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

25.

THE KNELLERS

WHILE WE DEBATE, THE DIE IS CAST.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

AS Gollety assembled the Petiot dossier, Albert Camus gave Jean-Paul Sartre an extraordinary opportunity. The United States State Department was looking for eight French journalists and former members of the Resistance to take a seven-week tour of the country, all expenses paid. Camus asked if Sartre was interested in representing Combat. “Shit! I’ll run over there,” Sartre said, accepting the offer. Simone de Beauvoir later said that she had never seen him so happy.

On January 11, 1945, Sartre departed on a twenty-four-hour flight with three stops in a nonpressurized DC-8 military plane. It was his first trip outside Europe. He would write thirty-two articles, published in Combat and Le Figaro, detailing his experiences in a place he had earlier equated with the future: skyscrapers, jazz, movies. In Manhattan, Sartre would dine with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s widow, Consuelo, in her apartment overlooking the East River, which had been decorated for Greta Garbo. Her husband, the author of the previous year’s The Little Prince, had disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over Corsican waters on July 31, 1944. Sartre met W. H. Auden, attended a private screening of Citizen Kane, and sought out the jazz he’d long loved, including a performance by Charlie Parker on Fifty-Second Street.

Leaving behind the despair of post-Liberation Paris, mired in shortages, continued rationing, and the ever-present threat of being denounced as a collaborator, Sartre was flown coast to coast and shuttled between stops in a limousine. He attended a Washington, D.C., cocktail party hosted by Walter Lippmann, toured a Hollywood studio, flew over the Grand Canyon by plane, talked with trade union leaders in Chicago, interviewed farmers in the Midwest, and in the South experienced the deep social and racial divisions that permeated the “land of freedom and equality.” On March 9, he was treated to an evening at the White House. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told him about how much he loved France, how he had biked throughout the country as a boy, and showed him his collection of miniature donkeys, which, Sartre noted for his French readers, was the symbol of his Democratic Party.

But the most significant event for Sartre that year occurred back in Paris. On October 29, 1945, five months after his fortieth birthday and his decision to quit teaching to pursue a full-time writing career, Sartre delivered a public lecture entitled “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” The former teacher came out to a crowd of two or three hundred people, with no notes, his hands in his pockets, and defined the philosophic system soon to be inseparable from his public persona. Existentialism, he said, was “that doctrine which makes human life possible.”

War and its atrocities had spread disillusionment. Sartre’s philosophy was already sometimes cited as emblematic of the anguish and despair that gripped the postwar world. Despite what both his conservative and Communist critics said, Sartre would present his philosophy instead as a “doctrine based on optimism and action”:

Existentialism defines man by his actions; it tells him that hope lies only in action, and that the only thing that allows man to live is action; Man commits himself to his life, and thereby draws his image, beyond which there is nothing. We are alone without excuses. This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free

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Maurice Nadeau titled his article in Combat about the talk: “Too Many Attend Sartre Lecture. Heat, Fainting Spells, Police. Lawrence of Arabia an Existentialist.”

Others were less impressed. A reporter for Samedi Soir wrote that Sartre might be a hero to “the hairy adolescents of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” but for more discerning readers, he was a “murderer,” stealing his ideas from German philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and crowning his bastardized philosophy with a “barbaric name” that no one understood and yet “everybody speaks of it over tea.” For sheer promotional talent, Sartre had surpassed everyone since P. T. Barnum.

But this review, like the positive one in Combat and other papers, also helped spread Sartre’s name and awareness of his philosophy beyond the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Other Parisians began to seek out Sartre’s works, including the monumental treatise he published two years before that had been ignored, Being and Nothingness. Existentialism was on its way to becoming what the historian Ronald Aronson called the first postwar media craze.

THE last French Occupation media craze, meanwhile, was nowhere near subsiding. As the capital prepared for its first Christmas in four years without German soldiers, a certain Parisian aristocrat was celebrating a midnight supper with a masked ball with the theme of Marcel Petiot. A journalist asked the hostess if a ball based on a mass murderer was appropriate. Yes, she said, she and her friends also needed their fun.

