by David King
This mysterious woman was suspected of sending nine victims, all of them fellow Jews, to the escape network. The defense would try to show that she worked for the Gestapo and only sent Petiot traitors attempting to infiltrate his organization. The prosecution would take the position that Kahan could have worked out of any number of motives, ranging from a desire for commission profit, to the altruistic hope that she was helping desperate people escape the Nazi Occupation. For the prosecution, she was no collaborator, and more to the point of the trial, neither were the people she sent Petiot. Audience and jury alike would hang on every word of this important witness.
Kahan was visibly nervous as she started to testify. In a husky voice with a strong Slavic accent, she described how she first met Petiot through her friend and lover, Dr. Saint-Pierre, a physician well known in the underground for his criminal clients and connections. The meeting took place in a back room at Fourrier’s hair salon, where Dr. Eugène, as she put it, questioned her about “the circumstances of my friends and me.” She admitted referring the Wolff, Basch, and Schonker families to the escape organization. All of these people, she said, were delightful.
Given the portrayal of these families by the defense, Leser asked the witness if they were really opposed to the Nazis.
“Of course, Mr. Président,” Kahan said. “They were not only anti-Nazi, but they also lived in terror of being arrested. There was no doubt of their sentiments.” Each of the Jewish families was so happy about the opportunity to leave Occupied Paris that they viewed Petiot “as their God.” They had praised the altruistic Frenchman who operated the escape agency, at great personal risk, to help Jews that he did not know. One journalist in the audience noted that the defendant stopped staring absentmindedly at the ceiling when he heard these words and looked like he felt a sudden sharp pain in his chest.
Kahan also testified to her desire to leave Paris, but Petiot had opposed it for the reason that she could be useful to the Resistance movement. “I understand now what a wonderful pawn I was.”
The witness proceeded to describe how she had adored Dr. Eugène for his patriotic work on behalf of the Resistance. Even when the story broke in March 1944, she testified, she had not made a connection. She had never known him under the name Marcel Petiot, only Dr. Eugène, and all the talk of “injections, nightclubs, drugs, loose women” did not match the man she knew, who was “serious, levelheaded, composed, and very sensible.” It was his photograph on the front page, she said, that caused her to discover the horrible truth.
As for why she did not simply go to the police with her story if she were as innocent as she claimed, Kahan reminded the prosecution that, as a Jew in the Occupation, she was “hunted as a harmful beast.” At one point, she had considered going to the police, but she said that the attorney she consulted, René Floriot, advised her to “stay put.”
Kahan’s story and her motives were soon questioned by Floriot, and a spirited debate followed over her professed work for the Resistance. She became defensive. She struck the railing with her fist, and as she appeared flustered, her accent became more pronounced. Dupin came to her aid, noting that the police had found no evidence disputing her claims of having served the Resistance.
Floriot asked about a certain police report dated November 30, 1945, that identified Eryane Kahan as “an adventuress … who lies with skill.” In the interviews following her arrest as an alleged Petiot accomplice in the autumn of 1944, Kahan could not name a single person she had worked with in the Resistance—and again, this was after the Liberation, when there was no lack of people claiming this distinction. Kahan had been found, Commissaire Poirier noted, with “many difficulties.” Indeed, she was living in the 16th arrondissement, under the fake name of Odette Motte.
Another thing that Floriot knew was that the former leader of the French Gestapo, Henri Lafont, had picked her out from a list of photographs as a woman who had informed his gang about the activities and whereabouts of fellow Jews. Specifically, in a deposition signed December 21, 1944, Lafont stated that Kahan “came to us to give tips on the passages to Spain arranged by a doctor.”
It was a lengthy cross-examination accompanied by a duel of glasses, as Floriot and Kahan removed and wiped their spectacles at regular intervals. Floriot focused first on establishing that Kahan had received a commission for every person she sent Dr. Petiot. He hounded the witness, citing the police report and the testimony of several witnesses. But Kahan refused to budge, and a heated exchange erupted between prosecution and defense attorneys. Insults and insinuations flew from both sides, prompting Leser to call a recess. When the court returned, Dupin withdrew his comments, which might have “offended the very legitimate sensitivities of my opponent.”
