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

by David King

  At this point, many people helped track down the serial killer. An editor of Résistance, Louis Jean Finot, released Petiot’s letter and the police circulated it throughout the FFI. All indications suggested that Petiot was probably masquerading as a doctor, which would make sense as a cover for someone with his background, and so the search focused on physicians in the Resistance. Colonel Rol, leader of the FFI in Paris, secured samples of handwriting that resembled the letter in question.

  Among a number of people assisting the investigation was Captain Henri-Jean Valeri, originally from the commune of Villepinte in Seine-et-Oise and the leader of an FFI counterespionage unit in charge of rooting out traitors and “collabos.” A slender man in his late forties, with dark brown hair and a thick mustache and beard, Valeri served as investigations officer for the intelligence organization G2 in the First Infantry Regiment of the FFI, stationed in the armory of Reuilly. Valeri had considerable skill and experience, and his quick promotion to captain—even for a time that saw many quick promotions—proved his zeal. Police investigators were more optimistic about the case than they had been in months, but they were quickly running out of time.

  AFTER the Liberation, Frenchmen began the long and difficult process of coming to terms with the dark years of the Occupation. The first priority in the reckoning was to remove collaborators from positions of power. Sometimes this was done through the legal system in the High Court newly created to judge cases of treason, or “intelligence with the enemy.” Other times, it was action taken by people themselves in the form of lynchings, summary executions, or a wide range of vigilante-style punishments. Women accused of sleeping with the Germans, the so-called “horizontal collaboration,” in particular, were punished by the wrath of mobs.

  An estimated ten to twenty thousand women would have their heads shaved, be stripped naked or semi-naked, and then marched through the streets, sometimes with swastikas tarred or tattooed on their breasts or with signs around their necks bearing the words “I whored with the Germans.” Some of them, being new mothers, carried babies in their arms. German authorities estimated that fifty to seventy-five thousand children had been born to German fathers and French mothers in the Occupation. A recent study by Jean-Paul Picaper and Ludwig Norz, Enfants Maudits (2004), raised the figure to about two hundred thousand.

  The violent purging was more common in the south of France, where tensions between Resistance and Militia were more severe, and many places were liberated by the French Resistance rather than the Allies. But no town of any size was immune. In all, about 310,000 cases involving some 350,000 people charged with “intelligence with the enemy” were brought to court. About 60 percent of the cases were dismissed for lack of evidence. Of the 125,000 that went to trial, approximately 100,000 resulted in convictions, though almost half of them (49,723) received the verdict “national indignity,” which bore no prison sentence or fine. About 20 percent of the trials ended with a prison sentence (25,901), with another 13,339 sentenced to forced work. Officially, 7,055 people received death sentences, though the vast majority of these were not carried out.

  Estimates for the number of summary executions with no attempt to use the legal system have dropped significantly. In the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, historians believed that there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 slayings. More recent studies have estimated the total figure at perhaps 8,000 to 9,000. At any rate, the euphoria of liberation was giving way to the bitter controversies of retribution. Veteran intelligence agent Roger Wybot compared the atmosphere surrounding the search for collabos that autumn to the “stock market in a moment of madness.”

  Some Frenchmen believed that the exuberance in purging suspected collaborators was undermining the shaky foundations of the country’s unity. François Mauriac was one of many people who urged caution, appealing for reconciliation, not revenge, as France’s new leaders confronted the challenges of rebuilding the country. Others, like Albert Camus at Combat, pressed to take the purges further, punishing the criminals for cruelties they committed—the author of The Stranger had not yet reached his famous opposition to the death penalty. Captain Henri Valeri, working on the Petiot case, agreed with Camus, pushing his men at the Reuilly armory to show no mercy tracking down collaborators and rooting them out of power. France, he said, was using eyebrow tweezers, when the proper instrument should be a shovel.