While Yonnet and Brouard investigated Petiot’s alleged Resistance activities, Gollety appointed a team of psychiatrists to examine the suspect’s mental health. The committee consisted of three men: Dr. Paul Gouriou, director of the Psychiatric Hospital of Villejuif, who had examined Petiot at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne when he was accused of stealing oil cans and concluded that he was insane; Dr. Georges Paul Génil Perrin, of the Henri Rouselle Center at Sainte-Anne’s Neurological Hospital, in contrast, found Petiot only a “constitutional delinquent” who exploited legal loopholes by emulating well-known symptoms. The third member, Dr. Georges Heuyer, a leading specialist in pediatric neuropsychiatry and juvenile delinquency, had not previously rendered an opinion on the suspect.

In the first psychiatric evaluation, conducted in late December 1944, the doctors probed into similar territory covered by Judge Gollety and the DGER lieutenants. Petiot, however, showed more arrogance and disdain for his medical colleagues. He emphasized that rue Le Sueur had served as a center of Resistance activity, with Fly-Tox helping Frenchmen escape from German camps, liquidate his country’s enemies, and fetch arms caches dropped by Allied planes. “At one time,” he boasted about his property, “there were over sixteen hundred pounds of arms hidden there!”

It was simply impossible for him, Petiot said, to liquidate dangerous collaborator gangsters like Jo the Boxer and Adrien the Basque by himself. This was the work of an organization, not one man, let alone a medical doctor. “You forget it was I who was imprisoned and tortured by the Germans at Fresnes for eight months, then the bastards framed me with the bodies they stuffed into my house.”

The doctors asked about the enormous wealth Petiot had accumulated, reported by the media at the time to include “over fifty properties worth millions” and a fortune worth, according to one police estimate, approximately 200 to 250 million francs.

“I did not acquire my fortune from my alleged victims,” Petiot said. “I made five hundred thousand francs per year from my medical practice. I spent hardly one hundred thousand per year. My wife is very frugal and my servants very cheap. Then my secondhand and my antique business brought me profits.” Petiot mentioned an oriental rug that he purchased for 17,000 francs and then sold later that same day for 60,000. He also claimed to have profited from his real estate investments, though of course such methods did not explain how he could have purchased the property in the first place.

But the question, it was soon clear, was not only the source of his fortune, or even its amount; it was also its fate. Petiot’s answers then and later were never satisfactory. The interrogators, ill-prepared to deal with his financial situation, did not at this time probe further. Instead Petiot took the offensive, noting that he had joined the Resistance, “ready to make any sacrifice,” and now he found himself being “labeled both a murderer and a monster.”

After the interview and physical exam, which showed Petiot to be in good health except for slow reflexes and a cholesterol spot in his left eye, the doctors evaluated his mental state. They were impressed by his intelligence—undoubtedly highly intelligent, with a solid understanding of psychology and forensic medicine, and well read in the literature of mental disorders. At the same time, they could find no sign of mental instability, noting only that he appeared “completely amoral.” Most important for the upcoming trial, the committee concluded that Petiot should be held responsible for his actions.

On May 3, 1945, the military security team Yonnet and Brouard also submitted the conclusions of their six-month investigation. It was a scathing verdict.

[Petiot’s] hesitations, his contradictions, his glaring ignorance of the structure of a Resistance network for which he pretends to have worked, the numerous improbabilities in his declarations, his systematic habit of mentioning only Resistance comrades who are either dead (Cumulo, Brossolette) or who cannot be found (the members of Fly-Tox) lead one to believe that Petiot was not at any time in serious contact with any Resistance organization whatsoever

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WHEN it came to stealing the identity of Dr. François Wetterwald, Petiot’s methods had been brutally simple. On September 11, 1944, he had shown up at the apartment of sixty-eight-year-old Marthe Wetterwald, whose son was held at the concentration camp of Mauthausen. Petiot claimed to be a representative of the International Red Cross responsible for negotiating the release of French prisoners still held in Germany. He wanted to help her son.

To facilitate his efforts, Petiot asked to inspect his identity papers. Overjoyed, Madame Wetterwald complied. When some of her son’s military documents, including his army paybook, were not handy, Petiot asked her to find them. Two days later, he returned as planned and began leafing through the items. When Madame Wetterwald left the room, he slipped some important documents into his pocket, and then later used them to obtain his false identification cards. Madame Wetterwald’s son would remain at the concentration camp until the Allies liberated it in May 1945.