Floriot nodded and then launched into a series of rapid-fire questions, suggesting that Kahan had enjoyed a close relationship with Occupation authorities. He asked about her friend, the German officer, and the fact that she had been seen riding in a German truck, which she could not deny. Her apartment building, Floriot continued, was often visited by three or four German officers. He mentioned the deposition of a former friend who believed that Kahan caused her husband’s arrest by the Gestapo. Kahan countered that she had never heard that before.
When Floriot asked about Madame Cadoret’s testimony, namely that she had been worried when Kahan was “saluted by a number of German soldiers,” Kahan said that this was simply her friend Herbert Welsing and one or two of his Luftwaffe friends. Floriot noted that her memory had suddenly returned.
There was one last question, Floriot said. Kahan had been accused of “intelligence with the enemy” (Article 75 of the penal code), but what had happened to her dossier? Kahan denied having any knowledge of such a file. Jean-François Dominique, then covering the trial for Toulouse’s La Républic du Sud-Ouest, thought that she was taken aback by the question.
“Since you do not appear to remember, the dossier is number 16582.”
The prosecutor scribbled the number down with a great flourish, hoping to show the jurors that he intended to disprove this allegation. The judge ordered that this file, completed in April 1945, be retrieved and brought to the courtroom. It would not have any bombshells. But for the moment, it seemed that Kahan was a Gestapo agent.
Marcel Petiot had been unusually quiet. The president asked if he had any questions. Yes, he did, the defendant said. After inquiring about the baggage carried by the Wolff and Basch families and inviting the witness to clarify her financial situation, Petiot seemed most interested in the claim by Cadoret about his dirty hands. Had Kahan also noticed that? he asked.
“I have not looked at your hands,” she said. “They did not interest me.”
Perhaps they were dirty, Petiot responded. When he visited Kahan on rue Pasquier, he told the court, he had not felt safe and often changed the manual gearshift on his bicycle in case he needed to make a fast escape. Many people in the audience found it amusing to hear France’s alleged most deadly serial killer claim that he did not feel safe on that particular street.
“If I did have dirty hands,” Petiot then shouted, “at least I never dirtied them by raising them to swear an oath of loyalty to the traitor Pétain!”
“I forbid you to be insolent,” Leser warned the defendant.
“Toward whom?” Petiot laughed. “Pétain?”
Leser reminded the court that magistrates had been required to swear oaths of allegiance to German authorities. The Act Constitutionel No. 9, drafted on April 4, 1941, made it law. Petiot said that he knew someone who had refused. Paul Didier was the most famous example of a judge who lost his position for his principled refusal.
Leser dismissed the witness. In the audience, Jean Galtier-Boissière found her intriguing and rather puzzling: “Was she tortured by remorse for having delivered three Jewish families who had confided in her to a killer?” Did she perhaps serve the Germans? After listening to her testimony the last two hours, Galtier-Boissière said that he still could not decide
between “these equally plausible hypotheses.”
The prosecution closed by calling a number of other witnesses to show that the Wolffs, the Basches, and the Schonkers could not have worked for the Gestapo. Three hotelkeepers from the quartier Saint-Sulpice testified that each of the Jewish families had fled the Nazis into France and were trying to flee again. Petiot had posed as their unfortunate answer.
33.
WALKOUT
THE FOREIGN PRESS DOES NOT APPEAR TO UNDERSTAND FRENCH JUSTICE.
—Alex Ancel, Parisien Libéré, March 31, 1946
IN Floriot’s hands, the interrogation of witnesses on days eleven and twelve sometimes became so fierce that it seemed that the question of a witness’s or victim’s honor overshadowed the issue of Petiot’s guilt. The prosecution, outmaneuvered, labored to prove the obvious, namely, in Yvan Dreyfus’s case, that he was a patriot who had been forced to sign two documents promising to aid the Third Reich. The defense used the evidence of his signature to argue that Dreyfus was a collaborator and a traitor who intended to infiltrate Petiot’s Resistance organization.
