The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  The most curious fact about these disappearances was that all the escapees who left the barbershop on the rue des Mathurins did so during the day—the nine pimps and prostitutes left at 9:00 on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Petiot did not take them to his apartment around the corner, but headed off to the west, toward the Etoile, two miles away, and the rue Le Sueur. Yet none of the neighbors on the rue Le Sueur—who remembered every truck that came and, many of them, even Madame Petiot’s sole visit three years earlier—ever saw a stranger enter the house. They were willing to swear that no one had. At night there was a 10:00 curfew, and bands of people with suitcases could scarcely have walked the streets without being noticed by a German patrol. It was never learned how the victims arrived at the rue Le Sueur, if, in fact, they did.

  Pintard’s open soliciting at the rue de l’Echiquier café in a milieu that included informers was effective for volume traffic but not well suited to secrecy, and it was not long before the Gestapo heard about the escape organization. Early German reports indicated that agents of the Reich had little difficulty spotting Pintard and Fourrier but were completely baffled when it came to identifying the ingenious medical doctor who directed what they believed was a highly effective escape network. A Gestapo security file dated April 8, 1943, stated:

  There is a great deal of talk in public about an organization which arranges clandestine crossings of the Spanish border by means of falsified Argentinian passports.

  I have consequently, through a man in our confidence, learned the conditions for traveling to [South] America. A group leaves for Spain every three weeks. The interested party must pay F50,000 and provide ten photographs and his address at the first interview. Inquiries are subsequently made to determine whether the person does, in fact, live at the indicated address. It is probable that these inquiries are made by a French police inspector. Finally, the interested party is notified three or four days before the convoy’s departure and must go to a place whose location is concealed until the last moment. There, he is taken in charge by a member of the organization and lodged at a hotel or in a doctor’s apartment. The daily rate is F400. From this moment on, the parties are not allowed to write to or contact anyone. After several days, the subjects are taken to the train station and turned over to two other members of the organization, who give them their false passports in exchange for the F50,000. All liquid cash—particularly foreign currency—and jewels must be surrendered, and are returned only at the Spanish border. Each traveler is free to take with him as much money as he chooses.

  It is assumed that this organization is directed by high French officials.

  Another report, this one from Robert Jodkum’s Jewish Affairs sector of the Gestapo, added:

  According to my informants, the doctor in question does not deal solely with Jews, but with anyone who comes to him, and it is said that he has abetted the escape of certain suspicious persons, notably terrorists, and even army deserters.

  The voyagers travel on neutral ships leaving from a port in Portugal. They are sent there by rail via Irún.…

  The long and fastidious investigation which I have made shows that this network is organized in a remarkable fashion and takes infinite precautions to avoid crossover or communication between adjacent cells in the network’s hierarchy.

  It would be interesting to be able to organize a surveillance all along the railway trajectory to the frontier and discover the method of crossing the border.

  Members of a foreign embassy are certainly collaborating on the furnishing of false passports. A later report will deal more specifically with this point.

  Robert Jodkum resolved to crack the organization, and to do so he recruited, or rather blackmailed into service, a Jew whose credentials as an enemy of the Germans would be above all suspicion. Yvan Dreyfus was a wealthy Jew who headed a large radio and electronics importing-and-distribution company in Lyon. When the war broke out in 1939, he had returned from studies in the United States to enlist in the French army; when the Germans disbanded the French military forces in 1940, he used his company to supply the Resistance with transmitters and to repair damaged air-dropped material. The Gestapo had arrested him at Montpellier while he and nine others were trying to flee and join de Gaulle’s forces in London. He was currently in prison at Compiègne awaiting deportation.

  Yvan’s wife Paulette did everything imaginable to force the release of her husband. Since the camp at Compiègne was the staging area for most deportations to Germany and eastern Europe, Madame Dreyfus had every reason to fear for his life. With the proper connections and the right amount of cash, however, one could often negotiate the release of prisoners who were not dangerous saboteurs. After long months spent questioning friends and acquaintances, she was put in touch with a Monsieur Dequeker, a merchant employed by the Germans as an administrator of confiscated goods. He was also a director of the Théâtre des Nouveautés.

