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

by David King

  Raphaël was instructed to write letters to relatives. As he was single, he wrote to his parents, telling them not to worry and that he would return home when the situation improved. In Raphaël’s case, he was asked to write the letters before he arrived at the meeting with the physician. This was not likely standard procedure. For one thing, in the case of other letter writers, like Van Bever, Khaït, and Braunberger, each one had disappeared without warning, and as they did not carry any luggage, it is not likely that they carried any letters informing of their departure, either. It is also possible that the procedure was later changed. Raphaël would have been one of the early travelers in the false network.

  The evening of the departure, Petiot escorted Raphaël to rue Le Sueur. “Still decided? Are you really afraid?” Petiot asked his new client, who answered that he was not. “Good, so much the better.” He took the young man into his office, which was where Massu placed it, in the outside building, with the polished desk, armchairs, and magazines on the table. The applicant was told to enter a room down the corridor where he should await departure. This was the triangular room. He was told he would leave from this room, exiting onto a side street, today’s rue Bois de Boulogne. A chauffeur would soon arrive to take him on his journey to freedom. Raphaël did not know this, but the so-called exit was the false door inspectors found glued onto the wall.

  “You see, it is important that you completely master your nerves,” Petiot advised his client, explaining the difficulties that lay ahead. Raphaël remembered the physician telling him that he would probably have to go three days at least without sleep. To help him cope with the physical and mental challenges of the escape from Occupied Paris, Petiot offered an injection.

  The injection was not by a distance-operated syringe, as Nézondet claimed, attributing the story to Maurice Petiot. It was probably an ordinary hypodermic needle; it did not elicit any special description or commentary. After the injection was administered, Dr. Petiot escorted Raphaël into the small room and returned to his “office.” Raphaël was now alone in the triangular room. There was no forced entry or incarceration. He was free to walk around the room. He stared at the bare walls. No windows, a door with a button, and an odd array of hooks. He waited. He sat down on one of his suitcases. It was completely silent.

  As he described the sensation, he began to feel weak. His head became heavy, his heartbeat seemed to slow, and he felt a sudden sense of fatigue. There was still no sign of the chauffeur or the doctor, who he thought must have been detained by a patient. Then, as Raphaël described it, he felt an “unbearable torpor seize [him].”

  After what seemed like several hours, though of course he could not say for sure, Raphaël woke up in a great deal of pain. He compared it to being “spread out on a pile of wood or on iron bars.” His wrists, he discovered, were now locked in iron bolts, and so were his ankles. A rope, tied from the ceiling, passed around his body. He was now hanging on the wall, suspended from the iron hooks. He could not move. He felt exhausted and nauseous, with an excruciating pain in his back. His ears buzzed, his muscles cramped, and he saw visions. His head was more congested than at any time of his life. His body was one big overwhelming pain. Everything felt hopeless, he said, but he knew that his only chance of survival was to maintain hope.

  Suddenly it became difficult to breathe. As he described it, the room was overtaken by a “stinking atmosphere.” He believed it was carbon monoxide, but as he was not a chemist and that particular gas has no odor or taste, this could not be correct. A gas of some sort, however, had entered the room. What was it?

  In the 1980s, an unidentified former member of the French Gestapo living in South America gave a startling admission to a French historian using the pen name “Henry Sergg” while writing the book Paris Gestapo. In a wide-ranging conversation, accompanied by a glass or two of tequila, the former French Gestapo member mentioned that some people in his gang knew how Dr. Petiot killed his victims. The standard theory of death by injection was, as he put it, “a load of crap.” What Petiot did was gas them. Of course, a single anonymous source cited by a historian using a pseudonym is hardly ideal evidence (at the time, historians researching the French Gestapo still received death threats). That comment passed without much notice and no other biographer besides Sergg has mentioned it.

  But in light of Raphaël’s testimony, this claim deserves more consideration. In fact, the former French Gestapo member identified the gas as hydrogen cyanide. HCN, or “prussic acid” for its blue color, is a highly poisonous gas that enters the body not only through the lungs, but also the eyes, the skin, the gastrointestinal tract, and the mucous membranes. It attacks the oxygen in the blood and the central nervous system, causing the organism’s cells and living tissue literally to suffocate. Hydrogen cyanide is also the gas that the Nazis used at Auschwitz and other death camps.

  When Petiot began his renovations at 21 rue Le Sueur, the first known Nazi experiments with this particular gas had taken place in Block 11 of the Auschwitz Main Camp on September 3, 1941. It was a doctor, SS Colonel Dr. Viktor Brack, who had first suggested hydrogen cyanide to the Nazi elite, who were then looking for a more efficient and faster way than carbon monoxide to implement the “Final Solution.” Six months after this first experiment, which killed some six hundred Soviet POWs and three hundred Poles and Polish Jews, the Nazis had begun using hydrogen cyanide at the new gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. By this time, Petiot’s triangular room had been completed for nine months.

  Petiot did not need Zyklon B, the commercial form of hydrogen cyanide that the Nazis used. He could create the deadly gas by dropping pellets of cyanide of potassium into a bucket of sulfuric acid and distilled water—which is indeed what the French Gestapo member said that he did. As for the electric heater that Massu found outside the triangular room and stood on to look through the Lumvisor lens, it probably had a different purpose. Hydrogen cyanide gas only becomes volatile at seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. On cold days of winter and spring, Petiot’s electric heater would raise the temperature enough to begin vaporization.

  When the lethal gas attacks the cells, preventing them from processing oxygen, the victim gasps for air, sometimes gurgling or foaming at the mouth, the head moving up and down to the chest and side to side. The victim may then writhe in pain, with violent body spasms and convulsions. The heart might start and stop again for minutes in a prolonged, agonizing confusion of life and death. It is a horrific demise. Petiot installed a Lumvisor to watch every detail.

