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

by David King

  There were many questions that Massu would have liked to ask Lafont. For one thing, one of Adrien the Basque’s brothers, Emile Estébétéguy, and a member of the gang had claimed that Lafont had decided to punish Adrien by sending him to Marcel Petiot, knowing that the “escape agency” was actually a death factory. Was this possibly true, and if so, was there a connection between Lafont and Petiot? At the moment, Massu could not simply confront the gangster. As German police number 10 474R, Lafont was untouchable.

  A PROMISING new lead about other possible Petiot victims, meanwhile, came from an anonymous letter of late March 1944 to Massu’s office. It described a family of Jewish refugees from the Netherlands who arrived in Paris in September 1942, only to attempt to leave a couple of months later with the help of a physician who promised them passage to South America.

  There was nothing in this letter, Massu acknowledged, that could not have been fabricated based on information published in the newspapers. But the details had a ring of authenticity. The doctor had emphasized precaution and vigilance: not speaking to anyone about the organization, reliance on last-minute calls supplying details of the rendezvous, and of course, the careful instructions to bring along personal valuables in two suitcases.

  The author had only referred to the victims by their initials and age: Madame W (about age sixty-three), her son Maurice W (about thirty-six), and his wife L.W. (about forty-six). Wanting to pursue this lead further, the commissaire released the information to the newspapers, asking for anyone with knowledge of the letter to contact him. He promised to protect the identity of the letter writer.

  A few days later, a woman walked into his office claiming to be the sender. Given her knowledge of the letter’s contents, which had been closely guarded, Massu was convinced that he had the right person. Her name was Ilse Gang. She now provided the police with additional details of the missing family. “Madame W” was Rachel Wolff (born Rachel Marx), sixty-year-old widow of Salomon, or Sally, Wolff, once owner of the lumber company Incona C.V. Her son, “Maurice W,” was thirty-six-year-old Moses Maurice Israel Wolff, and L.W. was his wife, Lina Braun Wolff, a forty-seven-year-old divorcée from Breslau with a son by her first marriage in Tel Aviv. Lina was one of Gang’s oldest friends. Originally living in Königsberg, Germany, the Wolff family had fled to Paris when Adolf Hitler had come to power. In 1936, they had moved again, to Amsterdam.

  But Amsterdam had not proved the safe haven it had historically been. After the Nazis conquered the Netherlands in the spring of 1940 and tightened their grip with racial laws in June 1942, German occupying authorities had proceeded to wage a campaign of terror against the Dutch Jewish community. The concentration of Jews in Amsterdam, coupled with the relative lack of hiding places, made the Nazi house raids, roundups, and ultimately the deportation of Jewish men, women, and children to extermination camps the worst in Western Europe. Seventy-eight percent of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands would be deported, compared, for example, to twenty-five percent in France.

  As for the Wolffs, their family business had been seized by the Nazis. They sold what remained of their onetime wealth at a fraction of its value and, in July 1942, fled for their lives.

  To escape Nazi detection, they adopted the name Wolters. The family had been helped in their escape, first into Belgium by several people, including a customs official who hid them safely in a convent near Charleville. A lawyer in Rocroi, Maître René Iung, had also assisted them in their flight and overlooked the money they carried (about 300,000 francs), which, being illegal in the Nazi-occupied country, was subject to confiscation.

  When the Wolff family reached Paris in early September 1942 with their last name again changed, this time to Walbert or Valbert, they moved into the Hôtel Helvetia on rue Tourneux. They stayed a few days before moving on to the Hôtel du Danube on rue Jacob in the Latin Quarter. They would soon move again because, in October 1942, German authorities seized this building as well.

  Gang had looked without success for a more stable apartment for the family. Eventually her friend, Dr. Rachel Gingold, a Romanian dentist at 21 rue Cambon, suggested that she contact one of her patients, a Romanian-born Jewish woman who would soon command much attention from the police, the press, and the public. This was Rudolphina Kahan, or “Eryane,” a cosmopolitan woman with dyed strawberry blond hair, who spoke a handful of languages, including Italian, German, French, and Romanian and, as one journalist put it, looked like “a spy on the Orient Express.” Finding this woman seemed a lucky break.