  Dequeker asked for and received F100,000 merely to have the file opened. Soon afterward he demanded an additional F700,000; he told Paulette Dreyfus that his codirector at the theater, a former lawyer named Jean Guélin, had important connections with the Gestapo, notably with Robert Jodkum, who held a high post in the very sector that was handling her husband’s case. This was, in fact, a lucky break for Guélin. It was he who had first told Jodkum about the escape organization and Dr. Eugène. He had learned of it through the director of the Banque Régionale Parisienne, Marcel Chantin, who knew Fourrier. For the past several months Guélin had been a regular customer at the rue des Mathurins barbershop, improving his appearance while picking up any tidbits he could. He had spent weeks trying to figure out the best way to insinuate a convincing agent into the organization. If worked properly, he told himself, this just might be the chance he was looking for.

  Madame Dreyfus, of course, knew none of this. In late April or early May 1943 she met Guélin in front of Le Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysées and was told that the release of someone like her husband could not be obtained for less than F4 million. She managed to work the price down to F3.5 million and told Guélin to go ahead.

  Guélin’s first move was to send an intermediary to Dreyfus at Compiègne. The man chosen was Pierre Péhu, a former police commissioner who had been removed from his post by the Vichy régime and was presently doing secretarial work for Guélin while hoping for reinstatement. Péhu went to Compiègne one Sunday afternoon armed with the code word pomme—the Dreyfuses’ nickname for their young daughter—to convince the prisoner that his wife was really a trusting accomplice in a plan for his release. As far as Dreyfus was told, nothing more was involved than bribery. He was willing to cooperate, but balked when Péhu produced two typed letters for him to sign. The first swore that he would do nothing further that might be detrimental to the Reich; in the second, he would expressly promise to furnish any and all useful information concerning clandestine passages of Jews out of France. Dreyfus, appalled by the suggestion that he should betray his people and country for his own freedom, refused to sign. Péhu assured him that the letters were really without importance—merely a formality so that Jodkum could, if need be, justify the release to his superiors by proving that Dreyfus had been released for services rendered to the Reich rather than in return for a bribe; unfortunate, but that was the way things worked in these hard times. Péhu assured him the letters would, of course, never be used, and Dreyfus could have them back to destroy once the negotiations were complete. Dreyfus signed.

  Péhu gave the letters to Guélin, who in turn showed them to Madame Dreyfus. She was horrified; she could not believe that her husband would have signed them, but Guélin assured her also that they were a meaningless formality. He mentioned, incidentally, that he would need another F500,000 for Jodkum and F200,000 for Péhu. This latter cost was slightly elevated because Péhu had incurred travel expenses and had worked on Sunday. She hesitated, but finally delivered the money to Dequeker. Several days later, Dequeker phoned her and she demanded to know if her h
usband was free. Not yet, he replied, and furthermore they needed another F1 million—which she obstinately worked down to F400,000. Guélin and Dequeker realized by now that they had milked her for everything she was willing to give. Finally, in mid-May, Guélin informed Paulette Dreyfus that her husband had been released and was at the rue des Saussaies Gestapo office; it was time to pay the final installment of F3.5 million. She could come along if she wished. She declined and simply turned over the money.

  That evening Yvan and Paulette Dreyfus were reunited in a hotel near the place de la République, and they celebrated over dinner with Guélin and a few friends. But the freedom was only relative: Paulette was in Paris illegally, and Guélin had not yet returned Yvan’s identity papers nor surrendered the two compromising letters. Moreover, Guélin began speaking of actually exposing an escape organization. Once again, it would only be to give Jodkum justification for Dreyfus’s release. The escape organization was already well known and scheduled for arrest; thus, Guélin claimed, Dreyfus’s assistance would be quite superfluous, but it would look good to the Germans. Madame Dreyfus called Dequeker, who seemed the least antipathetic of the bunch, to beg him to leave her husband out of their plans. But Dreyfus initially played along.