  Or did he? Since the first use of the gas chamber, actually by the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City on February 8, 1924, the chambers have been equipped with a viewing lens as a safety precaution. As this particular gas forms clouds that would fill the room, the question arises: did Petiot really intend to enjoy the spectacle, or was it simply a means of indicating when it was safe to reenter the room and begin airing it out? At any rate, the triangular room was indeed a torture chamber, an even more disturbing one than imagined.

  So, almost sixty years later, while a number of probable solutions have emerged, there are still many unanswered questions. How many people did he kill, and how exactly did he do it? How close were his ties to the French Gestapo or, for that matter, the French Resistance? What happened to his loot? We may never know for certain the answers to these and other questions. Petiot did indeed take many of his secrets with him.

  What we do know is that this story is an important one that should never be forgotten. It is not simply about a prolific and profitable serial killer, one of the most profitable in history. Behind the ominous cloud of smoke that poured from the chimney in the heart of Paris’s chic 16th arrondissement was a terrifying tragedy. A predator had brutally exploited opportunities for gain, slaughtering society’s most vulnerable and desperate people, the majority of them being Jews fleeing persecution. Dr. Petiot had become the self-appointed executioner for Hitler, gassing, butchering, and burning his victims in his own private death cam
p.

  Acknowledgments

  AMONG the many people who helped me over the years I spent researching and writing this book, I would like to thank, first of all, Suzanne Gluck at William Morris Endeavor. Suzanne is the best agent on the planet, and it is an immense privilege and pleasure to work with her. I am also most fortunate to have John Glusman as my editor. John has supported this project in every possible way, and I am grateful for his many outstanding suggestions.

  It is also my pleasure to thank someone else whose help has been extraordinarily beneficial: Françoise Gicquel, Commissaire Divisionnaire of the Service de la Mémoire et des Affaires Culturelles, who granted me access to the entire Petiot dossier, which has been classified and locked away since the discovery of the crimes. Thanks to her support, I was able to read the Brigade Criminelle’s original reports, interrogations, and searches, not to mention Petiot’s own personal notebooks and some of his poetry. I am forever grateful for this opportunity. I would also like to thank Oliver Accarie-Pierson, Magali Androuin, Emmanuelle Broux-Foucaud, Orlanda Scheiber, and Jean-Daniel Girard for their expertise, professionalism, and hospitality. All of you did so much to welcome me at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police, and you made my stays in Paris so valuable.

  I would like to thank Jacques Delarue, who, in addition to his pioneering works of scholarship that have long helped historians understand the Occupation, kindly gave me access to some sensitive archives at the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine. Thank you, Aldo Battaglia and the team at BDIC for making this possible. I would also like to thank the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine for allowing me to read captured Gestapo records, and for their kindness and expertise. Sincere thanks, too, to everyone at the Archives de Paris for the opportunity to read the material on the Petiot trial that they had available and the Archives Nationales for an invaluable stenographic account that supposedly never existed. Thanks to Jason Clingerman at the National Archives in College Park and Mark Stout at the International Spy Museum for helpful advice. I would also like to thank Pete Kandianis, a detective whom I am proud to call a friend; his reading suggestions and book loans certainly helped me gain a better understanding of challenges Commissaire Massu and the Brigade Criminelle faced in their hunt for Dr. Petiot. A special thank-you also goes to Professor David Olster for sharing his scholarship and friendship over the years, and to the late Professor Raymond F. Betts for his profound influence, not least his infectious love of France. I would also like to thank many dear friends, both in Lexington and around the globe, who have shown such keen interest in this project, many of them since I first became fascinated by this story years ago when I was preparing one of my World War II lectures at the University of Kentucky.

  I would like to thank everyone in the interlibrary loan department at the University of Kentucky for providing me with many rare books from dozens of libraries around the world. These included a wide variety of memoirs and diaries written by doctors; diplomats; detectives; historians; actresses; Americans; sons of gangsters; Resistance fighters; rescuers; Gestapo, Abwehr, and Wehrmacht officers; a millionaire son of a founder of a major bank; a brothel madam; and many others. For books that were rarer and apparently not owned by any of the ten thousand libraries in the system, I would like to thank my antiquarian book dealers. It was exciting to open each new package, which included no less than Commissaire Massu’s “other” memoir, the memoir of Dr. Petiot’s oldest friend, a forgotten book on Petiot (the first major book on the subject and actually published in Berlin), and a fascinating small book published just three weeks after the discovery of the crimes at rue Le Sueur—this last one proving far more valuable than I’d expected. Of course, any remaining errors in this book are my responsibility alone.

  I would also like to thank my parents, Van and Cheryl King, for all their love and encouragement over the years, and I am deeply grateful for everything. As always, it is a joy to thank my wife, Sara, for all her love and excitement. She is an exceptional critic, and her many suggestions were hugely valuable. Thanks, and I love you! Finally, a special thank-you to Julia and Max for enlivening and enriching my world, and it is to you that I dedicate this book with all my love.

  Selected Bibliography

  ARCHIVES

  AN Archives Nationales

  AP Archives de Paris

  APP Archives de la Préfecture de Police

  BDIC Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine

  CDJC Centre de documentation juive contemporaine

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  ——. Notebooks 1942–1951. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

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  Charbonneaux, Hubert. “Hommage à Jean Charbonneaux (1918–1943).” Chantran. vengeance.free.fr/Doc/Charbonneaux05.pdf

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  Cobb, Richard. French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France Under Two Occupations 1914–1918/1940–1944. Hanover: Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1983.