by David King
As the commissaire was learning, the search was exasperating to say the least. On one hand, the accumulation of evidence—the butchered bodies in the basement, the human remains in the lime pit, and the personal items in the suitcases—suggested that Dr. Petiot’s enterprise was far larger than previously imagined. But who were these victims, and how could he identify them among the many thousands who had disappeared—thirty-three thousand Jews alone in the eleven-week period following July 17, 1942?
“You would phone a friend one day,” Jean-Paul Sartre recalled, “and the telephone would ring and ring in the empty apartment; you would ring the doorbell and he would not come to the door; if the concierge broke in, you would find two chairs drawn up together in the hallway with German cigarette ends between the legs.” Jews, Communists, members of the Resistance—anyone denounced as an enemy of the Third Reich—was at risk of a sudden arrest and deportation.
As the story of Dr. Petiot broke, desperate people with missing family members or friends increasingly contacted the police to ask if their loved ones might have been another one of his victims. Sometimes the distressed person, hoping to learn a relative’s fate, however horrific, acknowledged that they did not know of any connection with the murder suspect. Other times they could establish reason to believe that there had been a relationship, but the police struggled to prove that Petiot was in fact responsible for their loved one’s disappearance. The case of Denise Bartholomeus Hotin vividly illustrates the uncertainties that bedeviled investigators.
After reading about the murders in the newspapers, Charles Bartholomeus informed the police about his daughter Denise, or “Nelly,” who had been missing since June 1942. At the time of her disappearance, she was a twenty-seven-year-old former employee and model for Lancel, the luxury leather goods and accessories store on the place de l’Opéra. In June 1941, she had married Jean Hotin and moved onto his family’s farm near the village of La Neuville-Garnier in the Seine-et-Oise, where Jean’s father served as mayor. The former husband, Bartholomeus suggested, should be helpful for the investigation.
Denise and Jean had not known each other for a long time before their marriage. They had met only the previous December, when Jean, on a trip to Paris, saw her selling handbags and was struck by her beauty. Denise had followed him to the village but soon became unhappy, struggling to adjust to life on the farm, quarreling often with her in-laws. She began to miss her family, friends, and old social life in the city.
Not long after their wedding, Denise discovered that she was a few months pregnant. Jean’s father, fifty-seven-year-old Henri Hotin, fearing for their reputation, apparently pressed for the couple to have an abortion. Later that year Denise traveled to Paris to see a midwife in the Saint-Lazare district, named Madame Mallard, to be treated for “pneumonia,” but many in the town believed that she secretly carried funds from the mayor to pay for an operation.
Mayor Hotin would deny knowing she was pregnant, let alone ordering an abortion or paying for it. He said Denise’s trip was a mystery. Jean’s mother, Pauline, also denied knowing anything about any medical procedure and only said that if Denise went to Paris, it was “on her own initiative.” But Jean, as one police report put it, freely admitted what his parents tried hard to deny.
One year to the date after their wedding, as the town was still gossiping over the unhappy couple, Denise went back to Paris to obtain a certification declaring that she had not had an abortion. Wearing a yellow orange dress and matching bodice, she left on June 5, 1942. It was supposed to be a short trip, with Denise returning the same evening. She didn’t take any luggage.
Two days later, an enigmatic letter from Paris arrived at the Hotin farm saying that Denise could not return home and never had a “miscarriage” because, she emphasized, in a text replete with underlined and fully capitalized words, she was “never pregnant.” She had done “NOTHING wrong” and promised to return home soon. By the end of June, another letter arrived from Paris, this one for Denise’s husband. It was shorter:
I am very sad about being away from you. I can’t come home. I don’t know when I will be able to. I am so sad. I embrace you tenderly, and I love you.
Asked about his response, Jean said that he had first been surprised, but then assumed that his wife had decided to remain in Paris a little longer with her family. He was not sure if she had been to see Dr. Petiot, he said, but he knew for certain that she had consulted him in July 1941. Hotin’s attempts to find her had been in vain.
Denise’s family was worried and suspicious, certain that she would never leave her husband like that. They asked the Hotins for information, only to be told that she was not on their farm and they did not know her whereabouts, but everything was fine. Denise’s family remained unconvinced.
Curiously, her husband, Jean, was already not only in a new relationship, but also engaged to be remarried. He had filed for divorce from Denise on the grounds that she had deserted him. His father was pleased with the new match. Indeed, having observed the prominent family over the last year, many residents in the community were convinced that the Hotins were glad to be done with Denise. Some people saw her disappearance as all too convenient, and whispered that Jean might have murdered her. Why, after all, did he not report her missing to the police?
Hotin’s search for his wife, moreover, was not inspired. In January 1943, six months after her disappearance, he had finally gone to Paris, spoken with the midwife, and learned that she had referred Denise to Dr. Petiot. Had Hotin seen him? detectives asked, in his questioning on March 25, 1944. No, Hotin had to answer: “It was half past four when I arrived. I went upstairs and saw on the plate: ‘The doctor receives from five o’clock to seven o’clock.’ I did not dare to ring the bell.” He couldn’t wait, he added, because his train back to La Neuville-Granier was soon departing. That was the end of his search for his wife.
