Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (20 page)

There was the emphasis on departing in groups of two, or at most three, as Petiot had told Fourrier. The town house at 21 rue Le Sueur, with its private courtyard surrounded by high walls, was moreover better suited for shielding escapees than many of the attics, cellars, churches, and other safe houses used by Resistance groups. As for the hair salon, some Resistance organizations were indeed known to use them as fronts, a good choice, actually, for a clandestine business that relied on personal contacts, word-of-mouth publicity, and inconspicuous arrivals and departures. Agent Rose or Andrée Peel (née Virot),
who helped save more than one hundred downed British and American pilots in Brest, was only one example of a Resistant who worked out of a beauty parlor.

Argentina would not have been an unlikely destination either. For one thing, the South American country had long welcomed immigrants. With the immense pampas, a rich grassy plain sweeping westward to the Andes Mountains, and a flourishing beef industry, Argentina had enjoyed a rising prosperity but often lacked a sufficient labor force to exploit its resources fully. The capital, Buenos Aires, had grown sevenfold since the turn of the century, making it the third-largest city in the western hemisphere, behind New York and Chicago. Cosmopolitan residents of Buenos Aires called themselves
porteños
, or “
the people of the port.”

The welcoming of foreigners was not only central to Argentine history; it was also written into its constitution. “
The federal government shall promote European immigration,” Clause XXV stated, giving specific responsibility to its House of Representatives and granting each arrival full equality, with the option of becoming a citizen after only two years. Later legislation had offered additional incentives. The Immigration and Colonization Law of 1876, for example, promised arrivals a free five-day stay in a government hostel, assistance in obtaining employment, and if necessary, free travel to the job in the hinterland. The government would eventually help defer costs of the voyage and grant the first hundred people of each convoy one hundred hectares of land.

During the Great Depression, however, the government began to restrict immigration. In fact, the influx of illicit Argentine papers onto the black market in Occupied Paris was an unintended consequence of a series of new rules and regulations issued in Buenos Aires. In July 1938, a confidential act known as Directive 11 required Argentine consuls to “
deny visas, even tourist and transit visas, to all persons that could be considered to be abandoning or to have abandoned their country of origin as undesirables or having been expelled, whatever the motive for their expulsion.” The target clearly was Jews fleeing persecution. Many other decrees followed. Jewish emigration to Argentina was halved
within a year, and continued to drop. As the future vice president Vicente Solano Lima put it, “We don’t want the ghetto here.”

As the difficulty of legally entering Argentina increased, officials in Argentine consulates around Europe seized an opportunity to profit. In Milan, the Argentine consulate was notorious for selling immigration documentation. “What price for an Argentine visa today?” was a question often heard outside its offices, recalled Eugenia Lustig, the Italian Jewish physician. The Argentine consulate in Hamburg was known to sell visas to Jews for approximately 5,000 Reichsmarks. An Argentine consul in Barcelona, Miguel Alfredo Molina, confiscated passports from Argentine citizens to resell for 35,000 pesetas each. Closer to Petiot, the Argentine ambassador in Paris, Miguel Ángel Cárcano, was also cashing in on the opportunity. Before his recall at the beginning of the Occupation, he was believed to have made one million dollars from selling Argentine visas to Jews.

This was sordid business. At the same time, it illustrates painful moral ambiguities at the heart of the Second World War. As the historian and grandson of a wartime Argentine consul, Uki Goñi, asked, which was worse: selling visas that allowed hunted Jews to flee Nazi tyranny, or remain “uncorrupted” and refuse to issue any immigration documents at all?

So when Petiot said that his escape organization had access to someone inside an Argentine embassy, it would not have sounded preposterous. But that, of course, is not the same thing as saying that he actually had the documents, or that they would have managed to secure their entry into that country. At the time Petiot claimed to have such power, Argentine diplomatic papers, both real and forged, were losing their value. Immigration was tightening against legal and illegal entries, even before the military coup of June 4, 1943, would restrict it to a trickle.

E
DMOND Pintard, the tall, garrulous, extroverted fifty-six-year-old makeup artist and former vaudeville performer, stepped into
Massu’s office on March 20, 1944. The commissaire later remembered how poorly the interrogation had begun, and how arrogant the detainee had been.

