Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (3 page)

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.

W
HAT 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.

C
OMMISSAIRE 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.”

D
R. Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot had seemed a respectable family physician with a flourishing medical practice. He adored his wife, Georgette Lablais Petiot, an attractive thirty-nine-year-old brunette whom he had married almost seventeen years before. They played bridge, often went to the theater or the cinema, and doted on their only son, Gérard (Gerhardt Georges Claude Félix), one month from his sixteenth birthday. All of this made the discoveries at rue Le Sueur even more inconceivable.

The physician had grown up in Auxerre, an old medieval town just under one hundred miles southeast of Paris. At its center, amid the half-timbered buildings on the winding cobbled streets, stood the imposing Gothic Cathedral of St. Étienne and the large Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Germain, with its late-fifteenth-century clock tower. The Yonne River runs through this wine-growing district famous for its Chablis, branching out into the surrounding wooded region that produces its second-leading export, timber.

Petiot’s father, Félix Iréné Mustiole, worked at the Auxerre postal and telegraph office. His mother, Marthe Marie Constance Joséphine Bourdon, or Clémence as she preferred to call herself, had also worked there, as a young postal clerk before his birth. Petiot, the older of two children, was born January 17, 1897, just over ten years before his brother Maurice was born in December 1906. Petiot had lived his earliest years in the family’s rented apartment on the top floor of a house at 100 rue de Paris.

In 1912, his mother died from complications of a surgery. “
At the death of my sister,” Henriette Bourdon Gaston told the police in March 1944, “I raised my nephews.” Many villagers, on the other hand, would claim that the brothers had lived with her much longer, Marcel for extended periods of time since the age of two. Was Gaston ashamed of the man he had become and therefore downplaying her involvement in his upbringing?

It was difficult, for Massu and historians alike, to navigate through
the layers of rumor, gossip, and myth that surrounded Petiot’s childhood. As with many other accused murderers, former neighbors dwelled upon tales of his sadism and antisocial behavior. Young Petiot, it was said, liked to capture insects and pull off their legs and heads. He snatched baby birds from nests, poked out their eyes, and laughed as they shrieked in pain and stumbled into the side of the cage. Then, withholding food, he watched them starve to death.

Even his favorite cat was not immune to his cruelty. In one of several variants of the story, when Henriette Gaston was preparing to wash clothes, she put a tub of water on the stove and went to fetch the linen. Marcel was playing on the kitchen floor with the cat. When Gaston returned, the young boy was holding the animal by the neck and attempting to dip its paws in the scalding water. She screamed. Marcel, changing abruptly, hugged the cat to his chest and yelled back that he hated her and wished she were dead. The next morning, after she tried to teach him a lesson in empathy by allowing him to sleep with the cat, she awoke to find the boy covered with scratches and bites. The cat had been smothered to death.