Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

by David King

  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.

  The STO was extended several times in 1943 and 1944, eventually making all men aged eighteen to sixty and childless women eighteen to forty-five liable to forced labor. As the number of defaulters increased dramatically in 1943 and 1944, and many law-abiding citizens came to their aid against this law widely regarded as arbitrary and unjust, the Germans threatened harsher punishment for evasion. “All close male relatives, brothers-in-law, cousins over age of 18 will be shot; all women similarly related will be sentenced to hard labor.” Children under the age of seventeen would be packed away to an “approved school.” The brutality and exploitation at the heart of the Occupation was evident to an increasing number of Frenchmen.

  By the time Petiot was locked up in the Gestapo prison, the Resistance had gradually moved beyond individual acts of opposition and sabotage to become, as the socialist Jean Texcier put it, “a good occupation for the occupied.” Resistance newspapers and pamphlets all over Paris sounded the call to action. Albert Camus, who joined the editorial staff of Combat in the autumn of 1943, put it this way only days after the discovery of Petiot’s crime in March 1944: “Total war has been unleashed, and it calls for total resistance. You must resist because it does concern you, and there is only one France, not two.” Sympathizers, he warned, would be punished just as active Resistants. Now was the time to act.

  AS the story of Petiot’s “murder house” broke, Albert Camus was holding rehearsals for his first play, Malentendu (The Misunderstanding). The plot revolved around owners of a hotel who recruited, entertained, and then robbed and killed their guests—a Petiot-esque project that would debut in June, ironically at the Théâtre des Mathurins, just across the street from Fourrier’s hair salon.

  The piece was in fact inspired nine years before when Camus read a short item in the Associated Press about a young man who returned home to Yugoslavia only to be killed by his mother. Camus added the element of the disguised return and the twist that the family had, in his absence, transformed the hotel into a profitable slaughterhouse. Camus set the story instead in the distant Bohemian town of České Budějovice (Czech Budweis), which he had visited eight years before. His new lover, the actress Maria Casarès, played the sister.

  Camus was coming to terms with his new life in Paris. At first, he had found the occupied city a dismal gray, like its pigeons and statues, and a stark contrast to the sun, sea, and shimmer of his native Algeria. He missed his favorite café, which was decorated with a guillotine and a skeleton and had a flamboyant manager who wandered the establishment with a dildo in his hand. And Camus also missed his wife, Francine, though he continued to have love affairs.

  For a time, Camus had considered taking advantage of an escape agency to cross into Spain and then return to Algeria. He certainly had experience with clandestine departures. Before coming to France, Camus had helped men and women pass into Morocco with the hope of joining de Gaulle in London. Camus, however, soon abandoned the idea of leaving Paris, no matter how appalling the impact of the German Occupation was on intellectual life—Henri Jeanson compared it to living in a “madhouse run by the lunatics.” Camus instead concentrated on his work, which in the spring of 1944 also included writing at night on his new novel, The Plague, which would be set in a city overrun by rats.

  As Camus put the final touches on his play about the murderous hotel owners, Jean-Paul Sartre was preparing for the opening of his No Exit, a one-act play that would debut on May 27, 1944, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. The story took place, appropriately enough for the Occupation, in hell. Sartre had first picked Camus to direct and play the lead male role of Garcin. The rehearsals, which had begun at Christmas 1943 at Camus’s or Simone de Beauvoir’s apartment, were suspended in February, when the actor playing the lead female role, Olga Barbezat, was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Fresnes. At this point, either Camus backed out of his commitment or Sartre decided to replace him. The result was the same. No Exit was staged with an established director and a professional cast.

  The German-controlled press lambasted the play for its “immoralism,” but Sartre’s No Exit would prove to be a major success, particularly with the young. “Hell is other people” was the line most cited. Sartre later explained that he only meant that people judge themselves with criteria given by other people, and therefore, if and when relations sour, humanity falls into a state of “total dependence” resembling hell. Sartre’s popularity soared. After this piece, he became, in the words of Jean Paulhan, “the spiritual leader of thousands of young people.” The scholar Guillaume Hanoteau agreed. Looking back at the postwar flourishing of Parisian intellectual life, Hanoteau credited Sartre’s No Exit with inaugurating the “golden age of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”

  The Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the SS, and other elite Nazi officers and selected collaborators, meanwhile, were enjoying their own day in the sun. It was a sumptuous world
far removed from the privations of everyday life replete with shortages and regular power outages. The officers were also avoiding the carnage of the Eastern Front: sipping champagne in the silk-lined suites of the Crillon or at the Ritz, dining by candlelight under the chandeliers of Palais du Luxembourg; and of course enjoying the fashionable soirees at the German embassy hosted by its Francophile ambassador, Otto Abetz. The spectacle of his social events prompted Céline to dub him King Otto I.

