by David King
Beretta played the part of an aspiring fugitive, feigning financial distress and negotiating the fee of 100,000 francs down to 60,000. He paid an initial 10,000 and promised the last 50,000 the following day. When he showed up to complete the transaction, he handed over the first 45,000, all supplied by the Gestapo with serial numbers duly noted. He delivered the remaining 5,000 in a telephone booth outside Café de la Renaissance, near métro Strasbourg-Saint-Denis. At this point, the hairdresser said that Beretta would leave Paris in a party of eight. He claimed to have a list of names in a book in his pocket.
On May 21, 1943, Beretta arrived at the hair salon for his scheduled departure. Fourrier and the makeup artist Pintard were there, but not Dr. Eugène. Berger sensed that the agency’s leader might have become suspicious, perhaps even had been tipped off about the raid. He ordered his Gestapo men to pounce. Agents exiting black Citroëns dashed into the salon and threw the men to the ground as they accepted payment.
When Jodkum learned of this arrest, he was livid. He would have preferred to watch the organization longer to discover its inner workings, not just its recruiters, who were easy enough to identify and arrest. Jodkum wanted the more shadowy agents who guided clients across the frontier, the officials who helped with the false paperwork, and, of course, the leader of the organization himself and the reputed treasure, all of which he feared would now be harder to seize. He blamed Berger’s panicked arrest for spoiling his opportunity. As a higher authority, Jodkum pulled rank and seized control of the interrogations.
The prisoners were handed over to Jodkum, with apologies. The hairstylist and makeup artist at first denied everything, but as questioning soon turned brutal, both men admitted working for a well-connected physician known as Dr. Eugène. He smuggled clients out of Occupied France across the mountains into the Free Zone, or abroad, passing through Andorra and then Spain, where they were put on a ship to Argentina. He also obtained false passports and other required travel documents for his clients. The doctor, they confessed, lived at 66 rue Caumartin.
WAS Marcel Petiot really Dr. Eugène, the man the Gestapo suspected of helping desperate people escape Occupied Paris? What implications, if any, did the Gestapo file have for discovering the identity of the remains at rue Le Sueur? And what had happened to Yvan Dreyfus?
By six o’clock on May 21, 1943, three hours after the arrest of the hairdresser and makeup artist, the Gestapo had stormed Marcel Petiot’s apartment and hauled him off to their headquarters in the imposing former French Ministry of Interior, at 11 rue Saussaies. They also arrested his old friend, René Nézondet, who had just arrived with theater tickets for the night’s performance of Champi’s musical comedy Ah, la Belle Epoque! at Théâtre Bobino.
Gestapo headquarters was an intimidating place even to its own officers. Former member Hans Gisevius described the atmosphere that prevailed in Berlin—and the tension could certainly apply to the office in Paris:
[It was] a den of murderers.… We did not even dare step ten or twenty feet across the hall to wash our hands without telephoning a colleague beforehand and informing him of our intention to embark on so perilous an expedition.
His colleague, Arthur Nebe, entered and exited the building using the back staircases, “with his hand always resting on the cocked pistol in his pocket.”
Dragged past the armed guards, Petiot was taken to a room on the fourth floor for questioning. He would later claim that the Gestapo had beaten him savagely at one point after his arrest, every hour throughout the night. The first few days—“three days and two nights,” as he put it—Petiot was shuttled between this building and other offices, including a branch of the military espionage and counterespionage organization, Abwehr, at 101 Avenue Henri-Martin.
Petiot suffered a series of brutal interrogations. As he described it, they drilled and filed his teeth, and put his head in a vise (“skull crushing”), causing him to spit blood for days and suffer excruciating cases of vertigo for a long time afterward. He was also given “the bath,” the technique of stripping a prisoner naked and then submerging him, headfirst, with arms and feet bound in chains, into icy water until he fell unconscious, at which point he was revived and the torture repeated. He was eventually dressed and sent in his soaking wet clothes to shiver away in a cold cell.