  No one ever really knew why or whether Dreyfus finally agreed. Perhaps he intended to fool Guélin and actually escape through the organization he was supposed to expose, though he never mentioned this to his wife. It is true that when Guélin arranged through Fourrier to meet Dr. Eugène at the barbershop on May 15, Dreyfus would not permit Guélin to enter the dim back room while he spoke to Dr. Eugène, and Guélin got only the quickest glimpse of the mysterious network leader. Or perhaps Dreyfus did cooperate, seeing no other way out, though one can scarcely imagine that a man of indisputable courage and resourcefulness could not have found some means of escape during his several days of liberty. Or perhaps he was biding time and when he left his wife four days later on May 19 he really believed, as Guélin told Madame Dreyfus, that he was only going to the rue des Saussaies Gestapo office for his papers—though he had with him ten photographs, and Guélin had brought two of his own suitcases as props. One can scarcely doubt the courage, patriotism, and integrity of Yvan Dreyfus, but the circumstances surrounding his departure that Wednesday afternoon were so compromising and inexplicable that Pierre Véron, the lawyer the Dreyfus family later hired to present their case (and who, coincidentally, also represented the Khaïts), had little hope of persuading a post-Liberation jury that Dreyfus’s murder had been anything but the justifiable execution of a French traitor.

  Guélin, in any event, did not take Dreyfus to the rue des Saussaies, but to the barbershop on the rue des Mathurins. He was again denied the opportunity of meeting Dr. Eugène. Fourrier insisted that Guélin wait in his apartment while he and Dreyfus walked toward the place de la Concorde. Halfway there, reported the Germans who were following them, Fourrier turned back and Dreyfus fell in with a man fitting the description of Dr. Eugène: thirty-five to thirty-eight years old (Petiot was actually forty-six), five feet eight, thin, chestnut hair, clean-shaven, dressed in a blue suit with white stripes, nervous and habitually rubbing his hands together. The two men chatted amicably as they headed up the Champs-Elysées toward the Etoile and, incidentally, the rue Le Sueur. Halfway along the avenue, Petiot and Dreyfus neatly eluded their pursuers. Robert Jodkum was annoyed yet intrigued by the cleverness of his prey, but he had another pigeon ready to depart the following week and then, he felt sure, he would break the entire organization.

  Robert Jodkum, however, was not the only Nazi intelligence official to have learned of the escape network. Herr Doktor Friedrich Berger, head of the rue de la Pompe Gestapo office—subsector IV-E3 in charge of security for the occupied territory—was equally ambitious and just as well informed, though he was more interested in simply stopping the network than in tracing its ramifications. A French acquaintance of his, Charles Beretta, was enlisted for the task. It is uncertain whether Beretta had been collaborating for some time or whether, as he claimed later when under indictment on that charge, he had truly been seeking escape, had been arrested by the Germans during a routine check, and when he mentioned Berger’s name in an attempt to extricate himself, was blackmailed by his friend into following his original plan but with a new aim. In any event, it is clear that Beretta had been arrested by the Nazis and sent to Germany in June 1940, that he had returned to France with a false postal-worker’s identity card, and that his wife had been arrested in April 1943 and sent to the prison camp at Drancy, in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, where she was now under threat of deportation. Assuming he really was innocent, his position under German domination would indeed have been a tenuous one: his wife’s fate and his own freedom depended upon the Germans’ goodwill. On the other hand, whether he was forced to participate in the Petiot affair or not, he subsequently went on to collaborate with a wild abandon rarely seen in victims of blackmail. He denounced many Jews on his own initiative and helped capture an escaped French prisoner. Moreover, he told the Germans the time and place of a secret meeting of a Resistance group at Montargis in Brittany; when German troops raided the meeting, the Frenchmen opened fire and were wiped out on the spot. Beretta carried out his present task with great efficiency, as his reports showed.

  Sunday 5/16

  Subject: Clandestine passages

  This past Friday the 14th, as arranged, I went to Fourrier’s barbershop at 25 rue des Mathurins at 11:30 A.M. The Doctor was there with Fourrier and an unknown third party.