Now, if Jean Hotin’s claims were true, then Denise would have visited Petiot in the first week of June, a difficult time, when he was already under investigation for two separate cases of selling narcotics, not to mention the two mysterious disappearances of witnesses, Van Bever and Khaït. Would he really have risked another disappearance, when any one of them, if proved, could end his career and send him to prison? This is not impossible; Petiot liked to toy with danger, as Massu would soon learn. He certainly did not lack confidence in his ability to escape punishment either, with or without protection.
Of course, it is possible that Madame Mallard did send Denise to Petiot; even if Parisian midwives rarely made such referrals in the early 1940s, they would do so when an operation went wrong or threatened to endanger the life of the patient. Perhaps the doctor had seen her and attempted an operation, only to have it result in a complication, or a dangerous infection from the unhygienic conditions that often surrounded black-market abortions. To avoid exposure to what was then a capital offense, Petiot had perhaps tried to cover the trail of his botched operation. There is, however, no evidence supporting this hypothesis.
The police kept reaching dead ends in this investigation. Jean Hotin’s claims that he visited Mallard—and the story of her referring Denise to Petiot—could not be verified because, by April 1944, Mallard was dead. She died that same month of natural causes. Mallard’s daughter, Gilberte Mouron, could not confirm the incident either, admitting only that she believed that she had heard Petiot’s name mentioned before. As for the office hours Jean Hotin cited, they did not match the ones Petiot kept at the time. No evidence tracing the disappearance of Denise to Dr. Petiot was ever found, and in fact, the police could not prove that she had visited the doctor, or that she was even dead. Still, the name Denise Hotin was added to the list of the doctor’s murder victims.
The townhouse at 21 rue Le Sueur. After Dr. Petiot purchased it from Princess Marie Colloredo-Mansfeld, neighbors began to note peculiar sights, sounds, and smells coming from the building.
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Courtyard of the townho
use. The door of the brick building led to Dr. Petiot’s office, and beyond that, his death chamber.
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The basement stove where human bodies were found burning on March 11, 1944.
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The kitchen workstation where the bodies were dismembered.
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Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, told his son, Bernard, that they were confronting “the most dreadful criminal plot that I have ever seen.”
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Entrance to the lime pit at rue Le Sueur.
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Rope and pulley found over the pit.
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Gravediggers from Passy Cemetery were hired to sift through the debris for human remains.
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Remains of the victims were carried away for examination at the Institut médico-légal.
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The photographs of Georgette and Marcel Petiot used in the warrant for their arrest on March 13, 1944. The third photograph is of young Dr. Petiot.
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“the mysterious charnel-house of rue le sueur.” The occupied press was quick to speculate on Petiot’s relationship with drug addicts, prostitutes, and “terrorists” in the Resistance.
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Crowd outside Petiot’s residence at 66 rue Caumartin. Paris would soon be engulfed in “Petiot Mania.”
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Georgette Petiot is carried away after her apprehension by the police.
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The arrest of Dr. Petiot’s younger brother, Maurice.
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Black satin dress found at 21 rue Le Sueur. The garment was still scented with perfume.
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Forty-nine suitcases belonging to victims arrive at 36 Quai des Orfèvres.
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He did not steal identities, Petiot said; he only borrowed them.
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Police believed that this viewer, found in the wall, was used to watch victims suffer in the death chamber.
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In court, Petiot put on a show, and the trial soon became a circus.
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Petiot liked to sketch and doodle in his prison cell as well as at the trial. This drawing was made in prison.
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This is a page from the manuscript Petiot wrote in prison. “Man,” Petiot wrote, “has been created to play, to challenge chance, to make love, and to struggle. But he has lost the rules, and, at the same time, something of the taste for the game.”
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18.
NINE MORE
If YOU START ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT EVERYONE WHO DIES, YOU’RE GOING TO BE A VERY BUSY MAN.
—Marcel Petiot, attributing the words to Dr. Paul
AFTER Paulette Grippay’s black satin dress, Massu now made a second connection between the testimonies of witnesses and the contents of the suitcases found at rue Le Sueur and in Neuhausen’s attic. This was the collection of Sulka silk shirts with the monogrammed initials “A.E.,” which were identified as belonging to Adrien the Basque Estébétéguy. Confirmation came from a tall, stocky man who arrived at the quai des Orfèvres in a new white Bentley: Henri Lafont.
Lafont was undoubtedly one of the most powerful men in Occupied Paris. This was an unexpected position for a former small-time crook who could not read or write. Abandoned by his mother at age thirteen, immediately after the death of his father, Lafont had eked out an existence on the street, stealing café chairs for resale, writing bad checks, and drifting in and out of reform schools and detention centers. His first prison sentence, begun May 15, 1919, was for theft. Ten more incarcerations would follow by 1934, for similar charges, totaling about eight years in prison.
