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

by David King

  But what, in the summer of 1944, was obvious about the Petiot case? Did Rolland come to help the police catch Petiot or mislead them, or did he have some other motive? Was he simply a deluded or grossly misinformed attention-seeker? Who, if anyone, sent him? When the police, and later the media, wanted Rolland for additional interviews, he was never found. The question of the peculiar informant became more charged because this outrageous and largely false tale would soon play a key role in helping the police unravel the mystery of Petiot’s disappearance.

  20.

  APOCALYPTIC WEEKS

  THIS WAS THE DAY THE WAR SHOULD HAVE ENDED.

  —Irwin Shaw

  DESPITE the international media coverage, the Petiot Affair drew increasingly less attention that summer in French newspapers. This was not just because the landing in Normandy overshadowed its coverage; nor was it simply a reminder of how cold the police trail had become. By May 1944, it looked unlikely that Petiot would be found alive, and many police officers feared he was already dead. But there was another cause for the dramatic decline in media attention.

  Although evidence is elusive and the files were long ago purged, there is reason to believe that the German Occupation authorities intervened to stop the police investigation. Georges Suard, chauffeur for the commissaire of police at the Sûreté National, M. Béranger, heard about German obstruction in late April 1944. His source was the head of the French police himself. In an interview with Commissaire Louis Poirier on October 9, 1945, Suard revealed that, when he had been driving his boss, then an associate under Vichy Ambassador Fernand de Brinon, he was told that the French police would never find Marcel Petiot as long as the Germans occupied Paris.

  Béranger, he added, “told me that he had been present at a meeting when a German figure gave the order to de Brinon to quash the affair from the French police point of view.” The German leader was not identified. Neither Béranger nor de Brinon would ever admit to interfering with the Petiot investigation. After the Liberation, when both men stood trial for collaboration with the enemy, it is not surprising that they would deny taking any action that blocked the arrest of the suspected serial killer.

  The time Suard first heard of the German intervention—late April—moreover coincides with a sudden media silence on the Petiot case. Immediately before that, the press speculated on his whereabouts, ending with a noticeable spike in stories of witnesses reporting that the physician had been captured or found dead. On April 21, the Nazi Transocean News Agency asserted that Spanish authorities had arrested Petiot after “a vain flight across the French frontier into Spain” and handed the fugitive over to the police at Bordeaux.

  Interestingly, Commissaire Massu always denied that the Germans had hindered his investigation, claiming only that the French police had to file daily reports on the affair and never received any reaction to them whatsoever. But Massu was not privy to decisions made in the upper echelons of the Occupation authorities. Count Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s ambassador to the occupied zone, answered to the German authorities and gave orders to the prefect of police, Amédée Bussière, who was, in turn, Massu’s supervisor. Not surprisingly, too, Massu carefully denied German interference but not French.

  But why would Occupation authorities want to block the investigation? There was still no obvious answer. Likely, though, the ramifications would strike at the heart of the messy, complicated Petiot case, and any unraveling of the mystery would indeed, as the chauffeur said, have to wait until after the Germans left Paris.

  BY late July 1944, Allied armies had finally broken through Nazi defenses in the bocage of northwestern France. Caen had fallen not after one day, as planned, but fourteen, and then the Allies conquered a pile of ruins. As Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army continued moving slowly, methodically eastward from Caen, Patton’s Third Army was nearing the Seine, just southeast of the capital. The question for the Allies was whether to head straight for Paris to liberate the city or race to the Rhine with the hopes of reaching Berlin as soon as possible.

  At the forward post of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), then located about two miles inland from the Normandy beachhead at Granville, on the Cotentin Peninsula, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to postpone the Liberation of Paris. The top priority, in his assessment, was defeating the Nazis. Paris, by contrast, fulfilled no overall strategic or tactical objective. Besides, the German army had comparatively few troops in the capital; the Allies could always liberate it later. Eisenhower did not want to provoke unnecessary street fighting, potentially wreaking untold destruction and creating a Stalingrad on the Seine. Never mind the logistical nightmare of supplying the minimum four thousand tons of material daily to feed and fuel a city of two million people, when dwindling supplies of gasoline could be marshaled for a direct attack on Germany.

