The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Massu had, in fact, been suspended from his post and confined to his office on the quai des Orfèvres several days earlier for suspicion of collaboration under the Vichy government, and thus narrowly missed the long-awaited pleasure of seeing Petiot behind bars. No specific charges were made, and it appeared the case was the unfortunate result of ambitious officers who coveted his position and a rather natural suspicion of everyone who had held an important post during the Vichy government’s reign. Massu was held in his office for days without being told why, and in a fit of humiliation and despair, the proud commissaire slit his wrists and was rushed to the Hôtel Dieu close to death. He recovered and his case finally came up before a commission that found him innocent of all charges. He was eventually given a new post on the force, which he held until 1949, when he retired to become security chief and an agent for the American embassy in France.

  Petiot, in his tract, dredged up a case in which Massu had been inadvertently responsible for the arrest of a young Resistant who had hidden weapons and Communist-party propaganda in a café. The youth was later shot by the Germans. This was never held against Massu even during the official inquest on his case, and given the commissaire’s initial caution in the Petiot investigation, one could hardly accuse him of wanton overzealousness. Doubtless, unfortunately, he had thought he was going after a criminal and ended up catching a Resistant. But, referring to Massu’s arrest, Petiot wrote:

  One might think that Massu has been suspended—at the end of a rope. Not at all. Massu was simply suspended from duty and sent into retirement with all his rights and benefits intact, including that to be paid for information he sent to certain Resistance newspapers [that is, the Charles Rolland deposition]—information from dossiers he compiled while so faithfully serving the Gestapo.

  Granted that part of Petiot’s mission in the FFI had been to search out and denounce traitors, and considering the recent dates of the tract and of Massu’s arrest, one is almost led to wonder whether the hunted had not blithely turned and captured the hunter. But whether or not Petiot had actually played a role in his pursuer’s arrest, it was evident that the fugitive had not spent his nearly eight months at large fearfully concealed, but had placidly changed his name and life and carried on much as before.

  Police found that for several days after the discovery of the bodies at the rue Le Sueur, Petiot had stayed with various friends whose names were never learned, then met a house-painter named Georges Redouté, age fifty-six, a casual acquaintance whom he had treated once or twice. The unfortunate Redouté, who would spend months in prison for harboring a criminal, told police that on March 27 he had met Petiot walking in the street with two suitcases. Petiot said he had nowhere to stay and claimed he was a Resistance member fleeing the Germans. Redouté took Petiot home to his apartment at 83 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, just a few blocks from the café where Pintard had found so many future victims. Redouté gave Petiot a mattress on the floor and shared his meager supply of rations. The painter had read the newspapers, and he asked his lodger if bodies had really been found at the rue Le Sueur. “Yes,” replied Petiot, “but they were bodies of Germans and informers.” That evening as they went to bed, still uneasy, Redouté asked him to swear on his son’s head that he had not killed. “I cannot swear, because I have killed. But I assure you those were German corpses.”

  Petiot stayed at Redouté’s home for months. He went out infrequently and then only at night. He let his beard grow. During the day he sat around doing puzzles or reading the newspapers, and talked to Redouté about his Resistance activities. In the past, he said, he had made regular trips to the provinces and to I’Isle-Adam, a town fifteen miles north of Paris, to fetch arms dropped by English planes and bring them back to Paris. He and his group had killed enemies of France and thrown them in the Canal de l’Ourcq (which runs through Paris and feeds into the Seine, where bodies linked to Petiot had been found) and the Bois de Boulogne. Petiot assured his host that the triangular room and viewer were stupid lies dreamed up by the collaborationist press to discredit him. Redouté’s remaining doubts were quickly dispelled, and the housepainter firmly believed he was protecting a patriot who would be vindicated after the war’s end.

