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

1.

GERMAN NIGHT

THE GERMAN NIGHT HAS SWALLOWED UP THE COUNTRY.…

FRANCE IS NOTHING BUT A SILENCE; SHE IS LOST SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT WITH ALL LIGHTS OUT.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, letter to the New York Times Magazine, November 29, 1942

FOUR years before, many of Paris’s richest and most privileged residents had begun fleeing the capital. The duke of Windsor; Prince George of Greece; Princess Winnie de Polignac and her niece, Daisy Fellowes, the heiress to the Singer sewing fortune, had all departed. The Aga Khan set out for Switzerland. Peggy Guggenheim stored her art collection in a friend’s barn and drove away in her Talbot, in the direction of the Haute Savoie ski resort of Megève.

Not far behind were a number of writers, painters, and artists who had turned the City of Light into what New York Times art critic Harold Rosenberg called “the laboratory of the twentieth century.” James Joyce left for a village outside Vichy before continuing into Zurich. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas departed for Culoz, near Annecy. Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, and Wassily Kandinsky headed south. Vladimir Nabokov secured the last ocean liner to New York. Walter Benjamin hiked across a mountain passageway into Spain, but made it no farther than Portbou, where he committed suicide at age forty-eight.

The scale of departures from the French capital had accelerated in May 1940 with the Nazi invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. On the afternoon of June 3, when the air raid sirens began to wail, the Luftwaffe pounded the Renault and Citroën factories, the bombs also falling onto the Air Ministry on Boulevard Victor. The one-hour raid left a trail of street craters, massive piles of rubble, and a block of apartment buildings looking, as journalist Alexander Werth put it, “like a badly-cut piece of cheddar.” Two hundred and fifty-four people had been killed and another six hundred and fifty-two injured.

As the Nazi Wehrmacht advanced closer to the capital, nearly encircling it from the north, the east, and the west, the exodus soon reached epic proportions. Trains were booked far beyond capacity, forcing many Parisians to leave by motorcar, truck, horse-drawn cart, hearse, or any other contraption. More often, residents fled on foot, pushing selected personal belongings, from mattresses to birdcages, onto bicycles, motorcycles, prams, wheelbarrows, oxcarts, hay wains, coffee vendor carts—virtually anything with wheels.

Legions of refugees struggled, under the hot summer sun, against almost completely blocked roads, under the occasional strafing of the Luftwaffe and, after Mussolini declared war on June 10, the attacks of Italian planes. Automobiles were abandoned for lack of gasoline. Rumors thrived in the oppressive climate of heat and hunger, feeding on the painful memories of the First World War and the feelings of uncertainty that swirled around the present crisis. No one knew when, or if, they would be able to return home.

Of France’s forty million people, an estimated six to ten million inhabitants clogged the roads. Paris saw its population fall from nearly three million to about eight hundred thousand. The mass exodus was replicated in cities all over northern and eastern France, as the population headed south or southwest. The pilot and future author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, peering down from his observation mission on the 2/33 Reconnaissance Squadron, thought that the mass movements looked like “a boot had scattered an ant-hill,” sending the unfortunate refugees dispersing “without panic. Without hope, without despair, on the march as if in duty bound.”

Beginning on June 9, the French government itself fled the capital. Heading south, first to Orléans and then to the châteaux of the Loire, the leaders retreated to Bordeaux. Five days after their flight, the first German motorcyclists reached Paris, rolling into the Place Voltaire from the northern suburbs of Saint-Denis. By the early afternoon, the Nazi Wehrmacht had staged the first of its daily marches goose-stepping to drum and fife down an otherwise silent Avenue des Champs-Élysées. “There never has been anything like the eerie atmosphere in Paris,” Robert Murphy observed from his office at the United States Embassy on the Place de la Concorde.

At least sixteen people in Paris took their own lives that day. The neurosurgeon and head of the American Hospital, Comte Thierry de Martel, stuck his arm with a syringe filled with strychnine. Novelist Ernst Weiss, Franz Kafka’s friend, swallowed a large amount of barbiturates, but when this overdose failed to have its intended effect, he slashed his wrists, dying twenty-four hours later. The sixty-four-year-old concierge at the Pasteur Institute, Joseph Meister, shot himself in the head rather than obey the German invaders—he had been the first person cured of rabies by Louis Pasteur.

Many Parisians were in shock. What the German army under the kaiser had failed to do in four years of vicious slaughter in the First World War had been accomplished under Adolf Hitler in six weeks. France had suffered the most humiliating defeat in its history. Worse, however, was to come.

THE Germans would occupy three-fifths of the country, seizing a vast swath of territory north of the Loire that included two-thirds of France’s population, two-thirds of its most fertile agricultural lands, and three-fourths of its industry. The occupying power would control not only Paris but also the strategic Atlantic and Channel coastlines. France would have to pay the costs of the German Occupation, which were set at an exorbitant daily rate of 400 million francs and pegged to an inflated 20–1 franc-mark exchange rate. Over the next four years, France would pay the Third Reich a total of 631,866,000,000 francs, or almost 60 percent of its national income.