Sometimes prisoners faced other savage treatment, such as crushing or twisting of the testicles, or electric currents running through the hands, feet, and ears, with one end attached to the rectum and the other to the penis. There is no evidence that Petiot received either of the latter, but these served, along with the lash, the whip, the bath, and the vise, in the arsenal of interrogation methods used in Gestapo offices in France and elsewhere in Occupied Europe. It was called “running a prisoner through the dance.”
Petiot was interned at Fresnes Prison, a white stone structure seven miles outside of Paris that was at that time the largest prison in France and indeed the continent. It was also a notorious holding place for Resistants, captured British agents, and other enemies of the Third Reich. Petiot was detained in cell 440 on the fourth floor of the first division.
The cells in the long corridors were small, with a chair, a table, and an iron cot chained to the wall and covered by a straw mattress often infested with fleas or other bugs. Near the table were an open toilet and a single brass faucet. Graffiti was sometimes scratched or penciled into the walls, offering a glimpse into the spirit of the prisoners—many of them marshaling their resources in expectation of the next interrogation.
In cell 44 of the Second Division, American Sergeant H. Hilliard scrawled his name, the date “June 1943,” and the words “God bless America.” Guy Gauthier (alias André Nantais) of the Resistance network Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), locked in cell 205 of the Second Division, wrote, “Live Free or Die Fighting. France Free Yourself.” Cell 147 noted the death of “Mazera Dédé, innocent victim of the Gestapo,” while someone in cell 34 had drawn a heart with a pierced arrow and the letters R and L. He added not “Vive de Gaulle,” but “Vive le fin de la guerre.”
Like many other people arrested together, Marcel Petiot and René Nézondet had been separated upon arrival. Eight days later, Nézondet saw his friend again when both men stood outside the main entrance at Fresnes awaiting transfer from their cells for further questioning at Gestapo headquarters. Petiot was, Nézondet said, a pitiful sight. Handcuffed and chained at his ankles, Petiot “seemed to have great difficulty moving. He stood slightly stooped and patted his head constantly with a wet handkerchief.”
What, in the end, did Petiot admit to his interrogators? According to his confession, which he had been forced to sign, Petiot was not the main leader of the escape organization. He claimed to work for a patient in his medical practice named Robert Martinetti, or the “Martinetti Organization.”
Petiot had begun this work, he told his interrogators, one day in November 1941 when the alleged Martinetti informed him of the escape route to South America and asked if any of his clients wanted to use it. Months later, Petiot asked one of his patients, the hairdresser Charles Fourrier (his name was actually Raoul Fourrier), who in turn agreed to send him people wanting to leave Paris. Petiot met the potential clients at the rendezvous, usually at or near Place de la Concorde, such as outside the entrance to the métro at rue de Rivoli or, alternatively, in front of the station at Saint-Augustin. From here, he claimed to take them to Martinetti. The charge was at first 25,000 francs, though it later increased to 50,000 or higher, depending on the case.
Departures had begun in late 1942, Petiot said, pleading ignorance of most of the details about the organization, its escape route, and its hideaways. “All I knew, and all I was supposed to know, was Martinetti and delivering the travelers to him,” Petiot declared. Explaining why he was questioning Dreyfus if he were only a cog in the machine as he claimed, Petiot said that he had become skeptical of many people that Fourrier brought to him. He had taken it upon himself to examine candidates for their suitab
ility.
“I never saw any of the persons turned over to Martinetti again,” Petiot said. He did not know how to contact the boss, who, he claimed, always instigated communications by visiting his office or calling him. This professed ignorance must have sounded suspicious to the Gestapo, but the files revealed no further elaboration.
As one cell mate, a British-trained Resistance fighter named Lieutenant Richard Héritier, later claimed, he had no doubt that Petiot was a member of a network active in the French Resistance. He was moreover shocked at the brazen disrespect Petiot showed the guards. He acted as if he simply did not care what happened to him. Curiously, however, Petiot was never deported, executed, or made a hostage to be shot in reprisal for an attack on German soldiers. In fact, on January 13, 1944, Petiot was removed from his cold, damp cell and released. Less than two months later, the bodies were discovered on his property at rue Le Sueur.