After the radio engineer Jean-Claude Stern testified about Dreyfus’s patriotism, an electrician imprisoned with him at Compiègne named Marcel Berthet also confirmed Dreyfus’s Resistance credentials. “We respected Yvan Dreyfus as the most reliable Resistant, and I was keen to come here to declare it.” One highlight of his testimony was telling the court how Dreyfus and several other prisoners nearly succeeded in digging a tunnel to escape the camp.
Maître Véron then read a telegram from Pierre Mendès-France, a future prime minister who at that time served as Charles de Gaulle’s minister of national economy. After making a dramatic escape from a Vichy prison, Mendès-France joined the Free French forces in Britain. Mendès-France, then on a mission in New York, defended his fellow Resistant with passion. “I learn with amazement that PETIOT DARED DEFAME THE MEMORY OF YVAN DREYFUS.” The allegations were “unthinkable to everyone who valued Dreyfus’s character, courage, and patriotism.” Petiot looked on, several eyewitnesses noted, with an expression that vacillated between boredom and disdain.
Paulette Dreyfus then took the stand, wearing a black dress suit with a black veil and a pearl necklace. Unlike most of the previous witnesses, Dreyfus did not look at Petiot when she testified, and the physician, for once, did not interrupt.
Dreyfus discussed, her voice trembling, how her husband wanted to leave Occupied France to join de Gaulle in London. She told of his capture, imprisonment at Compiègne, and fear of deportation to Drancy, followed by the sordid history of the negotiations over his release that ended with Yvan being forced to sign the Gestapo papers. “I was horrified,” Dreyfus said. “His release was supposed to be unconditional.”
Dreyfus told how then, after they had paid the ransom, the lawyer Jean Guélin came with yet another “last requirement” for her husband at Gestapo headquarters. Her husband left with him and she never saw him again.
“When your husband left, did he carry any suitcases?”
“No, Guélin took care of the luggage and loaned him some,” Dreyfus said, thereby supporting the defense contention that the Gestapo attempted to infiltrate Petiot’s organization. Floriot had already established that the first of the two letters her husband had been forced to sign bound him not to act in any way against the Third Reich. He now asked her about the second letter. Dreyfus’s answer was exactly what the defense counsel wanted to hear: “To give information on the organization that managed the departures.”
LIKE Madame Dreyfus, Fernand Lavie had been outraged by Dr. Petiot’s assertion that he killed only “Germans, notorious collaborators, Gestapo, and agents provocateurs.” His mother had been killed, he had earlier told the police, because she refused, “by her silence, or her declarations [to become] an accomplice of Dr. Petiot’s trafficking in drugs.” Lavie was the next witness called to the stand.
He retraced the background of the case from his half sister Raymonde Baudet’s arrest for forged prescriptions to the strange postcards allegedly from his mother informing the family of her sudden departure for the unoccupied zone. “My mother never intended to leave,” Lavie said, noting that she did not pack any personal belongings or take any money with her.
Floriot reminded the court that Khaït’s husband David told the police that he believed Marthe had both written and delivered the letters, admitting also that she had previously expressed an interest in fleeing Occupied Paris. David Khaït was not available to testify because he had been arrested and deported by the Germans in June 1944. He had not returned.
“Do you know,” Floriot then asked, “that three people, including a railroad employee, believed that they recognized your mother in June 1943?” This was fifteen months after her disappearance.
Lavie said he had not heard that.
“Didn’t your mother come to drop off a letter with your attorney as your stepfather claimed?” The maid at the attorney’s office had also recognized her, Floriot said. The attorney, of course, happened to be Véron, who was now serving as Lavie’s representation in the civil suit. If this statement was correct, Floriot had found four witnesses who claimed to see Khaït after the time his client was accused of killing her.
“Let’s call the maid to the stand,” Véron said. The irony of the lawyer questioning the statement of his own maid was not lost.