The real François Wetterwald was not only a physician, he was also a prominent member of the Resistance. He was a leader of the group Vengeance, which collected information, sabotaged German sites in preparation for D-Day, and conducted other raids, most notably stealing German cars and uniforms, the latter often grabbed in the changing rooms of swimming pools. Among its many other activities, Vengeance operated an evasion network that helped Allied soldiers leave Occupied France.

Assuming Wetterwald’s identity proved to be advantageous. Petiot gained instant credibility as a Resistance fighter, and he had not been shy to exploit it.

BEFORE the pretrial questioning ended, three last victims would be added to the official total. In the fall of 1945, the French Ministry of Justice received a letter from an American Jew living in La Paz, Bolivia, named Siegfried Lent. The letter was originally addressed to the Jewish Deportees Service of the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York, and in it Lent asked for any information about his relatives, Kurt Kneller, his wife Margareth (Greta) Lent Kneller, and their son René, who had lived in Paris during the Occupation. It was known that this family tried to escape with the services of a doctor, but they had been missing since the summer of 1942.

Kneller, a forty-one-year-old electrician, had then served as codirector of Cristal Radio, a company that distributed radio and home appliances from its plant on rue Saint-Lazare. He also served as a technical consultant to other companies, including a battery manufacturer. Kneller and his wife had left their native Germany in June 1933, six months after the rise of Adolf Hitler. He sought French citizenship and, on the outbreak of war, volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, serving until his release in September 1940, following the armistice.

When the police tried to track down the landlady of their two-room apartment at 4 avenue du Général-Balfourier in the 16th arrondissement, they found that she no longer lived there. One of their neighbors, thirty-two-year-old Christiane Roart, however, proved to be a wealth of information.

The Knellers, she told Inspector Louis Poirier, had considered leaving Paris for some time, given the growing dangers the city now posed for its Jewish community. Kurt Kneller, a patriot who identified strongly with his new French homeland, wanted to remain in Paris, but he changed his mind on July 16, 1942, a date that came to be known as “Black Thursday.”

Alone in the third-floor apartment with René, Greta Kneller happened to see the arrival of French police from her window. Instinctively, she realized the danger. She grabbed René and rushed upstairs to hide with Roart.

This visit was part of the grand rafle, or “the great raid,” when, over the course of forty-eight hours, some 12,884 Jewish men, women, and children were seized by French police, marched into the city’s green-and-white buses, and then crammed into the sports stadium Vélodrome d’Hiver to await deportation to one of several concentration camps. Had the Knellers been at home that day, they would have had to face an eight-day ordeal in the hot, cramped arena, without access to adequate food, water, or basic sanitary facilities. After the stadium and a concentration camp, they would most likely have been herded onto freight cars on the way to Auschwitz.

Realizing that the authorities would likely return, the Knellers decided to find another place to live. Leaving young René temporarily with Roart, his godmother, the couple sought shelter with another family friend, Klara Noé, who lived nearby, at 19 rue Erlanger. On the following day, Friday, July 17, Kurt Kneller told his friend Ernest Jorin, a man who had invested in his firm and served as René’s godfather, that they had found someone who would help them escape Nazi-occupied Paris. It was his doctor. They were instructed to pack their valuables into suitcases, which would be picked up by him personally that night. Petiot asked for the usual passport photographs and recommended a photography studio on Boulevard Saint-Martin.

As Jorin later told police, he had been skeptical of the so-called escape organization. When he expressed his doubts to Kneller, the latter had shrugged them aside, saying, “I know, this appears suspect to me too, but what else can I do?” Kneller was desperate.

On the evening of July 17, the Knellers’ doctor arrived with a cart and horse-drawn cab driven by an elderly gentleman, matching the description given in the Wolff case. They loaded the luggage, two large and four or five small suitcases, onto the cart. The doctor said that he would return shortly for the furniture—suggesting again that, as in the Braunberger case, he was attempting to make even larger profits.

Roart was struck by how forcefully the doctor insisted on having all the apartment furniture handed over to him. He even threatened not to cross the Knellers into the unoccupied zone unless she complied. Kurt and Greta were not there to approve the transfer of property, as they had already moved, as instructed, into Noé’s apartment to await the doctor’s next communication. Reluctantly Roart and the concierge had agreed to the demands, handing out the bed linen first and promising the rest at a later date. The doctor, she remembered, had played with young René on his knee, but the boy did not want anything to do with him.