  In the story that later emerged, Kahan not only found the Wolffs a room in her apartment building at 10 rue Pasquier, but also told them about Dr. Eugène, who helped people leave Occupied Paris. She knew of his operation because she, too, she said, hoped to flee. A meeting was arranged with the help of Kahan’s doctor and likely lover, Dr. Louis-Théophile Saint-Pierre, who in turn put her in touch with one of his patients, a pimp who worked several Montmartre bars, known variously as Robert or Henri le Marseillais (real name Henri Guintrand). This man introduced her to the actor and agency intermediary Edmond Pintard.

  At a café in the Place de la Madeleine, Pintard met Kahan and then led her to a nearby hair salon. Dr. Eugène arrived ten minutes later and offered to take all three members of the Wolff family, making an exception to his rule of two at a time, probably because of the age of the mother-in-law. When he learned the price that Pintard had quoted (and arbitrarily doubled), he berated the makeup artist, threatening to end their working relationship. Apparently charmed by Kahan, the physician tried to recruit her for his organization. “We always need a woman like you,” he reportedly told her, offering her a commission for helping people escape and a promise, in turn, to arrange her journey later out of Occupied Paris.

  The following day, Dr. Eugène met with the Wolff family in a room at Kahan’s apartment building. After a pleasant conversation about the arts, over tea, the Wolffs had been impressed with the physician, who had seemed, in the words of their lawyer, Jacques Bernays, “a man of vast culture and fine sentiments, whose magnanimity and character fully explained his devotion to the noble cause of clandestine passages.” Dr. Eugène told them to bring no papers, clothing, or anything that would reveal their identity. Valuables were to be packed in two suitcases or sewn inside their clothing. Maurice Wolff concealed a number of diamonds and other jewels in the shoulders of his jacket. The stakes were high. A single mistake would mean, the doctor said, “twelve bullets in my carcass” and “perhaps worse” for them.

  In late December 1942, an old horse-drawn carriage pulled up to the entrance to Kahan’s building. The driver, an old man with an old-fashioned top hat and baggy winter coat a few sizes too large, put the Wolffs’ suitcases on the cart and opened the door for them. The carriage headed toward Place St. Augustine and then on to rue Boetie, Champs-Élysées, and L’Étoile. After turning onto Avenue Foch and then onto a side street, it stopped at the carriage entrance to No. 21 rue Le Sueur. The Wolffs entered the mansion, hoping to depart for South America.

  Within two weeks, three additional couples who had recently arrived in Paris would follow the Wolffs, seeking the help of Dr. Eugène: Gilbert Basch (alias Baston), a twenty-eight-year-old former cosmetics executive in Amsterdam, and his twenty-four-year-old wife, Marie-Anne Servais Basch; Marie-Anne’s parents, Chaïm Schonker, another perfume executive, and his wife Franciska Ehrenreich Schonker, who lived in Nice (aliases included Stevens and Eemens); and Marie-Anne’s sister, Ludwika Holländer Arnsberg and her husband, Ludwig Israel Arnsberg (alias Schepers and Anspach). By January 1943, there had been at least nine people, using about a dozen pseudonyms, sent by Kahan to Dr. Eugène. All of them were wealthy Jews. None of them would be seen or heard from again.

  Not long after helping the Wolffs, Ilse Gang told Massu, a woman with reddish-blond hair wearing dark sunglasses came by her apartment to inform her of the Wolff family’s safe arrival in South America and asked her if she wanted to follow them through the escape net
work. She had declined.

  19.

  THE LIST

  ALWAYS THE SAME PROCEDURE, ALWAYS THE SAME MEANS.

  —Pierre Dupin, avocat général

  WHO was this woman who sent Dr. Petiot nine Jews in fifteen days at the end of 1942 and early 1943? An anonymous letter to Commissaire Massu from Auxerre, dated March 26, 1944, claimed that she, “doctoress Iriane,” worked as a recruiter arranging passage out of Paris for a commission and, moreover, earned twice the rate for every woman she recruited.

  Massu sent detectives to question Kahan. But when they arrived at her apartment on the fourth floor at 10 rue Pasquier, which runs into the rue des Mathurins where Raoul Fourrier had his hair salon, Kahan was nowhere to be found.

  A number of her neighbors spoke to the police, but insight into her possible motives remained elusive. Arriving in Paris in 1927, Kahan had worked at various times as a masseuse, a singer, and then as a medical assistant. Some thought that she seemed poor; others believed that she was a bohemian enjoying a comfortable lifestyle with money deriving from an unknown source.