Floriot asked about Lavie’s half-sister, Raymonde Baudet, whose forged prescription began the original narcotics investigation. Lavie admitted that he had not heard from her and did not know her whereabouts. He only knew that she was living in the country.
“Yet she must know that we are discussing her at the Cour d’assises and that her presence here would be welcome,” Dupin interjected, trying to cover the fact that the prosecution had neglected to call her to testify.
“How many witnesses does that make whom you haven’t been able to produce?” Petiot asked. “Are we to conclude that they are dead? Did you murder them?”
Dupin then asked the witness if he had been shown a letter from Jean-Marc Van Bever, another alleged Petiot victim who disappeared within days of his mother in March 1942. Lavie said that he had. The police inspector had concealed the signature, but he thought the handwriting was the same as in the letters that arrived at their apartment supposedly from his mother.
The graphologist Edmond de Rougemont did not agree, Floriot noted.
“Maître, if you manage to explain this away,” Véron said, “you will perhaps remove two reasons for condemning your client to death. There will still be twenty-five left.”
MARGUERITE Braunberger took the stand on Saturday, March 30, the twelfth day of the trial and the last one for the prosecution witnesses. As the third widow to testify, Braunberger discussed her husband’s disappearance on the morning of June 20, 1942, noting the mysterious phone call summoning him to a meeting at the L’Étoile métro station on the pretense of taking him to care for a patient at an unknown location on rue Duret.
An usher of the court opened one of the glass cages in the room and showed the witness a blue shirt with white pinstripes and a man’s hat, size 50. Braunberger, embracing them, confirmed that they had been worn by her husband the day he disappeared.
“How do you explain this find?” asked Maître Perlès, the attorney for the Braunberger family.
“The moment has not come for me to answer,” Petiot said.
“I would advise you to do so,” Leser said.
Petiot refused, adding that he would respond after the other witnesses had testified.
“That gives you time to think of a reply,” Perlès said.
“Petiot, I order you to answer.”
The defendant held his ground, promising a rebuttal in half an hour.
“Mon Dieu, I’m not going to go anywhere.” As the court would soon learn, Petiot actually had an unexpected answer to the accusations.
After Madame Braunberger left the stand, the prosecution called Raymond Vallée
to testify about the relationship between Braunberger and Petiot. He was well placed to provide information. A friend of the Braunbergers and a cousin of Georgette Petiot, Vallée had hosted the luncheon where the victim and his alleged murderer met.
Vallée told the court about receiving a letter, purportedly from Braunberger, on June 24, 1942, asking him to bring his furniture to one of Petiot’s properties near the Bois de Boulogne. Vallée admitted that he had been skeptical. He did not understand how Braunberger could have possibly known about the town house.
Petiot’s expressions had been full of disdain, but at one point during the testimony, he lost his temper and jumped out of his chair, shouting at the witness. Leser ordered him to sit down and control himself. A guard, standing behind Petiot, indicated that he should comply, using the familiar tu form, not the formal vous.
“I forbid you to use tu with me!” Petiot yelled at the guard, who simply repeated the order.
“Fuck you!” Petiot screamed.
As the crowd jeered, Leser pounded the gavel and shouted for everyone to calm down. But then, as Petiot started to ask Vallée a question, Leser allowed the witness to leave the stand. Floriot smiled. The clerk of the court, alert to the possibility of a mistrial, whispered to Leser. An usher was sent to fetch Vallée. Moments later, he returned to answer Petiot’s question. It was insignificant.
Other members of the Braunberger household took the stand, including the maid, the cook, and a nurse from Dr. Braunberger’s medical practice. Each one identified the shirt and hat as belonging to the doctor.
Petiot now asked for the two pieces of evidence. “There was no reason for me to kill this old Jew.” Not only did he barely know him, but Braunberger obviously didn’t take any money or valuables with him the morning he left his apartment. There was nothing to gain, the defendant said. As for the shirt, Petiot disputed the prosecution’s claims that it bore Braunberger’s initials. “Do not speak to me anymore about this hat or shirt,” he concluded, literally tossing the items at the clerk. Floriot would soon have more to say about these items.