The doctor had orchestrated the departure to the smallest detail. He would arrive at Noé’s apartment that night, take Kurt Kneller first, and then return the following day for Greta and René. They would all be taken separately to the same location, believed to be a resting home, where they would receive false identification papers and a series of vaccinations and inoculations. The family looked forward to being reunited in time for their departure to the new world.

After this alleged escape from Paris, many of the Knellers’ friends and relatives began receiving postcards. Roart received one about fifteen days later, as did Noé and Jorin, the latter in particular perhaps because he was believed to have kept some of the Kneller jewelry and other valuables. Each communication told essentially the same story. The Knellers had succeeded in “crossing over” and were doing well, though the journey had been difficult and Kurt had fallen ill. The letters and postcards ended, as in the Braunberger case, with the plea to destroy them.

There were other peculiarities. Madame Kneller signed each communication “Marguerite,” though friends knew she had retained the Germanic spelling of her name Margareth and always preferred the shortened form of “Greta.” The handwriting was more angular and strained than usual. Still, the letters seemed to have silenced any concern that something was amiss. They also likely served another purpose. As in the Braunberger case, the postcards would serve as recruiting tools for future clients.

When Christiane Roart was interviewed at the police station, she picked out Petiot immediately from a series of mug shots. She thought that the handwriting in the postcard matched the sample of a prescription signed by Dr. Petiot that the police provided. Moreover, when she looked through the suitcases, which she had packed for the family, she believed that the men’s shirts monogrammed with the faint initials “K.K.” (which someone had attempted to remove) had belonged to Kurt Kneller.

Other items in Petiot’s suitcases would be traced to this family, including a woman’s black coat, a woman’s bathrobe, and a number of kitchen and other towels monogrammed with their initials. Roart also recognized a pair of striped pink silk pajamas, though she could not say for certain that they had belonged to young René. The pants bottoms of a second pair of pajamas, however, seemed to be his, because, she remembered, it had been made from one of his father’s shirts. The boy’s name, age, and birth date matched one of the ration cards that Petiot carried at the time of his arrest.

The Knellers were never seen again in Paris or Argentina. On August 8, 1942, three weeks after their disappearance, workers on a barge on the Seine near Asnières reported discovering a bag wedged in some bushes. Inside were the mutilated remains of a young boy, approximately eight or nine years old, and the head, femurs, pelvis, and arms with the shoulder blades and clavicles of a woman between the age of forty and forty-five. Three days later, a man’s head was found in the river. The remains have never been identified, but the Knellers were added to the list of victims.

ON October 30, 1945, almost one year to the date after his arrest, Petiot suddenly refused to answer any questions. There had been ample time, he concluded, for the juge d’instruction to conduct his investigation and ask any question that he deemed relevant. Petiot was drawing the line. He would henceforth save his answers for the trial.

Gollety tried to prod him, but he would not relent. Sometimes the dossier reads like a farce, as seen, for example, in the interrogation on November 3, 1945.

“On what date did you buy the property on rue Le Sueur?” Gollety asked.

“I have decided that I will no longer answer any questions, except in public.”

“For what purpose?” Gollety asked, returning to the question of his purchase of the house.

“Write ‘ditto’ and things will move along more quickly.”

Gollety would arrive with a long list of questions, including a forty-eight-page compilation on December 28, 1945, and Petiot would simply refuse to answer any of them.

The following month, in accordance with French criminal law, Gollety sent the Chamber of Accusations a bulging dossier that weighed approximately fifty kilos. There was enough evidence, it was concluded, to warrant sending the Petiot case to trial.

As for the alleged accomplices, including Georgette Petiot, Maurice Petiot, René Nézondet, Albert and Simone Neuhausen, Raoul Fourrier, Edmond Pintard, Roland Porchon, and Eryane Kahan, it was now officially decided that all charges would be dropped. There was simply not enough evidence to prosecute them. “Yet it is certain that, if justice can do nothing against them,” the future prosecution assistant Maître Michel Elissalde said, “the name that they bear and the sad reputation which affects them personally may already serve as a constant source of shame, at least if Petiot’s amoral insensitivity has not triumphed over them.”

The state was going to concentrate on Marcel Petiot. The number of victims was set at twenty-seven, and the file was turned over to the procureur général to draw up the formal acte d’accusation.