  ON the morning of October 31, 1944, a man in khaki uniform with a kepi, an FFI armband, dark glasses, and a thick beard stepped onto the platform of the Saint-Mandé-Tourelle railway station. At 10:45, as he punched his ticket, a stranger walked up to him and asked the time. Then, with this distraction, the stranger kicked him in the groin and three other men jumped on him. The man in khaki was carried out of the railway station, blindfolded, and gagged, with his hands cuffed and feet bound. After seven months and twenty days eluding arrest, Marcel Petiot had been captured.

  Escorted back to the Reuilly armory, Petiot was forced to remove his FFI armband and uniform, so that he would “no longer sully the honor of the French army.” The murder suspect carried a loaded 6.35 revolver, 31,780 francs in cash, and a large number of false identity papers and blank documents for search warrants, orders, and arrests. A Communist Party card, identification number no. 268004, only eight days old, was found in his possession, along with a membership card (No. 29 097) for the Communist organization of the France-U.S.S.R. Friendship Committee. Petiot also had a number of ration cards under various names, including one for a little boy named René, whose last name had been smudged and replaced. At this time it was not known who the child was, though police would soon have a good idea.

  Given the amount of coverage that the murders initially received, it might seem that with his arrest Marcel Petiot would again dominate the news. This was not the case. Although reports would regularly appear both in French and international media, many of the former underground newspapers did not care for the topic. It was embarrassing, to say the least, to have this man claim the cause of the Resistance, as he would do with fervor, and his story would certainly raise many unwelcome questions. The Petiot case, moreover, had been sensationalized so much in the captive press, to distract from the harsh realities of the Occupation, that it alienated editors who once worked on Resistance papers.

  Albert Camus’s paper, Combat, exemplified the trend when its editors reported Petiot’s arrest and then proclaimed their reluctance to cover the monstrous tale: “We believe we have fulfilled our journalistic obligations by relaying this news without commentary. We will do the same each day, but we refuse to glorify an affair which is repugnant from so many points of view.” This reaction—if understandable in the charged circumstances of the autumn of 1944—was unfortunate. Without a full investigation, many questions about the case would remain no closer to resolution.

  The man who actually arrested Petiot, Captain Simonin, was himself a recent recruit to the Resistance—one of approximately ten thousand agents who then belonged to the emerging intelligence service answering to the War Ministry and known as the DGER (Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches). Actually, Simonin was not his real name, and he was not authorized by French police to make the arrest. He was later identified as a thirty-one-year-old former police officer named Henri Soutif, who had served as the commissaire des renseignements généraux of Quimper in northern France, collaborated closely with the Occupation authorities, and ordered the arrest, torture, and deportation of many Frenchmen.

  Simonin’s arrest had come at a propitious time. Among the papers in Petiot’s possession was an order for the suspect, under one of his several aliases, to transfer to DGER offices in Saigon. Was Petiot hoping to escape to French Indochina, where he would serve in the Medical Corps of the intelligence service? This was at least one of his options. Petiot’s date of departure was apparently set for November 2, 1944.

  In perhaps the biggest surprise, Captain Henri Valeri and Marcel Petiot turned out to be the same person. In typically
bold style, Petiot had posed as Valeri and maneuvered into a position inside Reuilly to help authorities find the killer of rue Le Sueur. At one point during his investigation, he even gained a meeting to discuss the case with the procureur de la république, who later said he had been impressed by Valeri’s thoroughness, energy, and command of the facts of the case.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Valeri’s secretary, Cécile Dylma, said to Inspectors Lucien Pinault and Émile Casanova, about learning the identity of her boss. “He’s a man so sweet, so calm. Captain Valeri has never shown a single act of anger towards us.” At the same time, she acknowledged that he declined most invitations and generally kept quiet about his private life. “To think that I have been alone with him in his office for a month,” Dylma said, “it makes me shudder.”

