Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (34 page)

Kneller, a forty-one-year-old electrician, had then served as codirector of Cristal Radio, a company that distributed radio and home appliances from its plant on rue Saint-Lazare. He also served as a technical consultant to other companies, including a battery manufacturer. Kneller and his wife had left their native Germany in June 1933, six
months after the rise of Adolf Hitler. He sought French citizenship and, on the outbreak of war, volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, serving until his release in September 1940, following the armistice.

When the police tried to track down the landlady of their two-room apartment at 4 avenue du Général-Balfourier in the 16th arrondissement, they found that she no longer lived there. One of their neighbors, thirty-two-year-old Christiane Roart, however, proved to be a wealth of information.

The Knellers, she told Inspector Louis Poirier, had considered leaving Paris for some time, given the growing dangers the city now posed for its Jewish community. Kurt Kneller, a patriot who identified strongly with his new French homeland, wanted to remain in Paris, but he changed his mind on July 16, 1942, a date that came to be known as “Black Thursday.”

Alone in the third-floor apartment with René, Greta Kneller happened to see the arrival of French police from her window. Instinctively, she realized the danger. She grabbed René and rushed upstairs to hide with Roart.

This visit was part of the
grand rafle
, or “the great raid,” when, over the course of forty-eight hours, some
12,884 Jewish men, women, and children were seized by French police, marched into the city’s green-and-white buses, and then crammed into the sports stadium Vélodrome d’Hiver to await deportation to one of several concentration camps. Had the Knellers been at home that day, they would have had to face an eight-day ordeal in the hot, cramped arena, without access to adequate food, water, or basic sanitary facilities. After the stadium and a concentration camp, they would most likely have been herded onto freight cars on the way to Auschwitz.

Realizing that the authorities would likely return, the Knellers decided to find another place to live. Leaving young René temporarily with Roart, his godmother, the couple sought shelter with another family friend, Klara Noé, who lived nearby, at 19 rue Erlanger. On the following day, Friday, July 17, Kurt Kneller told his friend Ernest Jorin, a man who had invested in his firm and served as René’s godfather, that
they had found someone who would help them escape Nazi-occupied Paris. It was his doctor. They were instructed to pack their valuables into suitcases, which would be picked up by him personally that night. Petiot asked for the usual passport photographs and recommended a photography studio on Boulevard Saint-Martin.

As Jorin later told police, he had been skeptical of the so-called escape organization. When he expressed his doubts to Kneller, the latter had shrugged them aside, saying, “
I know, this appears suspect to me too, but what else can I do?” Kneller was desperate.

On the evening of July 17, the Knellers’ doctor arrived with a cart and horse-drawn cab driven by an elderly gentleman, matching the description given in the Wolff case. They loaded the luggage, two large and four or five small suitcases, onto the cart. The doctor said that he would return shortly for the furniture—suggesting again that, as in the Braunberger case, he was attempting to make even larger profits.

Roart was struck by how forcefully the doctor insisted on having all the apartment furniture handed over to him. He even threatened not to cross the Knellers into the unoccupied zone unless she complied. Kurt and Greta were not there to approve the transfer of property, as they had already moved, as instructed, into Noé’s apartment to await the doctor’s next communication. Reluctantly Roart and the concierge had agreed to the demands, handing out the bed linen first and promising the rest at a later date. The doctor, she remembered, had played with young René on his knee, but the boy did not want anything to do with him.

The doctor had orchestrated the departure to the smallest detail. He would arrive at Noé’s apartment that night, take Kurt Kneller first, and then return the following day for Greta and René. They would all be taken separately to the same location, believed to be a resting home, where they would receive false identification papers and a series of vaccinations and inoculations. The family looked forward to being reunited in time for their departure to the new world.

After this alleged escape from Paris, many of the Knellers’ friends and relatives began receiving postcards. Roart received one about fifteen days later, as did Noé and Jorin, the latter in particular perhaps
because he was believed to have kept some of the Kneller jewelry and other valuables. Each communication told essentially the same story. The Knellers had succeeded in “crossing over” and were doing well, though the journey had been difficult and Kurt had fallen ill. The letters and postcards ended, as in the Braunberger case, with the plea to destroy them.