  Charles de Gaulle disagreed. In addition to disarming the launching sites for Hitler’s V-1 flying bombs in northern France, de Gaulle called Paris “the key to France” and pressed for an immediate seizure of the capital for enormous symbolic and humanitarian reasons. There were also political realities. Continued Nazi occupation, he believed, would only play into the hands of his Communist rivals. He already feared that they were plotting an insurrection to seize power themselves.

  While he sent representatives to plead his case with Eisenhower, de Gaulle ordered General Pierre Koenig, his chief of staff and the leader of the irregular army of the Resistance, the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (French Forces of the Interior, or FFI), to prevent a revolt from occurring in the city without his consent. The task was difficult. De Gaulle wanted an insurrection, but he did not want to give the Communists a chance to exploit it for their own purposes. He then ordered Philippe de Hauteclocque, better known by his nom de guerre, General Jacques Leclerc, of the French Second Armored Division, under the authority of the US Third Army, to head for Paris. Leclerc was instructed to disobey Patton and Eisenhower if necessary.

  Some nine hundred miles away, at the Wolf’s Lair, then Nazi field headquarters in an East Prussian forest, Adolf Hitler had other plans for the city. “Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins,” Secret memo Nr. 772989/44, of August 23, 1944, informed the commanding general of Greater Paris. To carry out this destruction, Hitler had appointed Dietrich Von Choltitz, a forty-nine-year-old general who was notorious for his hardness, experience, and not least, his ability to follow difficult directives without question. It was Von Choltitz who had given the order in May 1940 to firebomb the inner city of Rotterdam, and then in July 1942, he oversaw the massive destruction in the siege of Sevastopol.

  Von Choltitz had arrived in Paris on August 7 to replace General Karl von Stülpnagel, who had been implicated in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Stülpnagel had in fact arrested the entire SS in Paris. But when word arrived that the Führer had survived, Stülpnagel was recalled to Berlin. Instead of following orders, he hopped into a black Horsch, drove to his old battlefield at Verdun, and tried to blow his brains out. Blinded but still alive, he was captured by German soldiers. Stülpnagel was brought back to Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, where he hanged himself.

  While Allied armies succeeded on the fifteenth with a second major landing near Saint-Tropez in southern France, the Gestapo struck at police headquarters, attempting to seize its weapons. The French police rebelled. Under the leadership of several Resistance groups inside the police, particularly the Front national de la police, L’Honneur de la police, and Police et patrie, the police refused to hand over their weapons, and then to patrol the streets—a shutdown that was part of a widening breakdown of city services. Workers in the métro, the railway, the post office, and the Bank of France were also on strike. Electricity, gas, and many other services no longer worked. Then, as Paris threatened to erupt, the police seized the prefecture.

  At this time, General de Gaulle was still in Algiers, trying to arra
nge a flight back to the continent and growing more desperate by the minute. First, the American B-17 that had promised him a flight suffered repeated delays, most recently to fix its landing gear. Then, on August 19, General de Gaulle boarded the Lodestar Lockheed plane France and flew north. The Royal Air Force escort that was supposed to meet him over the Channel was not there. Running low on fuel, the general had to make a decision. The pilot believed that there was perhaps enough fuel to reach France, but it was not certain. The general ordered the pilot to proceed.

  The plane landed at a little airfield near Saint-Lô with about two minutes of fuel to spare. Having left as an obscure brigadier general, de Gaulle returned as the leader of the Free French. There was no fanfare. He was welcomed by three people.

  That same morning, de Gaulle learned, just as he had feared, that rival Communists had launched an insurrection. Colonel Rol, the nom de guerre of Henri Tanguy, was orchestrating the revolt from his headquarters some ninety feet belowground, in the cellars of the Paris Department of Water and Sewers. This secret location was linked to a maze of catacombs, the old stone quarries, nineteenth-century sewers, and almost the entire Parisian métro system. Rol planned to use this network for quick, decisive acts that would culminate in the seizure of key government buildings. The Communists would then, de Gaulle feared, use the uncertainty of the Nazi retreat to consolidate their control of the postwar world. Alternatively, the Germans would quash the rebellion with a savage massacre.

