has caused him. He still contributes as much as possible to the Liberation, and apologizes if he cannot take the time to follow the polemic more closely

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Still using the third person to describe his actions, Petiot concluded: “Having lost everything except his life, he is risking even that under a false name, scarcely hoping that tongues and pens now freed from their shackles will tell a truth so easy to guess, and forget the clumsy kraut lies that require only two sous of French common sense to see through.”

Understandably, the police were thrilled by this response. Not only did this letter confirm that Petiot was still alive—and many detectives had feared that the reports of his death might prove true—but it also provided many clues to his whereabouts. Petiot, in rushing to defend himself, had aided them far more than he realized.

In addition to admitting his identity as Dr. Eugène and claiming a specific code number, which could be verified, Petiot had volunteered that he was in fact working in the Resistance under a different name and provided them with no less than eight pages of his handwriting to discover his alias. He had not bothered to type his response or to ask his lawyer to do it for him. The envelope’s postmark showed that the letter had been mailed in Paris; the speed of Petiot’s rebuttal suggested that he might well still be in the capital.

At this point, many people helped track down the serial killer. An editor of Résistance, Louis Jean Finot, released Petiot’s letter and the police circulated it throughout the FFI. All indications suggested that Petiot was probably masquerading as a doctor, which would make sense as a cover for someone with his background, and so the search focused on physicians in the Resistance. Colonel Rol, leader of the FFI in Paris, secured samples of handwriting that resembled the letter in question.

Among a number of people assisting the investigation was Captain Henri-Jean Valeri, originally from the commune of Villepinte in Seine-et-Oise and the leader of an FFI counterespionage unit in charge of rooting out traitors and “collabos.” A slender man in his late forties, with dark brown hair and a thick mustache and beard, Valeri served as investigations officer for the intelligence organization G2 in the First Infantry Regiment of the FFI, stationed in the armory of Reuilly. Valeri had considerable skill and experience, and his quick promotion to captain—even for a time that saw many quick promotions—proved his zeal. Police investigators were more optimistic about the case than they had been in months, but they were quickly running out of time.

AFTER the Liberation, Frenchmen began the long and difficult process of coming to terms with the dark years of the Occupation. The first priority in the reckoning was to remove collaborators from positions of power. Sometimes this was done through the legal system in the High Court newly created to judge cases of treason, or “intelligence with the enemy.” Other times, it was action taken by people themselves in the form of lynchings, summary executions, or a wide range of vigilante-style punishments. Women accused of sleeping with the Germans, the so-called “horizontal collaboration,” in particular, were punished by the wrath of mobs.

An estimated ten to twenty thousand women would have their heads shaved, be stripped naked or semi-naked, and then marched through the streets, sometimes with swastikas tarred or tattooed on their breasts or with signs around their necks bearing the words “I whored with the Germans.” Some of them, being new mothers, carried babies in their arms. German authorities estimated that fifty to seventy-five thousand children had been born to German fathers and French mothers in the Occupation. A recent study by Jean-Paul Picaper and Ludwig Norz, Enfants Maudits (2004), raised the figure to about two hundred thousand.

The violent purging was more common in the south of France, where tensions between Resistance and Militia were more severe, and many places were liberated by the French Resistance rather than the Allies. But no town of any size was immune. In all, about 310,000 cases involving some 350,000 people charged with “intelligence with the enemy” were brought to court. About 60 percent of the cases were dismissed for lack of evidence. Of the 125,000 that went to trial, approximately 100,000 resulted in convictions, though almost half of them (49,723) received the verdict “national indignity,” which bore no prison sentence or fine. About 20 percent of the trials ended with a prison sentence (25,901), with another 13,339 sentenced to forced work. Officially, 7,055 people received death sentences, though the vast majority of these were not carried out.

Estimates for the number of summary executions with no attempt to use the legal system have dropped significantly. In the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, historians believed that there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 slayings. More recent studies have estimated the total figure at perhaps 8,000 to 9,000. At any rate, the euphoria of liberation was giving way to the bitter controversies of retribution. Veteran intelligence agent Roger Wybot compared the atmosphere surrounding the search for collabos that autumn to the “stock market in a moment of madness.”

Some Frenchmen believed that the exuberance in purging suspected collaborators was undermining the shaky foundations of the country’s unity. François Mauriac was one of many people who urged caution, appealing for reconciliation, not revenge, as France’s new leaders confronted the challenges of rebuilding the country. Others, like Albert Camus at Combat, pressed to take the purges further, punishing the criminals for cruelties they committed—the author of The Stranger had not yet reached his famous opposition to the death penalty. Captain Henri Valeri, working on the Petiot case, agreed with Camus, pushing his men at the Reuilly armory to show no mercy tracking down collaborators and rooting them out of power. France, he said, was using eyebrow tweezers, when the proper instrument should be a shovel.

ON the morning of October 31, 1944, a man in khaki uniform with a kepi, an FFI armband, dark glasses, and a thick beard stepped onto the platform of the Saint-Mandé-Tourelle railway station. At 10:45, as he punched his ticket, a stranger walked up to him and asked the time. Then, with this distraction, the stranger kicked him in the groin and three other men jumped on him. The man in khaki was carried out of the railway station, blindfolded, and gagged, with his hands cuffed and feet bound. After seven months and twenty days eluding arrest, Marcel Petiot had been captured.