  Germany’s waning fortunes in war, if anything, strengthened the desire of its officers and soldiers to enjoy Paris. German officers were regular visitors to the cabarets and brothels. Madame Fabianne Jamet (real name Georgette Pélagie) remembered them at hers, One Two Two, with fondness: handsome young SS men showing perfect manners; Wehrmacht soldiers shouting “Heil Hitler” as they raised their champagne glasses; Luftwaffe pilots coming in for a last drink and fling before embarking on a bombing mission in the Battle of Britain. She recalled the latter passing around a tube of a stimulant designed to increase their concentration and confidence to face the Spitfires and anti-aircraft guns, and confessed that she started using the drug herself.

  The French criminal gangs, on the other hand, were “horrible creatures.” The gangsters in their fashionable jackets bulging with concealed weapons would lounge around downstairs with their women, “emptying magnum after magnum and boasting to one another about their exploits.” Worse, they were unpredictable and often unruly, like the hooligan who got drunk and started juggling hand grenades. These “vile, disgusting thugs,” Jamet added, “threw their money about on champagne and girls as though there was no tomorrow.”

  16.

  THE ATTIC

  I CANNOT SAY WHO I AM. STILL YOU KNOW ME.

  EVERYONE KNOWS ME. IF I WERE TO TELL YOU MY NAME,

  YOU WOULD BE TERRIFIED.

  —Marcel Petiot to FFI Lieutenant André Rolet

  DETERMINED to catch the killer, Commissaire Massu was dreaming of the moment he would place the handcuffs on Marcel Petiot. He would show the suspect to his seat near the window overlooking the green square below, offer him a cigarette, and then launch into what he called “the most passionate interrogation of [his] entire career.” By the end of this battle of wits, he would be able to put together the many loose pieces of the puzzle and ensure that cruelty, malice, and deviousness on such a horrific scale would not go unpunished.

  But far from being close to a resolution, the case seemed only to be expanding. After François the Corsican and Jo the Boxer had “passed” to the new world, as it was called, news of the escape organization had circulated around rue de l’Echiquier and the many cafés, bars, and other hot spots of Faubourg Saint-Martin. Soon Pintard was approached by several of Jo’s associates, including the notorious gangster Adrien Estébétéguy, known as “Adrien the Basque,” “The Cold Hand,” or “The Right Hand.” A forty-five-year-old from Bayonne, Adrien had worked much of southwestern France, particularly Toulouse, racking up some eight prison sentences and seven current warrants for arrest, not to mention a string of assault charges over the years, four of them recently, against French policemen.

  Packing two standard automatics, which he was said to draw at the slightest dispute in a poker game, Adrien had a reputation as a tough guy with a biting wit and a penchant for fine clothes. He particularly liked new suits, this at a time when one on the black market cost the equivalent of the annual salary of a ticket collector on the métro.

  By early 1943, Adrien the Basque had many reasons for wanting to leave France. As part of his work with the Devisenschützkommando, an outfit that tracked down people selling currency and gold illegally, a highly profitable enterprise virtually annexed by Henri Lafont’s criminal gang, Adrien was accused of reselling for personal profit some of the gold he seized and then turning in an inferior gilt substitute. He was apparently making significant omissions in his reports of confiscated goods.

  Some of the unreported profits probably also came from his work with Kurt von Behr of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) office, which was removing art and cultural property from “ownerless” Jewish homes. Adrien was involved in particular in the Möbel Aktion, or “Furniture Operation,” that involved retrieving furnishings in apartments where Jews had been deported, and then sending the loot to newly formed German administrations in the east. Later, after the Allied bombing of Cologne on the night of May 30, 1942, ERR authorities changed the stated mission, claiming that the seized property would be used to compensate German victims of the air raids. By the end of the Nazi Occupation, some thirty-eight thousand apartments in Paris alone would be looted by this organization.

  Adrien the Basque was guilty of yet other omissions. Like Jo the Boxer, he had been using his German security identity card (a Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, card) and Gestapo uniform to impersonate a policeman and commit a number of robberies. This kind of crime, unfortunately, was on the rise. Approximately one thousand cases of false Gestapo agents were known, many of them targeting the most exposed residents with the least recourse, such as foreign-born Jews or small-time black marketers believed to have hidden away cash. Profits could be substantial. And Lafont was not one to tolerate being defrauded, or insulted, by men in his gang.