There were other peculiarities. Madame Kneller signed each communication “Marguerite,” though friends knew she had retained the Germanic spelling of her name Margareth and always preferred the shortened form of “Greta.” The handwriting was more angular and strained than usual. Still, the letters seemed to have silenced any concern that something was amiss. They also likely served another purpose. As in the Braunberger case, the postcards would serve as recruiting tools for future clients.

When Christiane Roart was interviewed at the police station, she picked out Petiot immediately from a series of mug shots. She thought that the handwriting in the postcard matched the sample of a prescription signed by Dr. Petiot that the police provided. Moreover, when she looked through the suitcases, which she had packed for the family, she believed that the men’s shirts monogrammed with the faint initials “K.K.” (which someone had attempted to remove) had belonged to Kurt Kneller.

Other items in Petiot’s suitcases would be traced to this family, including
a woman’s black coat, a woman’s bathrobe, and a number of kitchen and other towels monogrammed with their initials. Roart also recognized a pair of striped pink silk pajamas,
though she could not say for certain that they had belonged to young René. The pants bottoms of a second pair of pajamas, however, seemed to be his, because, she remembered, it had been made from one of his father’s shirts. The boy’s name, age, and birth date matched one of the ration cards that Petiot carried at the time of his arrest.

The Knellers were never seen again in Paris or Argentina. On August 8, 1942, three weeks after their disappearance, workers on a barge on the Seine near Asnières reported discovering a bag wedged in
some bushes. Inside were
the mutilated remains of a young boy, approximately eight or nine years old, and the head, femurs, pelvis, and arms with the shoulder blades and clavicles of a woman between the age of forty and forty-five. Three days later, a man’s head was found in the river. The remains have never been identified, but the Knellers were added to the list of victims.

O
N October 30, 1945, almost one year to the date after his arrest,
Petiot suddenly refused to answer any questions. There had been ample time, he concluded, for the
juge d’instruction
to conduct his investigation and ask any question that he deemed relevant. Petiot was drawing the line. He would henceforth save his answers for the trial.

Gollety tried to prod him, but he would not relent. Sometimes the dossier reads like a farce, as seen, for example, in the interrogation on November 3, 1945.

“
On what date did you buy the property on rue Le Sueur?” Gollety asked.

“I have decided that I will no longer answer any questions, except in public.”

“For what purpose?” Gollety asked, returning to the question of his purchase of the house.

“Write ‘ditto’ and things will move along more quickly.”

Gollety would arrive with a long list of questions, including a forty-eight-page compilation on December 28, 1945, and Petiot would simply refuse to answer any of them.

The following month, in accordance with French criminal law, Gollety sent the Chamber of Accusations a bulging dossier that weighed approximately fifty kilos. There was enough evidence, it was concluded, to warrant sending the Petiot case to trial.

As for the alleged accomplices, including Georgette Petiot, Maurice Petiot, René Nézondet, Albert and Simone Neuhausen, Raoul Fourrier, Edmond Pintard, Roland Porchon, and Eryane Kahan, it was now officially decided that all charges would be dropped. There was simply
not enough evidence to prosecute them. “
Yet it is certain that, if justice can do nothing against them,” the future prosecution assistant Maître Michel Elissalde said, “the name that they bear and the sad reputation which affects them personally may already serve as a constant source of shame, at least if Petiot’s amoral insensitivity has not triumphed over them.”

The state was going to concentrate on Marcel Petiot. The number of victims was set at twenty-seven, and the file was turned over to the
procureur général
to draw up the formal
acte d’accusation
.

O
N the crisp spring morning of March 18, 1946, some four hundred spectators and one hundred journalists packed the Cour d’assises of the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. Everyone was eager to see the man accused of killing twenty-seven people, chopping them into pieces, flushing their inner organs into the sewer, and then disposing of the other remains in his lime pit or burning them in his basement stove. All the while, he amassed a fortune. This was expected to be, the
Washington Post
reported, “
the most sensational criminal trial in modern French history.”