  Louise Nicholas, who had known her since she sang in cabarets in Montmartre, told the police that Kahan had a close friend in the German army. Actually, this man, thirty-seven-year-old Herbert Welsing, was a junior officer in the Luftwaffe. When he was interviewed in April 1944, Welsing had little to say, other than to claim that he did not know that Kahan was Jewish or involved in any clandestine organization.

  Kahan’s landlady, Fernande Goux, had met her in the spring of 1942 at the nearby Georgette Bar. Within months, Kahan had moved into a small two-room apartment on the sixth floor of her building, though she soon exchanged this for a larger flat on the fourth floor. It was about March 20, 1944, Goux said, that Kahan had abruptly moved out of her building.

  No one would admit knowing where she went. No one, either, would acknowledge hearing anything to suggest that Kahan had worked for an escape organization; the penalty for this illegal activity, after all, could be death. The trail for the moment went cold.

  On April 12, Massu and Battut drafted a list of probable victims of Dr. Petiot. There were now seventeen:

  Joachim Guschinow

  Jean-Marc Van Bever

  Marthe Fortin (Khaït)

  Denise Hotin

  Annette Basset, or “Annette Petit”

  Joseph Réocreux, “Jo the Boxer”

  Lina Braun (Wolff)

  Rachel Marx (Wolff)

  Maurice Wolff

  Charles Lombard

  Joséphine Grippay

  Adrien Estébétéguy, “The Basque”

  Gisèle Rossmy

  Joseph Piereschi, “Zé”

  Yvan Dreyfus

  Claudia Chamoux

  François Albertini, “The Corsican”

  Charles Lombard, number ten on this list, was actually soon removed. A thirty-nine-year-old gangster notorious for committing robberies as an impersonated police officer, Lombard had disappeared in March 1943. His wife, Marie, feared that he had, like his friend Adrien the Basque, contacted Dr. Petiot in an attempt to leave for Buenos Aires. But police soon learned that Lombard was alive and well, flourishing in the criminal underworld. He would surface in Turin after the war, apparently trying to find a ship to flee to South America.

  Three of the victims sent by Kahan, the members of the Wolff family, had been added to the list. The police had found their names in a suitcase from Neuhausen’s attic. Within a month, Kahan’s other six recruits would be added as well. A number of invoices from the company Wagons-lits Cook had been found in the suitcases, bearing the names, or rather the aliases, of the Schonker and Arnsberg families. The list of probable victims was now at twenty-two.

  BY May 1944, the rapid movements on the Eastern and Southern fronts dominated the front pages. After conquering the Crimean peninsula in a six-day campaign, seizing 24,000 prisoners, and inflicting some 110,000 casualties, the Soviet Red Army thrust forward into Romania, consolidating its hold over the strategic plateau that held Europe’s largest oil supply, which was desperately needed by the Third Reich. Only 140 miles away, some 448 U.S. Flying Fortresses and Liberators of the Fifteenth Army Air Force pounded the oil fields at Ploesti and then Bucharest itself. Everywhere, it seemed, the Nazis were engaging in what the controlled press called “strategic retreats.”

  While the Allies marched up the Italian peninsula, seizing Rome and Mussolini, anxious and hopeful Parisians speculated about the long-expected Allied attack on Occupied Europe. Winston Churchill would call this undertaking “the most difficult and complicated operation that has ever taken place.” On the early morning of June 6, at 0630, H-hour of D-Day, or J-Jour to the French, the massive Allied armada of some 175,000 troops, 11,000 planes, and more than 5,000 vessels swarmed over the rough English Channel in what would be the largest seaborne invasion in history.

  One week and thousands of casualties later, as the Allies fought through the bocage of Normandy, with its thick hedges and sunken lanes protected by three elite SS Panzer divisions, Adolf Hitler unleashed a new “wonder” weapon: the long-range, pilotless, and jet-powered V-1 flying bomb, to wreak vengeance on the city of London. Carrying a one-ton warhead and moving at a speed of 700 km an hour, which was faster than any Allied plane or anti-aircraft gun, the V-1 “Hell Hound” or “Fire Dragon” would, by end of summer, kill 6,184 people and destroy 75,000 buildings. The war, it was clear, would not be over anytime soon.

