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

CHAPTER 20. APOCALYPTIC WEEKS

1 “told me that” Georges Suard, Audition, October 9, 1944, APP, Série J, affaire Petiot, carton n° VI.

2 de Brinon would ever Count Fernand de Brinon, Audition, October 20, 1945, APP, Série J, affaire Petiot, carton n° VI, and again in the report of December 1945, in APP, Série J, affaire Petiot, carton n° VI. See also Le Pays, March 13, 1946, for another speculation about his intervention. Brinon passes over the spring of 1944 quickly in his Mémoires (Paris: La Page Internationale, 1949).

3 “vain flight” United Press, April 21, 1944; Le Petit Parisien, April 21, 1944; Le Cri du Peuple, April 24, 1944.

4 But Massu was not Jean-François Dominique makes this point well in L’affaire Petiot: médecin, marron, gestapiste, guillotinée pour au moins vingt-sept assassinats (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1980), 110. See also AN, 334 AP 65, 3368.

5 four thousand tons Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1951), 386–387.

6 “the key to France” Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 36.

7 De Gaulle wanted Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 1998), 631–632.

8 “Paris must not” Larry Collins with Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1966), unpaginated introduction; Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., Retreat to the Reich: The German Defeat in France, 1944 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 189.

9 The French police rebelled C. Angeli and P. Gillet, La police dans la politique (1944–1954)(Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1967), 57–74.

10 Under the leadership Marcel Le Clère describes the role of the guardians of peace in particular in Histoire de la police (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), 124–125.

11 The pilot believed Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War That Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 179; Charles de Gaulle’s version, The Complete War Memoirs, 634–635.

12 “To this city” Collins, Is Paris Burning?, 30.

13 “sparkling torpedoes” Beevor and Cooper, Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949, 34.

14 “purple-faced generals” Ibid.

15 “crossroads of death” Willis Thornton, The Liberation of Paris (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 167.

16 With forces estimated Beavor and Cooper, Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949, 33.

17 Grand Palais Edmond Dubois, Paris sans lumière (Lausanne: Payot, 1946), 208.

18 “roped to the turret” Collins with Lapierre, Is Paris Burning?, 175.

19 “Tous Aux Barricades” Comité parisien de Libération, Albert Ouzoulias (Colonel André), Les Batillons de la jeunesse: le colonel Fabien et d’autres jeunes dans la résistance, dans les maquis et l’insurrection parisienne (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1967), 439–440.

20 “What the hell, Brad” … “Is Paris burning?” Collins with Lapierre, Is Paris Burning?, 203, 220, 221, 302.

21 “olive drab jeeps” Flint Whitlock, The Rock of Anzio: From Sicily to Dachau: A History of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 398.

22 “The greatness of man” … “The night of truth,” Combat, August 25, 1944, printed with a slightly different translation in Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi Trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 18.

23 “Paris,” he shouted Gregor Dallas, 1945, 21; De Gaulle later described it as an “improvised reply,” The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, 649–650.

24 “I was drunk” Gilles Perrault and Pierre Azéma, Paris Under the Occupation (New York: The Vendome Press, 1989), 56.

25 “the loveliest, brightest” Collins and Lapierre, Is Paris Burning?, 322.