“
Monsieur le commissaire,” Pintard said, with an exaggerated self-confidence. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. Edmond Pintard, theatrical makeup artist currently threatened with an indictment of complicity for … crimes.”

“Me, an accomplice of crimes, the Great Francinet? Yes, I mean the Great Francinet, known by all the directors of music halls of Paris, a specialist in songs for weddings and banquets. My name, Monsieur le Commissaire, was on the advertising columns in letters
this large,
” demonstrating by stretching out his hands, his fingers stained yellow by tobacco. “And if I am a makeup artist today, it is because I chose to retire at the height of my glory.”

“How much were you paid to be the recruiter of Dr. Petiot?”

“You dare …”

“I dare say that if you continue to tell me about your life, I am going to get angry. We are not at the theater here.” Massu pointed to the files on his desk, detailing the “innocent men and women who have been murdered by the careful attention of your friend Petiot. Murdered and perhaps tortured, before being cut up into bits and thrown into a lime pit. You have never smelled human flesh burning, have you?

“I asked you how much Petiot paid you,” Massu repeated. “I don’t believe that I heard your answer.”

Pintard would eventually say that, despite recruiting for the escape organization for about two and a half years, he had only been paid twice. The first time was 6,000 francs, and the second 12,500 francs. His friend, Fourrier, had paid him directly out of his own commission. Pintard had only met Petiot once or twice, he added, and dealt through Fourrier, whom he had known for almost twenty years. Like the hairdresser, Pintard said that he did not know of the town house at 21 rue Le Sueur until he read about it in the newspapers.

“Did you solicit in bars?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“And the other times?”

“People began to know me in the neighborhood. They came to me.”

When asked what exactly Petiot had promised his clients, Pintard explained that it was a safe passage to South America and official papers that proclaimed them commercial agents of a republic there. Like Fourrier, Pintard claimed to have believed that Dr. Eugène was a hero, a patriot, and a “great Resistant.” As for his own responsibility, he said he thought he was only “doing [his] duty helping other Frenchmen escape their enemies.”

At the end of the questioning, Pintard paused at the door. Massu asked if he wanted to say anything.

“Monsieur le Commissaire, if you would kindly ask the photographers to give me some peace. Everyone who knows me … I am ashamed.”

“I am unable to do anything. They are doing their job.”

Pintard opened the door, exiting to the blinding light of magnesium flashbulbs.

A
T the time Fourrier and Pintard began recruiting clients to escape Occupied Paris, Nazi Germany looked almost invincible. The swastika flew over capitals across the continent: Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and after April 1941, Belgrade, Sofia, and Athens. London, many believed, would be next, fulfilling Marshal Philippe Pétain’s prediction that Britain would soon be a corpse.

On June 18, 1940, General Charles de Gaulle had entered the London BBC studios and issued a powerful appeal to his countrymen: “
The cause of France is not lost.” All French officers, soldiers, and workers should join him at once in the continued struggle, he said. “
Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not and shall not die.”

Few people in France actually heard that landmark broadcast; fewer still had answered the call. In fact, no prominent military officer, politician, or businessman had signed up to de Gaulle’s cause, except for the governor general of Indochina, Georges Catroux, and, almost one year later, the forty-one-year-old left-wing prefect of the département of Eure-et-Loire, Jean Moulin.
Most of de Gaulle’s earliest supporters were Bretons, estimated in July 1940 to represent some two-thirds of his small army of
seven thousand patriots.

After the conquest of France, the Nazis had tightened their grip
over the occupied zone, pouncing on any sign of unrest. When morale hit new lows in the winter of 1940–1941, as temperatures fell below freezing for a record seventy times, which was fifty more than average, the Resistance gained few additional recruits. By the spring of 1941, when Petiot first told Fourrier about his supposed organization, all of Paris and its surrounding region could have produced fifty fighters, as Charles Tillion recalled with some exaggeration, “
capable of using any weapons at all.”