  Meanwhile, at a banquet in the Palais du Luxembourg, with many high-ranking Nazi Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, and other Occupation authorities in attendance, the Luftwaffe commander in chief, Hugo Sperrle, stood and raised his glass: “To this city of Paris where the flag of Germany shall fly for a thousand years.”

  The next morning, General Von Choltitz received a phone call from Generaloberst Alfred Jodl at the Wolf’s Lair. Adolf Hitler demanded to know why no buildings had yet been destroyed.

  LIKE “sparkling torpedoes,” as the satirist paper Le Crapouillot put it, limousines and black Citroëns were speeding away from the hotels in central Paris. Inside the automobiles, former administrators and “purple-faced generals, accompanied by elegant blonde women, looked as if they are off to some fashionable resort.” Administrators of lesser rank, left behind, burned files and packed away loot.

  Mines were continuing to be laid around the capital, in accordance with Hitler’s wishes to leave no building of cultural significance standing. German tanks maneuvered into the place de la Concorde, which gave a commanding presence over the long, straight, and wide boulevards that spread out from the square. Panzers did the same at the Palais du Luxembourg and the École Militaire near the Eiffel Tower. At Place Saint-Michel, they had established a crossfire that would soon be called “the crossroads of death.”

  Bands of Resistance fighters took to the side streets and dark alleys, or moved behind the barricades to rally supporters. With forces estimated by one leader at fifteen thousand, the FFI had few weapons, perhaps enough for two thousand, though many of these were old rifles hidden since 1940 or arms that had survived Allied parachute drops and evaded Nazi detection. One group of young Communists, taking the dearth of weapons into their own hands, used women to lure German soldiers around Pigalle into back alleys, where Resistance comrades waited to pounce on them and steal their weapons.

  Men in cars painted with the Cross of Lorraine patrolled, with two gunmen in the front, like republicans in the Spanish Civil War. At the Sorbonne, Professor Frédéric Joliot-Curie, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, made Molotov cocktails, borrowing green champagne bottles from cellars as well as bottles from the laboratory where his wife’s parents, Marie and Pierre Curie, had discovered radium. Other Resistants continued to fire stray shots at German sentries or seize goods. One man even sneaked outside the German embassy on rue de Lille and stole the German ambassador’s convertible.

  Police, on strike, still refused to patrol the streets—probably the first time in Parisian history that police and rebels fought on the same side. As fighting spread sporadically across the capital, a German tank fired radio-guided incendiary shells into the Grand Palais. Inside, the Swedish entrepreneur Jean Houcke had been planning a lavish production to coincide with the Liberation. It was to be the largest circus in Europe, complete with exotic animals, trapeze acrobats, and even a clown impersonating Adolf Hitler. Houcke, in shock, sobbed as his investment burned to the ground.

  More intense fighting occurred near police headquarters, which had barricades outside as high as the statue of Joan of Arc. The prefecture was now flying the tricolor, its first appearance atop a major city building since the Occupation. The weapons and ammunition of the Resistance were running low. German tiger tanks approached with Frenchmen “roped to the turret of each tank” as human shields.

  Barricades were hastily erected elsewhere in the city, particularly in working-class and Communist strongholds of the north, east, and southeast. Communist Party leaders in the Resistance were calling for a full revolution, shouting the old battle cry of the Commune: “Tous Aux Barricades.” Resistants moved into position behind barricades assembled from overturned cars, rails from bombed railroad tracks, and wood from chopped-down trees and reinforced with other city facilities, from park benches to pissoirs. Another popular cry—“Chacun son Boche!”—instructed everyone to “get his own German.”