The file in front of Massu was silent on the mystery of his release. Was it because, as Jodkum later implied, the Gestapo had concluded that Petiot was a complete lunatic? Did the Gestapo manage, as it sometimes did, to “turn” prisoner Petiot and have him work for them? Would that explain the sense of invulnerability he seemed to feel as he repeatedly insulted the Germans? Had he, as Petiot himself later claimed, proved so stubborn that the Gestapo chiefs had calculated that they would learn more if they released him and tracked his activities?
The French police would later find out, thanks to Germaine Barré, an agent in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), that Jodkum had offered Petiot his freedom in return for 100,000 francs. Having heard the conversation herself, while awaiting her own interrogation, she recalled that Petiot had declined, claiming that he suffered from cancer of the stomach and did not care whether they released him or not. Jodkum then called Petiot’s brother, Maurice, who promptly paid the ransom.
But this testimony begs the question why the Gestapo would release Petiot in the first place, particularly at such a relatively cheap price. Did Petiot benefit from protection? If so, who or what was looking after him, and why? The Gestapo file was certainly helping Massu learn about the case, but at the same time, it raised many questions about the murder suspect, the identity of the bodies found on his property, and of course the motives of the crimes.
On March 15, 1944, with Gestapo file in hand, Massu ordered the arrest of the hairdresser Raoul Fourrier and makeup artist Edmond Pintard. Later that same day, as Massu was trying to make sense of the murky and increasingly puzzling case, a middle-aged man contacted the police after reading in the newspapers about the discovery on rue Le Sueur.
13.
POSTCARDS FROM THE OTHER SIDE
SOMETIMES I AM UNABLE TO PREVENT MYSELF FROM QUIVERING WHEN I IMAGINE THE SCENES THAT HAVE BEEN WITNESSED AT THE HOUSE ON RUE LE SUEUR.
—Commissaire Massu
JEAN Gouedo, the man who appeared in Massu’s offices, owned a leather and fur shop across the street from Marcel Petiot’s rue Caumartin apartment. He had purchased the store in 1941 from his friend and former partner, Joachim Guschinow, then a forty-two-year-old Polish-born Jew who had been frightened by a number of developments in Occupied Paris. Gouedo had no need to explain why Guschinow had lived in fear.
On September 27, 1940, a new law had forced Guschinow, like all Jewish store owners, to display the bilingual black-and-yellow sign identifying his business as Jewish: JÜDISCHES GESCHÄFT and ENTERPRISE JUIVE. The following month, Guschinow became one of 7,737 Jewish shop owners and 3,456 co-owners in the Department of the Seine who were forced to sell their businesses to a non-Jew. The German Occupation was making a tragic mockery of France’s tradition of tolerance, which had long attracted immigrants like Guschinow to the country.
In early May 1941, the Préfecture de Police used the recent German-ordered census, identifying the almost 150,000 Jews in Paris, and required the 6,494 foreign Jewish males of Polish, Austrian, and Czech nationality between the ages of eighteen and sixty to report to one of five locations on the fourteenth of the month. The 3,747 who obeyed were promptly deported to the concentration camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Most of them would later die at Auschwitz.
Three months later, at the next roundup, the French police sealed off an area of the 11th arrondissement, north and east of the Place Bastille, with a large population of foreign-born Jews, and began seizing men between the ages of eighteen and fifty. They forcibly removed them from home, work, the métro station, and the streets. The 2,894 arrested in the initial sweep, however, were not sufficient, according to German authorities. Follow-up operations raised the number to 4,232, all of whom were sent to the new concentration camp Drancy, three miles away, in an old unfinished housing project. On the night of October 2–3, Gestapo-organized riots burned six Parisian synagogues and destroyed a seventh with explosives. Everywhere, it seemed, Nazi persecution was increasing in frequency and intensity. Each day, Guschinow feared arrest.