  Nor, it seemed, would the search for Marcel Petiot. Reported sightings continued around Paris and its surrounding area for weeks. On June 24, 1944, a man showed up at police headquarters with a strange tale. He introduced himself as Charles Rolland, a former cinema film projector operator who had briefly served the French army in Tunisia. He claimed to know Petiot well.

  Seven years earlier, Rolland related, he first met the murder suspect. It was in Marseille, when a prostitute named Solange approached him and asked if he wanted to make a quick 100 francs. All he had to do was have sex with her while one of her rich clients looked on. Rolland, struggling financially, accepted the offer. The man who paid to watch was Marcel Petiot.

  After this incident, which culminated with the three of them engaging in a ménage à trois, Rolland further alleged, Petiot recruited him to sell drugs in Marseille. The two men would meet at the Cintra-Bodega Bar in the Old Port, where Rolland would receive the cocaine and then proceed to sell it at the American Bar on the Canebière. Then, after finding a customer, Rolland would hide the narcotics in a tank above a certain toilet in the men’s room. At the appointed time, the customer arrived, picked up the packet, and handed the money to Petiot as he entered the bathroom.

  Petiot in Marseille? Yes, Rolland said that he stayed at a hotel on rue Panier, and their partnership had continued until early January 1938, when Rolland volunteered for the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment and sailed to Tunisia. The following year, when he was discharged for “physical incapacity,” Rolland decided to come to Paris and reconnect with his rich friend. Rolland allegedly resumed the business of selling cocaine for Petiot, working the Café de la Paix and the Dupont-Bastille bar in the Opéra district.

  Although he was eventually arrested in late 1940 on an unrelated charge, Rolland said he saw Petiot two other times. The first was in January 1943, when he stopped by unannounced at his house at 22 or 21 [sic] rue Le Sueur. Petiot, he said, appeared anxious. “He seemed in a strange condition and did not want me to stay.” The physician declined to renew their working relationship, handed Rolland 500 francs, and sent him away, claiming that he expected clients at any minute. Rolland said the room smelled heavily of chloroform.

  The second time was a fortuitous meeting at the end of the following month, at the Cintra-Bodega in Marseille. The doctor was allegedly more welcoming. He told Rolland of his latest invention, a powerful new aphrodisiac that he claimed to have tested on more than sixty women. Then, when Rolland said he needed some important papers to join the P.P.F., Parti Populaire Franç
ais, a pro-Nazi collaborationist outfit, Petiot helped him obtain false certificates. Petiot also decided to join the military-political organization under a fake name, “Marcel Sigrand,” and the two of them often met near the beach at Les Catalans or in the Old Port. Later Rolland heard that Petiot had been seen that spring in Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, wearing a Nazi uniform and hunting down French Resistants.

  These claims were extraordinary, and indeed far-fetched. For one thing, when Rolland claimed to have worked with the doctor in Marseille, Massu knew for a fact that Petiot was in Paris practicing medicine and running his false escape organization. He was not in Pont-Saint-Esprit then either, as he was convincing Adrien the Basque and other gangsters that he could help them leave Paris. Even more damaging to his credibility, Rolland had made several errors in his testimony.

  Petiot’s house was not located, as he said, “on the corner” of rue Le Sueur. He did not live on rue Le Sueur or own the building in 1939 or 1940, when Rolland claimed to have visited him at that location. Rolland also incorrectly identified the address as the 15th arrondissement, and other descriptions also proved inaccurate. Petiot did not have only one floor, as Rolland claimed, but the entire building, and there was no concierge there either. Rolland’s tale seemed wrong on so many points as to be dismissed outright as worthless.

  When he was later criticized for spending so much time speaking with Rolland, Massu explained that he had to follow a lead, no matter how outrageous it might first sound. Indeed, Rolland’s testimony illustrated the degree to which many false rumors about Petiot flourished in the demimonde and were soon picked up by many newspapers.

  On July 26, 1944, the New York Times announced, “The Greatest Bluebeard of all time was reported from Paris to have been discovered at last.” Petiot was identified as a member of a French division of the Waffen SS, an elite Charlemagne unit of fanatical Nazi supporters. Three weeks later, Leonard Lyons noted in the Washington Post that civilians leaving France confirmed that Petiot, an Iron Cross recipient, had joined the SS. The French, the columnist added, blamed the police for missing the obvious.