  Adrien needed to leave Paris in a hurry, but he did not want to travel alone. He recruited one of his subordinates to join him: Joseph Didioni Sidissé Piereschi, known variously as Zé, Dionisi, or Joseph the Marseillais. This surprisingly handsome man, with a scar two inches long and one inch wide running from the base of his nose to his left cheek, came from a similar background. He had been imprisoned at age eighteen for his first murder. During World War I, he deserted twice and progressed to other crimes, such as stealing military supplies and selling arms on the black market. By the fall of 1940, he had been released from the Marseille prison by the Germans, and he soon began running a series of brothels for German soldiers.

  As with Jo and François before them, Adrien and Zé brought along their mistresses. Adrien’s was Gisèle Charlotte Rossmy, a petite brunette, aged thirty-four, who had worked as a typist and performed on stage as “Gine Volna.” Zé sported Joséphine, or Paulette, Grippay, “La Chinoise,” a star from an exclusive brothel in Marseille and a recent arrival in Paris. Planning to open a new brothel in South America, they were believed to have carried some 800,000 francs in cash.

  The gangsters again traded lovers to ensure honesty. On the last Sunday of March 1943, Adrien left with Paulette; a few days later, Zé followed with Gisèle. The group used a sign for communicating their safe arrival in Argentina: they took a 100-franc note, drew a flaming sun on it, and ripped it into two, each group taking a half. Adrien and Paulette would send their piece back through the organization to prove that they had arrived in South America. Not long after their departure, Petiot handed Fourrier the half note. “My men got them through,” he said.

  In March 1944, Massu’s detectives found the other half of the note in a drawer at Petiot’s office on rue Caumartin.

  PETIOT’S closest friend, the forty-nine-year-old René Nézondet, was now brought into custody. Tall and slender, with his dark hair slicked back over his high forehead, Nézondet had known Petiot longer and arguably more intimately than anyone else outside his family.

  As Massu already knew, Petiot and Nézondet had often dined together in their bachelor days in Yonne. They had been arrested together, twenty years later, by the Gestapo. In between, Nézondet had left his position as a clerk after injuring his arm. He started breeding trout and growing watercress at a ranch outside of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He also operated a restaurant and entertainment center, La Fontaine-Rouge. The Petiots liked to attend his Saturday night dances, invariably on Georgette’s urging. Marcel Petiot hated dancing.

  By 1936, after the end of his first marriage and losing his investment in a fire, Nézondet had moved to Paris and begun working as a concierge for Le Figaro. He had started to see Petiot again after consulting him for a throat condition that dev
eloped in the First World War. Nézondet was also in a new relationship with a nurse at Hôpital Cochin named Aimée Lesage, and they soon began to dine often with the Petiots. The Nazi Occupation, however, prompted Le Figaro to move to Lyon; Nézondet followed, only to be sacked shortly afterward for his alleged black market dealings. In 1942, he had returned to Paris and reconnected a third time with Petiot. It was his old friend who helped him obtain a job with the father of one of Petiot’s patients, Victor Braun, who ran a pharmaceutical company that sold many supplies to the German army.

  An inspector observing Nézondet told Massu beforehand that he would probably prove a difficult interviewee, likely to tense up at the least provocation and force the commissaire to have to draw out each monosyllabic reply. Massu, thus warned, began slowly. He walked behind the suspect without saying a word. He stood there, still silent, at his cabinet, pretending to search through papers. Nézondet remained tense. His raised shoulders, Massu noted, had not moved.

  The inspector was right about Nézondet’s lack of candor. When Massu asked if he liked his friend Petiot, Nézondet did not answer. When he asked about his line of work, Nézondet was evasive. Massu, tiring of the charade, pressed a button and told the secretary who entered the room to watch the witness. He went for a drink at a nearby bistro on the place de Dauphine. Nézondet was left, as he put it, “to simmer.”

  An hour and a half later, when he returned, Massu asked Nézondet again about his relationship with Dr. Petiot. This time, Nézondet spoke of his friend’s love of art, furniture, and deal making. For instance, sometime last spring, Petiot had asked him to offer his boss the opportunity to buy “1000 to 2000 bottles of cognac,” which he in turn could sell to the German army. Braun had declined because the military had stopped making bulk purchases of alcohol. What an interesting proposition from a so-called member of the Resistance.