  I was asked several questions:

  1. My family name, given names and address;

  2. They checked my military and other papers;

  3. Checked my identity card; all this to verify the truth of what I had told them.

  Had I not been able to furnish proof that I am really a prisoner of war on parole from prison [this was true, and was one of the facts Berger felt made Beretta convincing as a candidate for escape], the Doctor would have canceled the deal.

  All of this took place in a small isolated office at the back of the apartment, and lasted one hour and fifteen minutes.

  In addition, the sum of 100,000 francs was requested. I pretended that I would not be able to raise such a sum, and we finally compromised at 60,000 francs. This amount should cover expenses for the voyage to Spain and the preparation of false papers. (False passport, etc.)

  The Doctor showed me a passport, but he did not let me take it and study it closely.

  I gave him ten photographs (5 full-face, 5 profile).

  We were supposed to meet again that same evening at 7:00 at my home, but no one came. This morning a new appointment was made for tomorrow evening, Monday the 17th, at my house, at which time I am to pay the agreed upon 60,000 francs.

  Thursday evening I will be notified to prepare 2 suitcases and a blanket, and I will be taken to a spot whose location I will know only at the last moment, and from which I will be sent on to a train station for my definitive departure.

  According to the Doctor, it is at this moment that I will be given my false papers.

  Beretta attached a diagram of Fourrier’s apartment.

  At 7:00 the next evening, Fourrier and Pintard arrived at Beretta’s; he gave them only F10,000, hoping to show his precarious financial position. He said that he earned his money through the black market and that collection of debts was sometimes difficult. He promised to pay the remaining F50,000 at 7:00 the following evening. As it turned out, all of the money that Beretta paid had been furnished by the Gestapo; the serial numbers had been noted, Beretta had signed a receipt, and in each report concerning a payment, he copied down the serial numbers again. He was a fine, thorough traitor, and the Germans had no cause for complaint.

  The next day Beretta paid Fourrier and “Francinet” an additional F45,000 once again claiming that difficulties with his debtors had made it impossible to come up with the whole sum. The remaining F5,000 was later handed over in a telephone boot
h at the Café de la Renaissance near the métro station Strasbourg-St. Denis (a map of the area was appended to his report!). During one of their conversations, the boastful Fourrier pulled a notebook out of his pocket, saying it contained the names of everyone they had sent to Spain. Seven other people, he claimed, would be traveling with Beretta when he left on Thursday.

  It was Friday, May 21, two days after Yvan Dreyfus vanished, when Beretta arrived at the rue des Mathurins with a light bag containing underwear, one change of clothes, and “all the money he owned,” as Dr. Eugène had instructed. An instant later, the Gestapo burst in and arrested Beretta, Fourrier, and Pintard. They forced Petiot’s name and address out of the terrified Fourrier before taking them all to prison, and soon found the doctor at home at the rue Caumartin with his wife. As the Germans were searching the apartment, René Nézondet arrived to deliver tickets for that evening’s performance of Ah, la belle époque, a musical comedy about the joys of life in 1900 playing at the music hall Bobino. Though he protested ignorance and waved the tickets in front of them, the officers pushed him and Petiot downstairs and into a waiting car. Petiot turned as he left and called, “Don’t worry!” to his wife, who apparently understood nothing of what was going on until several days later, when Gestapo agents returned for a more thorough search. They told her that her husband was guilty of smuggling people out of the country—notably a Jew named Dreyfus, who had either escaped or been killed.

  Herr Doktor Berger’s satisfaction with the Beretta coup lasted only a few hours before he discovered he had ruined another subsector’s carefully laid plans and had eliminated all possibility of tracing the entire escape organization. With profuse apologies, Berger sent his four prisoners—Petiot, Nézondet, Fourrier, and Pintard—to Robert Jodkum at the rue des Saussaies for questioning. Beretta was sent with the others as a plant, in hopes that he might learn something, but during a routine search he was unable to conceal the Gestapo card and revolver he was foolishly carrying, and the others recognized him for what he was. Guélin appeared, too, pretending to have been arrested on some obscure charge, but Petiot did not trust him any more than Beretta and treated him with quiet disdain.