As at the opening of a new play, actors, film stars, and ladies of high society, wearing turbans or fashionable small feathered hats, flocked to the courtroom, jostling for any empty seat or a place to stand. Many other Parisians, brandishing binoculars or opera glasses, came in anticipation of the thrilling denouement of the macabre affair. The air reeked of perfume. Outside, street vendors hawked souvenirs in an atmosphere increasingly resembling a carnival.

The evidence for the prosecution, lining the entire back wall of the courtroom, weighed more than one ton. All the parcels, trunks, suitcases, and baggage, it was noted, gave the courtroom the appearance of a train station. There were also glass containers of other items found at rue Le Sueur, ranging from an umbrella to the wheel of a bicycle.

At the center of the long high table would sit the president of the tribunal,
fifty-seven-year-old Marcel Leser, in a long scarlet robe trimmed with ermine. He would preside over the trial and, in accordance with French criminal law, conduct the
interrogatoire
, or preliminary questioning, himself. At his side were two magistrates who would be asked to take part in the deliberations of the jury and even vote on the verdict. This practice was supposed to ensure legal expertise in the debate, though it also meant that the state could exert considerable influence on the outcome. A jury in 1946 had only seven members, and two-thirds majority sufficed to reach a verdict.
All jurors were, by law, male.

To the immediate right of the magistrates sat the chief prosecuting attorney, Avocat Général Pierre Dupin, a thin, balding man with gray hair. He had only been appointed to the case six weeks before, when a number of higher-ranking prosecutors declined and his predecessor abruptly resigned.
His assistant, thirty-year-old deputy Maître Michel Elissalde, had spent his honeymoon cramming for the trial, covering the floors of his apartment wall to wall with the documents and regaling his new wife with arguments about the case.

At a right angle to the prosecution was the defense, led by the celebrated forty-four-year-old Maître René Floriot in black robe and white cravat. Floriot wore his trademark round tortoiseshell glasses. His hair was short, cut to the top of his ears, slicked back over his forehead, and parted to the left. Four young attorneys assisted him: Eugène Ayache, Paul Cousin, Pierre Jacquet, and Charles Libman. Each one, apportioned a fourth of the dossier, had devoted the last eighteen months to preparing the case. As their hairstyles were similar to their superior’s, they were soon dubbed the “Floriot boys.”

There were also nine civil attorneys participating in the proceedings—in French law, families of victims may hire lawyers to represent them during the criminal trial and, like the prosecutor, cross-examine witnesses and the defendant. The Khaït, Braunberger, Guschinow, Kneller, Wolff, Basch, and Dreyfus families had all hired representation, as had the families of Paulette Grippay and Gisèle Rossmy. The most prominent of the civil parties was Maître Pierre Véron, a highly decorated Resistance fighter who represented the Khaït and Dreyfus
families. Paulette Dreyfus had hired another attorney as well: her brother-in-law, Maître Pierre-Léon Rein.

At 1:50 p.m., a small door in the back reserved for the defendant opened and in walked Dr. Petiot, wearing a gray overcoat atop his blue-gray suit with lavender pinstripes and a purple bow tie. He was not restrained in handcuffs, as he had asked that they be removed just moments before. Security was tight. Two Gardes Mobiles, each wielding a tommy gun, accompanied the defendant into the prisoner’s box, which was located at a raised level right behind his defense attorney. Other helmeted guards stood at attention around and outside the room.

Petiot smiled to the jury and audience. One journalist thought he looked like an actor, an artist, or a pianist; another quipped that he looked like the “
devil’s poet.” Petiot’s black “piercing eyes” gave even the hardened forensic expert Professor René Piédelièvre the chills.

Aware that he was the center of attention,
Petiot took off his overcoat, folded it gently, and placed it on top of the dossier beside him. Then, evidently not finding his effort satisfactory, he unfolded his coat and proceeded to refold it a second time more meticulously. He straightened the knot of his bow tie. The crowd watched his every move. The show was just beginning.