Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (2 page)

The city was suffering the fourth year of the Nazi Occupation. Huge red and white banners emblazoned with a black swastika had flown atop the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and many other landmarks and buildings near Petiot’s town house. White placards with Gothic script directed traffic, mostly German and many of them, in that area, Mercedes-Benzes or Citroëns with small swastika flags on the fenders. The few people on the streets after the official ten p.m. curfew were Germans, “friends of the occupiers,” and the “workers of the night.” A brothel exclusively for Nazi officers was located just around the corner from Petiot’s property.

As the car pulled up to 21 rue Le Sueur, a single streetlamp, hooded for the wartime blackout, cast a dim bluish light on the activities of the police, which, as Massu already realized, were inspiring an “uneasy curiosity” among the street’s residents. Some officers controlled the crowd eager to watch from balcony windows; others followed the commissaire inside the town house. Policemen were now arriving every few minutes.

Massu entered the mansion, which had a grand salon, a petit salon, a large formal dining room, a billiards room, a library, six bedrooms, and two kitchens. The house had previously belonged to Princess Marie Colloredo-Mansfeld, a sixty-seven-year-old Frenchwoman whose husband’s family had borne the title of imperial prince since 1763.
The French actress Cécile Sorel, the comtesse de Ségur and doyenne of the
Comédie Française, had lived there in the 1930s, a neighboring concierge was telling people. This would be claimed for years, but it is not accurate. Sorel had only rented the house to store her extensive wardrobe and trunks of memorabilia from her long career on the stage.

The current owner of the property was far less known to the general public than either the princess or the actress. “
The name Marcel Petiot meant absolutely nothing to me,” Commissaire Massu admitted. It was the first time he had even heard it.

From what Massu could tell, the owner was an assiduous collector of fine art. Many of the rooms boasted a splendid array of crystal chandeliers, oriental rugs, antique furniture, marble statues, Sèvres vases, and oil paintings in gilded frames. At the same time, there was a startling state of neglect. The rooms were not only dusty and full of cobwebs, but also, in some cases, the furniture was turned over or stacked in corners as if at a flea market. In several rooms and corridors were torn wallpaper, loose baseboards, and dangling panels. Massu saw exquisite Louis XV furniture alongside filthy couches with visibly protruding springs.

When one officer warned that the case would most likely turn out to be appalling, Massu was unfazed. He had heard this before. In fact, almost every time a new crime was discovered, someone usually noted that it would be a
“terrible histoire.”
He had no doubt that this might well be the case. As chief of the Brigade Criminelle, he was used to investigating disturbing affairs.

Still Massu was taken aback at the macabre spectacle in the basement of 21 rue Le Sueur: the half-burned skull in the furnace, the pile of tibias, femurs, and other bones on the floor. A foot, Massu saw, was “blackened like a log that had been slowly consumed.” A dismembered hand, curled up tightly, “grasped the thin air in desperation.” A woman’s torso lay there, with the flesh “gnawed away to reveal the splinters of the ribcage.” The stench—“the sinister odor of roasted human flesh,” as he put it—gripped his throat.

A few steps away, Massu found a shovel, a dark-stained hatchet, and then, underneath the stone stairs, a gray bag containing the left half of
a decomposed body, minus the head, foot, and internal organs. Massu
did not know how to describe the ghastly site other than by using a reference to medieval literature. The basement of the elegant town house looked like a scene from Dante’s
Inferno
.

E
XITING into the courtyard, Massu, Bernard, and a couple of detectives, including Inspector Principal Marius Battut, entered one of the smaller buildings in the back. In the first room was
a polished desk, along with two leather armchairs, a lounge sofa, and a small round table topped with magazines. A cupboard full of medical supplies stood against one wall; against another was a glass-lined bookcase in which medical treatises were shelved. What particularly struck the commissaire, however, was the room’s appearance: It was cleaner, tidier, and in much better condition than the more stately main building. It also seemed to have been recently renovated.

Opening a second door, located near one of the bookshelves, Massu exited into a narrow corridor, about three feet in width, which led to another door, this one with a thick chain and padlock. The investigators entered. It was a small, triangular room, about eight feet on the longest side, six on the shortest. The walls were thick, two of them of rough cement and the third covered by beige wallpaper. There were no windows or furniture, only two unshaded lightbulbs and a plain metal cot. Attached near the corners of each wall, about one meter from the ceiling, were a number of iron hooks.

A gold-trimmed double wooden door on the far wall appeared to lead to some grand salon, but when one of the inspectors tried to open it, the doorknob simply turned around. With the help of a crowbar, the men ripped the door from the hinges to discover that it had been glued there. To the right of this false door was a bell, which did not work either. Actually it was not even connected, as its wires had been cut from the outside. As for the door through which the inspectors had entered, Massu noticed that it had no handle on the inside.

Examining the beige wallpaper, which looked freshly applied, Bernard peeled it back and discovered a viewing lens fitted in the wall at
a height of almost six feet. The purpose of the room was not clear, but there was already a disturbing hunch that this small space with its iron hooks, many decoys, and virtually soundproof walls might well be where the victims had met their demise.

After retracing their steps to the courtyard, Massu and his team entered the old carriage house, which had been converted into a garage and crammed with tools, boards, slop pails, paintbrushes, gas masks, and old mattress springs. A sliding door in the back led to another building, probably the former stable. There, on the ground, beyond a pile of rusty scrap iron was a metal cover that hid the night’s most horrific discovery.

It was the entrance to a pit. A newly greased pulley, with a hook and a thick rope tied to form a noose, hung over the hole. A horrible stench left little doubt as to what lay inside. Massu, nevertheless, climbed down the wooden ladder, watching each slippery step, and landed in the middle of a revolting mix of quicklime and decomposing bodies of varying stages—the dumping ground, in effect, of a veritable slaughterhouse.

But who could say how many bodies lay in the pit? With a depth estimated at ten to twelve feet, there were clearly many more here than in the basement. The bones crunched under Massu’s foot on landing. When the commissaire exited, reeking from his descent, he ordered specialists to retrieve the bones for analysis at the police laboratory.
His assistants, however, refused. They looked as frightened, Massu said, as if they expected a bomb to explode or had met the devil himself.

Commissaire Massu had made some 3,257 arrests in his thirty-three-year career investigating crime in the French capital,
but he had never seen a case as heinous or as perplexing as this one. Who was responsible for this “
nightmare house”? Who, for that matter, were the victims, how many were there, and how exactly had they died? Most perplexing of all, what was the motive? The murderer—whoever he was—was not just killing his victims, he was dismembering them. The attempt to solve what Massu soon dubbed “
the crime of the century” had begun.

F
OUR 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.

T
HE 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.