The rest of France was to be carved up. Germany seized Alsace and Lorraine, as well as the northeastern territories of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, the latter governed by Wehrmacht Command in Brussels, with entrance strictly forbidden to Frenchmen. A slice of territory from Menton to the southeastern border was handed over to Germany’s ally, Italy. The remaining part, located south of the Loire, became the “free” or the unoccupied zone, a nominally independent state with its capital in Vichy, a spa and casino resort known for its mineral water. When the French government had resettled there in the summer of 1940, it had to acknowledge “the rights of the occupying power.” Collaboration—once a benign word for “working together”—soon took on a sinister new meaning.

In Paris, the Blitzkrieg was rapidly followed by a Ritzkrieg. Nazi officials arrived en masse to take control of the capital and commandeer prime real estate in the elegant western districts. The High Command of the German Military Occupation, which would govern the occupied zone, moved into the Hôtel Majestic on avenue Kléber. The Kommandant, or governor-general, of Grand-Paris, chose the Hôtel Meurice on rue de Rivoli; the military intelligence and counterespionage organization, the Abwehr (Abwehrstelle Frankreichs), set up headquarters in the Hôtel Lutétia nearby on the Boulevard Raspail. The Luftwaffe took over the Palais Luxembourg, while the Kriegsmarine settled into various properties on and around the Place de la Concorde.

For Nazi officers and their favored French collaborators, Paris had become the Babylon of the Third Reich. There were lavish champagne-and-caviar parties hosted by Ambassador Otto Abetz on rue de Lille, and equally extravagant affairs organized by Luftwaffe General Friedrich-Carl Hanesse in the Rothschild mansion on Avenue de Marigny. Famous restaurants, like Maxim’s, Lapérouse, and La Tour d’Argent, catered to every whim, as did cabarets, nightclubs, and brothels, many of which enjoyed exemptions from the official curfew. As New York Times correspondent Kathleen Cannell put it, at the time of the discovered bodies on rue Le Sueur in March 1944 Nazi-occupied Paris seemed to be “dancing with false gaiety on a rumbling volcano.”

For most Frenchmen, however, the last four years represented fear, cold, hunger, and humiliation. No group of people, of course, fared worse than the Jews. Almost immediately after the conquest, the 200,000 Jews of France began losing their basic civic rights. As of October 3, 1940, they could no longer serve in positions of authority in government, education, publishing, journalism, film, and the military. The following day, civil authorities were granted the power to intern foreign-born Jews in “special camps.” Three days later, the repeal of the Crémieux Act stripped citizenship from another 1,500 Algerian Jews.

The flurry of discriminatory laws was relentless. By early 1941, Jews could no longer work in banking, insurance, real estate, or hotels. Quotas restricted the number of Jews allowed to practice the legal and medical professions to 2 percent, though this, too, was later expanded into an outright ban. Jewish shops were soon to be “Aryanized,” that is, seized by the state and the ownership handed over or sold at a bargain rate to non-Jews. The aim was to “eliminate all Jewish influence in the national economy.”

It was not long before the rafles, or roundups, began. On May 14, 1941, the first rafle resulted in the arrest and internment of 3,747 innocent Jewish men. Ten months later, on March 27, 1942, “special train 767” left France with the first convoy of 1,112 Jews packed into overcrowded third-class passenger cars, bound for the new extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eighty-four deportations would follow, most of them in sealed cattle cars. SS Lieutenant General Reinhard Heydrich and his deputy Adolf Eichmann would continually press French authorities to quicken the pace. In all, 75,721 Jewish men, women, and children would be deported from France to Nazi death and concentration camps in the east. Only 2,800 of them would return home.

Paris under the Nazi Occupation was, in the words of historian Alistair Horne, the four darkest years of the city’s two-thousand-year history. For many Parisians indeed, it was a nightmare of tyranny and terror, resulting in a desperation to escape that would be ruthlessly exploited by one man in its midst.

WHAT Massu did after his initial search of the town house might seem peculiar at best. He did not go straight to rue Caumartin to look for Dr. Petiot, nor did he send any detectives there. Instead, he went home.

A French law, dating back to December 13, 1799 (22 Frimaire of the French Revolutionary Calendar), prohibited the police from barging in on citizens during the middle of the night unless there was a fire, flood, or an invitation from inside the residence. Article 76 of the Constitution of Year Eight, as it was known, had been written to stop the late-night arrests that occurred during the Reign of Terror. But in a case of this magnitude, Massu could have simply posted men outside Petiot’s apartment to wait for the legal hour. Clearly, there was another explanation for his inaction.

The commissaire suspected that 21 rue Le Sueur had been used by the Gestapo, the German secret state police, that had seized control of French internal affairs. Established in April 1933 to eliminate “enemies of the state” as part of Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power, the Gestapo had swelled from some three hundred officials in a former art school on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin to a total of forty thousand agents and many more informers across Occupied Europe. In the name of law and order, they could spy, arrest, imprison, torture, and kill with almost complete impunity. The organization was above the law, and there was no appeal.