  Commissaire Massu would not have the satisfaction of arresting Petiot. In the purges that followed the end of the Occupation, which soon escalated to involve the removal of twelve hundred officers from the police department, Massu had been arrested on August 20, 1944. He was accused of four specific charges of collaboration with the enemy, which included furnishing information to the Occupation authorities that led to the execution of patriots, working cordially and “dining on several occasions” with the German liaison to the Police Judiciaire, and deporting a Jewish woman and two girls who had been arrested for a misdemeanor. His enemies pounced. The commissaire was taken away to Fresnes.

  One of the documents that Petiot carried at the time of his arrest was an elaborate accusation against Commissaire Massu. The former head of the Brigade Criminelle, Petiot-Valeri wrote, should be suspended not just from his duties at the quai des Orfèvres, but more important, in the name of justice, from “the end of a rope.” Petiot’s job of punishing “collaborators” had put him in a frightening position to destroy anyone who could expose his past. How far could Petiot have gone in wiping the slate clean if he had not succumbed to his vanity and written an editorial to the Parisian newspaper? And, one wonders, how far did he go?

  In December 1944, the disgraced and depressed former commissaire, recipient of the Légion d’honneur, slit his wrists in an obvious suicide attempt. Rushed to Hôtel-Dieu, Massu recovered and eventually returned to face an official collaboration tribunal, which on April 20, 1945, cleared him of all charges, for lack of evidence. There was not a single “anti-national act with which one could reproach Massu,” Arthur Airaud, president of the Commission d’épuration at the Préfecture de Police, declared. That same day, Massu was freed from Fresnes, just over one year and three months after Marcel Petiot had walked out of the same building.

  “A good colleague,” Massu said, “profited from the circumstances to settle in my chair at the head of the Brigade Criminelle.” Massu would return to the police force to serve with distinction. On his retirement in 1947, he went to work in security at the American Embassy in Paris.

  Eleven years later, Massu appeared in a French television documentary together with his old friend, the bestselling mystery writer Georges Simenon. The two of them reminisced about how they first met over a glass of red wine at Les Trois Marches. Simenon described how, for inspiration, he had “haunted the Palais de Justice, the Place de Dauphine, [and] the little corner cafes.” He elaborated:

  I took all my models from right here. I watched them at work, and I picked up their habits. Maigret is a little of Chief Inspector Massu, a little of Chief Inspector Guillaume [Massu’s former supervisor].

  Commissaire Massu lives on today in Simenon’s gruff, earthy fictional detective Jules Amédée François Maigret.

  23.

  INTERROGATIONS

  AN INDIVIDUAL WITHOUT SCRUPLES AND DEVOID OF ALL MORAL SENSIBILITY.

  —Dr. Claude, Dr. Laignel-Lavastine, and

  Dr. Génil Perrin on Marcel Petiot

  AS Captain Simonin later revealed, he had discovered Marcel Petiot’s exact whereabouts thanks to a tip from one of Petiot-Valeri’s subordinates at the Reuilly armory. FFI Corporal Jean-Richard Salvage told him that the suspect was staying in an apartment owned by his mother at 22 rue Paul-Bert. Simonin had investigated the lead. Sure enough, Petiot left the building every morning, took the métro at Saint-Mandé-Tourelle station, and exited at Reuilly-Diderot for a quick walk to the armory.

  After making the arrest, Simonin did not immediately hand Petiot over to the police. Instead, he decided to question him about his activities. From the beginning, Petiot took on a brash, condescending tone, claiming to be, as Simonin put it, “a hero of the Resistance.” He bandied about the terminology of the Communist Party, blasting the “hirelings of the capitalists” and “mercenaries in the service of the Americans.” He spoke vaguely about only “obeying orders” and implied that his comrades in “the party” would not hesitate to free him.

  According to Simonin’s account of the interrogation, which eventually ended up in the files of the Paris police, Petiot elaborated on his many alleged services for the Resistance. He identified himself as an investigations officer and captain in the First Infantry Regiment of the FFI based at Reuilly. Later Simonin would say that he believed Petiot had chosen to apply to this particular armory because of the prominence of several Communist leaders there, including Commandant Raffy, a former ranking member of the Resistance group FTP (Franc-Tireurs et Partisans), who would serve as Petiot’s supervisor at Reuilly. It is also significant that Reuilly—so recently evacuated by the Germans—was also taking a lead in forming the tribunals to purge former collaborators.