As Gouedo explained to the commissaire, Guschinow had told him that his medical doctor, Marcel Petiot, claimed to know a way out of the country. It was not easy, the physician had warned, but it was certainly possible. For a fee of 25,000 francs, an underground escape network would smuggle him over the mountains into Spain or alternatively across the line of demarcation into the unoccupied zone, where he would board a ship at Marseille for Argentina. All travel documents, including forged identity papers, false passports, and phony entry and exit visas, would be provided.
Guschinow was supposed to maintain complete silence about the secret organization, but, in his excitement, he confided to his colleague—a fortunate circumstance that would help the investigation. Despite his misgivings about the risks of such an enterprise, Gouedo had agreed to help his friend prepare for departure, and he now told Massu what he knew. The instructions had been minutely detailed. No pictures or identifying papers of any sort were to be carried; any initials or marks on articles of clothing or any item on his person had to be removed. After all, it was worthless, the physician had reportedly said, to purchase a false identity, only to carry evidence that contradicted or cast doubt on it. The fee was to defray the costs for the passeurs, the stay in a string of remote hideouts, the voyage across the Atlantic, and the bribes of corrupt officials along the way.
Instructed to bring one or at most two suitcases of personal belongings, Guschinow had sewn two five-hundred-dollar bills in US currency into the shoulders of his tweed coat and concealed another sum in a secret compartment of one of his suitcases. In total, he carried about 500,000 francs, along with a fortune in gold, silver, diamonds, and other family heirlooms, which included an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 francs in jewels alone. He also brought along several fur coats to start a new furrier shop in Buenos Aires.
Hearing the extraordinary story, Massu called in Guschinow’s wife, Renée, for an interview, which took place on March 21, 1944. A small blond woman in her early forties, Madame Guschinow confirmed Gouedo’s account in many respects and elaborated on other details as well. On January 2, 1942, the night of departure, she accompanied her husband to the L’Étoile, perhaps farther. It was dark and they were trying not to be seen. Guschinow had been told to come alone.
It was striking that Renée’s husband had been told the location of the rendezvous—rue Pergolèse, which intersects rue Le Sueur. In every other case that the police would discover, all of which came later chronologically, the physician would never again reveal the address in advance. Had he perhaps learned to be more reserved with this information? At this point, too, there was no mention of the name Dr. Eugène, though of course Petiot had no need to use a pseudonym with Guschinow, who, as his patient, already knew his identity.
As Madame Guschinow continued relating what she knew about the enterprise, Massu learned that her husband had been referred to one of Petiot’s colleagues, a specialist in tropical diseases who would make some “necessary injections,” presumably vaccinations. Guschinow was asked to pack a special suntan lot
ion, two blankets, and selected valuables in no more than two suitcases. That evening, Joachim and Renée Guschinow dined together, walked around the Arc de Triomphe area, and then kissed good-bye, never to see each other again.
In March 1942, two months after her husband’s departure, Renée was worried that she had not heard from him. She visited the doctor, who was said to be the only acceptable way to contact a client abroad. Petiot assured her that her husband was doing well. After traveling through Marseille and Casablanca, he had reached Buenos Aires. Petiot showed her a postcard that he said he had received from Guschinow: “I have arrived. I got sick during the crossing but I am completely healed. You can come.” That was all it said, or at least that was what Petiot claimed it said. The letter had been written in code. There was no obvious date, stamp, addressee, or signature. It seemed to be written in Renée’s husband’s handwriting.
Two other postcards and letters purportedly from Guschinow appeared that spring, written on stationery bearing the name of the “Alvear Palace Hotel, Buenos Aires,” where Petiot claimed that Renée’s husband was living. In these communications, Guschinow never elaborated other than to say that, after nearly losing his mind at the initial departure and breaking down in tears, his voyage had been comfortable and he had arrived safely. His business was thriving, and above all, he wanted his wife to join him.
Once, on her insistence, Petiot allowed Renée Guschinow to retain the card from her husband, on the condition that she later tear it up. She had complied, she told Massu. In the last message, Guschinow demanded that his wife immediately depart, threatening to cut off ties unless she consented. Petiot seconded the urgency of the request, advising her to “sell all [her] belongings and carry as much money as possible.”