By then, too, Lafont had worked briefly in a number of jobs: errand boy, dockworker, mechanic, car dealer, and chauffeur. He enlisted for two years in the Thirty-ninth Régiment des Tirailleurs Algériens and, later, after finishing his military service, gained work under his alias, “Henri Normand,” as manager of a canteen for the Préfecture de Police. He had the chance to meet and befriend many policemen. In 1939, with war on the horizon, Lafont tried to reenlist with the army. His application was refused because of his criminal record. His many experiences, both on the street and in prison, however, would bear fruit during the Occupation.
Indeed it was during a prison stay that Lafont met a man who would later introduce him to the German authorities: Max Stocklin, a tall, cultured Swiss national who had been arrested in the late 1930s for his work as an informer for the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr. When the Germans arrived in France in June 1940, Stocklin’s espionage contacts released him, and he soon recruited Lafont into the Abwehr’s champagne-swilling set then settling into the Hôtel Lutétia at 45 Boulevard Raspail in preparation for its tasks of arresting French Resistants.
By the end of June 1940, Lafont was placed in charge of a new Abwehr creation called a Dienstelle, or purchasing bureau, known informally as an “Otto agency” after the Abwehr’s Hermann “Otto” Brandl, who helped establish them. These agencies bought objects in bulk, using funds provided by the French according to the Armistice, and then sold them to Occupation authorities, thereby facilitating the German exploitation of the French economy and, in the process, greatly enriching agency leaders. Lafont’s bureau, located on rue Tiquetonne, was responsible for buying food and later clothing, furniture, and objects of gold.
Within two weeks, Lafont had established a second branch of his purchasing agency on rue Cadet, in the seized former headquarters of the Freemasons. This one would concentrate on Jewish property. Other offices opened, including a large one on rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine that focused on the purchasing of wheat, butter, and livestock of Normandy. His profits soared. Beyond that, as with the other Otto agencies, Lafont was making contact with a diversity of Frenchmen, from bankers and lawyers to art experts and black market dealers. Many of these people would later prove helpful as his own star rose in Occupied Paris.
Lafont’s real break came that same summer when he succeeded in infiltrating a Resistance cell that had eluded the Abwehr for six months. With the help of his underworld contacts, Lafont found the group’s leader, a Belgian named Lambrecht, in Bordeaux, in a matter of days. Then, too, with his underworld methods, including a propensity to crack a whip in a man’s face and repeat “you will talk” in his surprisingly falsetto voice, Lafont managed to learn the names of the entire organization. The Germans then arrested some six hundred Resistance fighters in Paris as well as in Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, and other parts of the continent.
The leader of the Abwehr in France, Colonel Friedrich Rudolph, an old-fashioned Prussian officer and First World War veteran, was impressed with the resourceful new hire, though he was also appalled by his vicious methods. The German leader agreed to continue employing Lafont “on condition that he does not have to see him.” The Abwehr headquarters in Berlin cabled congratulations to the Paris office for its success, and Lafont’s supervisors hosted a celebration in his honor, culminating with a visit to the brothel One Two Two.
The Abwehr had found Lafont useful indeed. In August 1940, with the approval of a high-ranking Abwehr officer, Captain Wilhelm Radecke, Lafont had been allowed into Fresnes prison to recruit criminals for the expansion of his gang. One of the first of the twenty-seven men Lafont handpicked was Alexandre Villaplane, the captain of the French national soccer team that won the first World Cup in 1930, defeating Mexico 4–1. Villaplane had fallen on hard times in the Depression and resorted to rigging horse races. Another man he selected was Adrien the Basque
, whose Sulka shirts he now identified.
The most famous member of the gang was Pierre Bonny, a former police detective who had once been praised as the most talented policeman in the country. This was, of course, an exaggeration. In 1935, one year after helping solve the notorious Stavisky Affair, a financial scandal that nearly caused the collapse of the republic, Bonny’s own police career ended in a charge of corruption and a three-year prison sentence. After his release, Bonny scraped by operating a fledgling private detective agency that mainly shadowed unfaithful spouses. A short, wiry man with a dark mustache, Bonny brought a rigor and meticulousness, not to mention an administrative skill, to Lafont’s gang when he joined in 1942.
During this time, Lafont became a naturalized German citizen and also joined the SS, thereby switching his allegiance from the Abwehr to new patrons in the Gestapo. Lafont continued soliciting tips, following up on denunciations, tracking down hidden gold and currency supplies, and infiltrating Resistance groups. As the Allied bombing raids increased in 1943, Lafont would also hunt downed parachutists, airmen, and arms caches. No one knows how many people Lafont’s gang tortured and killed, or how much profit was earned from these activities. Lafont’s power would grow beyond his wildest imagination.
By May 1941, Lafont’s gang had moved from old headquarters on avenue Pierre-1er-de-Serbie to 93 rue Lauriston. At his highly sought after Saturday night dinners here, elite Nazi officials, SS men, industrialists, press barons, artists, film stars, and high-society women and men gathered over the finest delicacies available in Occupied Paris. In the cellars below, meanwhile, French Resistants and other enemies of the Third Reich were brutally tortured.