  DE GAULLE’S representative, Major Roger Gallois, had in the meantime presented the case for immediate Allied entrance to Paris to the chief intelligence officer of the Twelfth Army Group under General Omar N. Bradley. The information was passed along. Eisenhower, after first rejecting de Gaulle’s arguments, changed his mind. “What the hell, Brad,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to go in.” That evening, August 22, just south of Argentan, General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division was ordered to march to Paris.

  General de Gaulle had stressed to Leclerc the importance of arriving quickly, before the Communist uprising gathered momentum and perhaps even succeeded in seizing the reins of power. But there was another reason for hurrying into the capital. General Bradley received a message from Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling, who was mediating on behalf of Von Choltitz, that the German general was under great pressure to start the destruction of Paris.

  “We can’t take any chances on that general changing his mind, and knocking hell out of the city,” Bradley told his aide, General Edwin Sibert, and ordered Lt. Gen. Courtney Hicks Hodges to move. After all, even if Von Choltitz held firm, he might very well be replaced by a general determined to follow orders. Another thing Bradley knew from intelligence reports: German Panzer Divisions Twenty-six and Twenty-seven were on the way to Paris, and if they arrived in time, Von Choltitz would have no choice but to obey orders and fight.

  Von Choltitz was trying to stall with his anxious German superiors, hoping that the Swedish consul would manage to convince the Allies to act. He assured the Germans that he planned to dynamite the Arc de Triomphe, detonate the Eiffel Tower, and ignite the gold-domed Les Invalides. Seven tons of TNT were already under the Palais du Luxembourg, and another five tons of mines and munitions were secured under the former home of the Kriegsmarine on the Place de la Concorde. “The Grand Palais,” Von Choltitz reported, “you’ll be happy to know is in flames.”

  Later that day, CBS News broadcast to the world that “Paris has been liberated.” Wanting to be the first to announce the news, reporter Charles Collingwood had prepackaged a general statement and sent it along to London to be ready at the moment the city was liberated. Military censors, unable to listen to the “experimental tape,” simply passed it on London, where radio authorities guessed it was cleared. That was at least the official story of how newspapers all over the world carried Collingwood’s premature account of the Liberation. Paris, in the meantime, was near catastrophe.

  IN his march across northern France, Leclerc was encountering heavy rains, deep mud, and resilient Nazi attacks. The American Fourth
Infantry, by contrast, did not meet many retreating or resisting forces. For them, the race to the capital consisted mostly of streams of people lining the streets and cheering wildly. Major S.L.A. Marshall of the US Army Military History section recalled having sixty-seven bottles of champagne thrust into his jeep by the time they reached Les Invalides. Private First Class Charley Haley of the Twelfth Regiment credited one of his friends with kissing about a thousand women. Sergeant Donald Flannagan compared the joyous reception to Charles Lindbergh’s triumphant parade up Broadway after his famous oceanic flight.

  In his bunker at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler flew into a rage. Had the Panzers not arrived yet? Where were Von Choltitz’s promised detonations? Then, famously, Hitler turned to Generaloberst Jodl and asked, “Is Paris burning?” He ordered the Luftwaffe to strike and V-1 and V-2 rockets to rain down on the capital.

  On the evening of August 24, some 150 troops entered the Porte de Gentilly and rode past stunned Parisians to the Hôtel de Ville on the rue de Rivoli. Parisians on the street eventually realized that the men in the Sherman tanks and “olive drab jeeps” were not Germans or Americans. The Cross of Lorraine identified them instead as Free French. Leclerc’s men had arrived.

  The next morning, as children played in the Tuileries and boats sailed on the Seine, the main army of Leclerc arrived and fighting grew intense. FFI soldiers, with white armbands over their biceps, hustled from doorway to doorway to avoid sniper fire. The École Militaire and Les Invalides saw much action. The foreign office on Quai d’Orsay caught fire. Leclerc thought some seventy-six men were killed, with another two hundred wounded. Leaders of the FFI estimated that they lost a thousand, with another six hundred citizens. Estimates for Germans vary, probably between two thousand and twenty-five hundred, with perhaps as many as sixteen thousand prisoners.