Massu had reasons for presuming a possible Gestapo connection. There was not only the butchery and brutality of the crime scene, but also the fact that the German security forces had preferred to set up its offices in the chic 16th arrondissement. Around the corner on the Avenue Foch, for instance, were Gestapo buildings at Nos. 31, 72, 84, and 85, along with offices of the related SS secret service the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, at Nos. 19–21, 31 bis, 53, 58–60, 80, and 85. Many other German military, counterespionage, and Nazi Party offices were located on this street as well.

A swastika had flown over the building across from Petiot’s property. The garage at No. 22 had been appropriated by Albert Speer’s Organization Todt, a vast supply company that supervised German construction projects in Occupied Europe. In Paris, this group was doing everything from melting down bronze statues for armaments to sending laborers north to construct the Atlantic Wall against an Allied invasion.

The French police, of course, had no authority over the Gestapo or any of its activities. In a protocol signed with SS Brigadier General Karl Oberg on April 18, 1943, the secretary general of the French police, René Bousquet, had to agree to work with the occupying power to maintain “calm and order in an always efficient manner.” Specifically, the French would have to help German police combat the “attacks of the communists, terrorists, agents of the enemy and saboteurs as well as those who support them: Jews, Bolsheviks, Anglo-Americans.” To add further insult to humiliation, French policemen had to salute German officials whenever they encountered them in the street—this was the notorious Grusspflicht.

This subordination was to be endured, the argument went, because it was preferable to the alternative: namely, a police force staffed only by the occupying power and the many extremist militaristic organizations that collaborated with the Nazis. Such circumstances would not only lead to frightening police brutality, but also offer few chances to sabotage German authorities. Many members of Resistance organizations, on the other hand, scorned this position as a mere rationalization of a cowardly, self-interested collaboration between enemy and traitors.

Still, despite his initial hunch that the human remains on rue Le Sueur were somehow tied to the Gestapo, Massu had some nagging doubts. For one thing, he had not been warned off the site, as surely would have happened in advance or soon after the discovery of the bodies on its premises if there had been a Gestapo affiliation. Nor had he encountered any Gestapo agents on the property, which also would likely have occurred if the building had served as an extension of the secret state police. Hours after the initial phone call from his secretary, Massu had still not received any communication from German authorities.

COMMISSAIRE Massu arrived at his office at 36 Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité about nine o’clock on the morning of March 12, 1944. His windows on the third floor of the sprawling Police Judiciaire overlooked the horse chestnut trees of the place Dauphine, the restaurant Le Vert-Galant, and the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris and still standing despite the increased threat of Allied bombing raids.

Some inspectors were drawing up reports; others looked after detainees in the corridors, none of whom, unfortunately, would turn out to have anything to do with 21 rue Le Sueur. Picking up the Petiot file, which was begun the previous night, Massu prepared to return to the town house to meet a team of dignitaries and officials that included his immediate superior, the prefect of police Amédée Bussière, who was eager to inspect the site for himself as he would have to report to both French and German authorities.

At ten o’clock that morning, the German-controlled broadcasting organization Radio Paris first announced the gruesome discovery of the charnel house on rue Le Sueur. “Petiot has fled Paris,” the presenter said, not wasting any time to speculate on the suspect’s whereabouts. “He will likely return to the terrorist bands of Haute-Savoie,” as officials dubbed the Resistance fighters in the Alpine region bordering Switzerland, “and resume his position as médecin-major.” In this initial broadcast, as well as many others that followed that day, the radio station painted a portrait of the killer as an outlaw terrorist who opposed the Third Reich.

But Radio Paris had a poor reputation as a source of information. “Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris is German” was a popular refrain sung to the tune of “La Cucaracha.” Was Petiot really with the Resistance? Rumors inside the police force already circulated of the suspect’s ties to clandestine patriotic organizations. Massu had also heard that a leader of a Resistance network had arrived at the crime scene, spoken with police officers, and then, after having been shown inside the building, left with their permission. Patrolmen Fillion and Teyssier still denied this allegation, but Massu planned to question the patrol officers himself.

As news of the discovered human remains spread, many people began to take detours to see the building on rue Le Sueur, a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and the Bois de Boulogne. Many women with handbaskets stopped by on the way to and from the daily ritual of standing in long lines at the bakery, the dairy, the butcher, the greengrocer, the tobacconist, and elsewhere, where they hoped to obtain expensive, often poor-quality rationed goods, if they were still available. When one of Petiot’s neighbors, Madame Legouvé, went for a walk with her daughter that morning, she heard two people speak of the discovery. One gasped at the stench outside the physician’s town house, claiming that “it smells like death,” and the other replied that “death has no odor.”

Inside Legouvé’s rue Le Sueur apartment building, discussion was more animated. One of her neighbors noted that the smell on the sidewalk was of no consequence compared to the courtyard: “There, it is truly, truly foul.” Another neighbor, Monsieur Mentier, shrugged his shoulders, unwilling to speculate other than to state that the smell might well be explained by a crack in the main line of the sewer. The concierge hinted at something more sinister: “If I told you everything I know, it is likely that you would change your opinion.”