  Petiot denied that he had revealed his real name when he arrived at the armory in September 1944 looking for a commission. He presented himself, he said, as Dr. Wetterwald, who in turn used the alias Dr. Valeri. Simonin later said that he was positive that Petiot was lying. Petiot would only admit that he believed that Raffy’s own boss, the head of the First Infantry Regiment, Colonel Ruaux, knew his true identity. In time, Petiot added, other people at the armory learned about his past. He defended them by pointing out that they had not put much credence in the wild slanders of the German press.

  After discussing his medical practice, which he said earned 500,000 francs a year, an ironic boast perhaps for an avowed Communist, Petiot told Simonin that he had begun working for the Resistance in 1941. He had used his work as a physician to “demoralize German officer patients who came to consult me.” He made contact with a Resistance organization based on rue Cambon, to send him French workers who had returned ill or wounded from their work in Germany. These Frenchmen, Petiot said, often provided “very interesting intelligence,” which he readily passed on to the Allies.

  Petiot mentioned specifically informing the American consulate in Paris about a secret German weapon, based on the principle of the boomerang, that was being developed just over forty miles southwest of Berlin. He identified his contact at the consulate as a man named Thompson. The American consul was Tyler Thompson, but he would later deny having any contact with the suspect. As for how Petiot could have known his name, Thompson had a theory. At the beginning of the Occupation, when he served as third secretary, Thompson had signed more than one thousand red certificates to be placed on American-owned buildings and businesses all over Paris, declaring them inviolable according to international law.

  By late 1941, Petiot had allegedly made many more contacts in the Resistance. He claimed to be working with a group of anti-Franco Spaniards in the outlying district of Levallois and receiving training from a man from London who organized Resistance in Franche-Comté. Who was this British agent? Petiot said that he never knew his name, or even his code name. He did mention working with a man called “Cumulo,” who operated the Resistance group Arc-en-Ciel, which in turn served under Pierre Brossolette in Charles de Gaulle’s intelligence service, the BCRA.

  There were already many allegations to investigate, and authorities would pursue them, but Petiot was not done talking. As in the letter to Résistance, Petiot described how he had worked for a supposed Resistance group, “Fly-Tox,” that
specialized in tracking down and executing informers, or mouchards, a slang term derived from the French word for fly (mouche). The name “Fly-Tox,” Petiot later said, had been inspired by a commercial fly-killer product because, like the pesticide, his men liquidated mouchards.

  When Simonin asked Petiot to provide names “and all the information in your possession” about members of his alleged group, Petiot replied calmly that his organization was well known and it was unnecessary to provide further details. He did, however, elaborate on Fly-Tox’s methods of operation.

  Members of his organization staked out the offices of the Gestapo on rue des Saussaies. Any civilian who left the premises was followed. The Fly-Tox Resistant, posing as a member of the German secret police, waited until the target went to a secluded spot and then seized him. If the latter protested that he worked for the Germans, he had, as Petiot later put it, “convicted himself.” The suspect was then thrown into a truck. Interrogations took place at his property on rue Le Sueur, which he had used since his purchase earlier that year to store his antiques and “the bulk of his fortune.”

  The suspected collaborator—“once we acquired the certainty of his guilt”—would be executed by revolver or a secret weapon that Petiot claimed to have invented, which could fire in silence up to one hundred feet with deadly accuracy. The bodies were then dumped in the forests of either Marly-le-Roi or Saint-Cloud. Petiot claimed to have killed sixty-three people this way. As for the exact place his group disposed of the bodies, he said that he could not remember. He did not know the names of his victims either, as he had not recorded them and often could not determine with any certainty if his men knew a suspect’s true identity. “We only knew that they were enemies who had to disappear.”