Resistance to the German Occupation in Paris had, of course, lagged behind resistance in cities in the south, like Lyon, Toulouse, and Marseille. There were, after all, some thirty thousand to forty thousand Nazi troops stationed in Gross-Paris, not to mention the Gestapo, SD, and French affiliates who patrolled the streets, forcing opposition to the regime, at first, to take symbolic forms.

On November 11, 1940, Armistice Day, several thousand Parisian students, waving the illegal tricolor and singing the banned
“La Marseillaise,”
marched down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Étoile, where they placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The French police, wielding batons, tried to control the crowds. The Nazi occupying authorities then took over, attacking with rifle butts and eventually opening fire. Rumors swirled of a massacre. Although there were no known deaths, more than one hundred people had been arrested and many people injured when German authorities fired on the demonstrators.

Early acts of defiance in Paris took place in many subtle ways. When newsreels were shown in cinemas, for instance, the portrayal of German victories or images of the Führer sparked such spasms of coughing that they forced the owners to keep on the lights. In February 1941,
Liliane Schroeder reported how her mother was nearly arrested for powdering her nose during a newsreel. Similarly, Parisians expressed their opposition to the Occupation by wearing particular colors on certain days, like black ribbons and black ties on the first anniversary of the German conquest, or red, blue, and white on Bastille Day 1941, which led to some 488 arrests.

Churchillian “V” signs of victory gradually adorned walls and pavements around Paris, the French police counting a thousand such markings on April 7, 1941. Anti-German slogans were scrawled on walls, official German posters were slashed, and handwritten stickers denouncing the Occupation were pasted around town, four hundred of them, for instance, found by the police in one week in January 1941. Students liked to creep up behind a German truck at a traffic light and pin to it a small typewritten sticker that carried the words “Vive de Gaulle.”

French protests, however, soon took a different turn.
On the morning of August 21, 1941, a twenty-two year-old French communist named Pierre-Félix Georges (code name “Fredo” or “Fabien,” later “Colonel Fabien”) killed a German naval cadet, Alphonse Moser, as he boarded a train at the Barbès-Rochechouart métro station. The Nazis responded ruthlessly. Kommandant von Gross-Paris, General Ernst Schaumburg, announced a new policy of creating a pool of “hostages” from all Frenchmen arrested or taken into custody and then choosing a number of them for execution “
corresponding to the gravity of the case.” Six hostages were shot in reprisal for the murder of Moser.

But the severity of the punishment did not deter further attacks. The day after the announcement, two German officers were killed at Lille and then two more the following day in the Nord. This pattern was repeated throughout the autumn of 1941. An officer was gunned down at a métro station ticket window, a soldier knifed exiting a brothel; incendiaries, stolen from the Nazi depot, were tossed into a German hotel. A hand grenade was lobbed at a Nazi canteen; a bomb exploded at a German bookstore on the Place de la Sorbonne. Trains were derailed, cables were cut, and fuses in factories sabotaged. In December of that year alone, the German army estimated that there had been some 221 attacks against officers, soldiers, and property.

Resistance groups were now on the rise in Paris and elsewhere, especially after the Red Army repulsed the Nazi invasion and began to pursue the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Inside France, a new German policy further swelled the ranks of Resistance. In February 1943, the Germans implemented the hated STO (
Service du travail obligatoire
),
which required all Frenchmen aged twenty-one to twenty-three to serve two years of compulsory labor in Germany. By the end of the war, some 650,000 Frenchmen would be sent to the involuntary work program in war-related industries. To avoid this fate, young men fled to the countryside, leading to the spontaneous creation of bands of
maquis
, named after the Corsican word for thick scrubland and soon carrying connotations of a bandit or outlaw.

From remote bases in hills or mountains, many of the emerging “armies of the shadows” engaged in sabotage and attacks on German and Vichy authorities, ranging from disruption of railways to guerrilla-style raids. As they needed food and funds to survive, not to mention strike German targets, some gangs raided farms, robbed shops, and attacked people suspected of collaborating or profiteering on the black market. Some
maquis
became popular legends, like L’Hermine in the Drôme with his black cape and coat of arms. Other Frenchmen denounced them as criminals masquerading under a noble cause.