Escorted back to the Reuilly armory, Petiot was forced to remove his FFI armband and uniform, so that he would “no longer sully the honor of the French army.” The murder suspect carried a loaded 6.35 revolver, 31,780 francs in cash, and a large number of false identity papers and blank documents for search warrants, orders, and arrests. A Communist Party card, identification number no. 268004, only eight days old, was found in his possession, along with a membership card (No. 29 097) for the Communist organization of the France-U.S.S.R. Friendship Committee. Petiot also had a number of ration cards under various names, including one for a little boy named René, whose last name had been smudged and replaced. At this time it was not known who the child was, though police would soon have a good idea.

Given the amount of coverage that the murders initially received, it might seem that with his arrest Marcel Petiot would again dominate the news. This was not the case. Although reports would regularly appear both in French and international media, many of the former underground newspapers did not care for the topic. It was embarrassing, to say the least, to have this man claim the cause of the Resistance, as he would do with fervor, and his story would certainly raise many unwelcome questions. The Petiot case, moreover, had been sensationalized so much in the captive press, to distract from the harsh realities of the Occupation, that it alienated editors who once worked on Resistance papers.

Albert Camus’s paper, Combat, exemplified the trend when its editors reported Petiot’s arrest and then proclaimed their reluctance to cover the monstrous tale: “We believe we have fulfilled our journalistic obligations by relaying this news without commentary. We will do the same each day, but we refuse to glorify an affair which is repugnant from so many points of view.” This reaction—if understandable in the charged circumstances of the autumn of 1944—was unfortunate. Without a full investigation, many questions about the case would remain no closer to resolution.

The man who actually arrested Petiot, Captain Simonin, was himself a recent recruit to the Resistance—one of approximately ten thousand agents who then belonged to the emerging intelligence service answering to the War Ministry and known as the DGER (Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches). Actually, Simonin was not his real name, and he was not authorized by French police to make the arrest. He was later identified as a thirty-one-year-old former police officer named Henri Soutif, who had served as the commissaire des renseignements généraux of Quimper in northern France, collaborated closely with the Occupation authorities, and ordered the arrest, torture, and deportation of many Frenchmen.

Simonin’s arrest had come at a propitious time. Among the papers in Petiot’s possession was an order for the suspect, under one of his several aliases, to transfer to DGER offices in Saigon. Was Petiot hoping to escape to French Indochina, where he would serve in the Medical Corps of the intelligence service? This was at least one of his options. Petiot’s date of departure was apparently set for November 2, 1944.

In perhaps the biggest surprise, Captain Henri Valeri and Marcel Petiot turned out to be the same person. In typically bold style, Petiot had posed as Valeri and maneuvered into a position inside Reuilly to help authorities find the killer of rue Le Sueur. At one point during his investigation, he even gained a meeting to discuss the case with the procureur de la république, who later said he had been impressed by Valeri’s thoroughness, energy, and command of the facts of the case.

“It’s unbelievable,” Valeri’s secretary, Cécile Dylma, said to Inspectors Lucien Pinault and Émile Casanova, about learning the identity of her boss. “He’s a man so sweet, so calm. Captain Valeri has never shown a single act of anger towards us.” At the same time, she acknowledged that he declined most invitations and generally kept quiet about his private life. “To think that I have been alone with him in his office for a month,” Dylma said, “it makes me shudder.”

Commissaire Massu would not have the satisfaction of arresting Petiot. In the purges that followed the end of the Occupation, which soon escalated to involve the removal of twelve hundred officers from the police department, Massu had been arrested on August 20, 1944. He was accused of four specific charges of collaboration with the enemy, which included furnishing information to the Occupation authorities that led to the execution of patriots, working cordially and “dining on several occasions” with the German liaison to the Police Judiciaire, and deporting a Jewish woman and two girls who had been arrested for a misdemeanor. His enemies pounced. The commissaire was taken away to Fresnes.

One of the documents that Petiot carried at the time of his arrest was an elaborate accusation against Commissaire Massu. The former head of the Brigade Criminelle, Petiot-Valeri wrote, should be suspended not just from his duties at the quai des Orfèvres, but more important, in the name of justice, from “the end of a rope.” Petiot’s job of punishing “collaborators” had put him in a frightening position to destroy anyone who could expose his past. How far could Petiot have gone in wiping the slate clean if he had not succumbed to his vanity and written an editorial to the Parisian newspaper? And, one wonders, how far did he go?

In December 1944, the disgraced and depressed former commissaire, recipient of the Légion d’honneur, slit his wrists in an obvious suicide attempt. Rushed to Hôtel-Dieu, Massu recovered and eventually returned to face an official collaboration tribunal, which on April 20, 1945, cleared him of all charges, for lack of evidence. There was not a single “anti-national act with which one could reproach Massu,” Arthur Airaud, president of the Commission d’épuration at the Préfecture de Police, declared. That same day, Massu was freed from Fresnes, just over one year and three months after Marcel Petiot had walked out of the same building.

“A good colleague,” Massu said, “profited from the circumstances to settle in my chair at the head of the Brigade Criminelle.” Massu would return to the police force to serve with distinction. On his retirement in 1947, he went to work in security at the American Embassy in Paris.

Eleven years later, Massu appeared in a French television documentary together with his old friend, the bestselling mystery writer Georges Simenon. The two of them reminisced about how they first met over a glass of red wine at Les Trois Marches. Simenon described how, for inspiration, he had “haunted the Palais de Justice, the Place de Dauphine, [and] the little corner cafes.” He elaborated:

I took all my models from right here. I watched them at work, and I picked up their habits. Maigret is a little of Chief Inspector Massu, a little of Chief Inspector Guillaume [Massu’s former supervisor]

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Commissaire Massu lives on today in Simenon’s gruff, earthy fictional detective Jules Amédée François Maigret.