  In the days following the uprising against the Germans, Petiot was out all day long, and he returned in the evening with hand grenades and other objects he claimed his comrades and he had taken from Germans they killed. On August 20, he said he had taken part in the fierce battle that day at the place de la République, and he brought home a drum.* Three or four days after the Liberation, Petiot appeared at Redouté’s wearing a tricolor armband; he told his host he had enlisted in the FFI at the Caserne de Reuilly to ferret out collaborators and carry on the work of purifying and rebuilding France. He was quickly promoted to captain and had an automobile at his disposal. One day Redouté suggested that, now that the Germans were gone, Petiot could go to the police and clear himself of the false charges leveled against him. Petiot replied he would not do this as long as his wife and brother were still in prison. Shortly afterward, Redouté returned home from work to find Petiot and all his possessions gone, and he had never seen the doctor again.

  Petiot had not, as Redouté believed, simply gone to the barracks and enlisted under a false name. He went first, the investigators learned, to the army post on the quai de Valmy, where he picked up some useful information, including the fact that a Dr. Henri Gérard had been arrested and sent to Germany. Petiot needed identity papers, and he particularly wanted to be known as a doctor—one aspect of his old identity he did not care to relinquish. Wearing an armband and an official air, Petiot presented himself at the Gérard home as a representative of the International Red Cross charged with negotiating the return of prisoners from Germany. As he was unfolding his tale and explaining to Madame Gérard that the prisoner’s identity papers would facilitate his task, Dr. Gérard himself walked into the room; he had not, in reality, been deported, but only held in a Paris prison for several weeks and released. Petiot did not lose his poise, and impressed the doctor with stories of his Resistance activity, his captivity, and his torture—he even exhibited his filed teeth. While the two medical men sat and drank together, Petiot casually inquired whether Gérard knew of other doctors who were still held by the Germans. Gérard gave him the name of Dr. François Wetterwald, who had been arrested by the Gestapo for Resistance activity on January 15, 1944, and deported to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, in April.

  Petiot went to Wetterwald’s home on the rue d’Alleray and told the same story to the doctor’s mother, who was willing to do anything to obtain her son’s release. To make the necessary arrangements, Petiot told her as well, he would require certain details from her son’s identity papers. Madame Wetterwald brought them, and when she left Petiot alone for several minutes with the pile of documents, he removed the few he needed to prove he was François Wetterwald, a medical doctor and a member of the French army. Madame Wetterwald thanked Petiot as he left; her son remained at Mauthausen until the Allies liberated the camp in 1945. Thus, when Petiot arrived at the Caserne de Reuilly, it was as Dr. François Wetterwald, alias (for security reasons) Dr. Henri Valéri. He used this latter name, taken in slightly altered form from the brass plaque left by the previous owner of his office at 66 rue Caumartin, presumably so that Wetterwald’s former associates would not recognize him as an impostor. Petiot dared use this name even though, several months earlier, every newspaper in the country had printed the opening lines of the 1933 prospectus he had distributed in Paris: “You are hereby notified that the medical offices previously occupied by the celebrated Dr. Valéry will henceforth be run by Dr. Marcel Petiot.”

  Police investigators learned that Petiot’s service at the Caserne de Reuilly was, at first, exemplary. Valéri had been promoted to the rank of captain quickly, as was common in those turbulent times, but on his own obvious merits. His two secretaries, as had his patients, adored him; he was a tireless and dedicated patriot
who had often spoken of his great deeds in the Resistance. He often complained that the purge was not moving quickly enough, and was so devoted to the task of tracking down France’s enemies that once, they said, apparently without thinking it strange, he had spent three nights a week for several weeks in a cemetery at Ivry where he was convinced German soldiers and collaborators were hiding.

  Outside his immediate circle, the reports on Petiot were more compromising. Madame Juliette Couchaux, the owner of a café on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, filed a complaint that on September 12, FFI Lieutenant Dubois, the concierge of a nearby building, came to search her house on some flimsy pretext. He took F3 million worth of jewelry and conducted Madame Couchaux to a detention cell at the Caserne de Reuilly. Two or three days later she was led before a bearded officer she later identified as Petiot. She complained of the theft and her arrest. Petiot replied, “Madame, I have a bit of advice for you: withdraw your complaint, sell your café, and disappear.” Madame Couchaux refused to follow this odd suggestion, whereupon she was thrown into La Petite Roquette prison. She was released two months later by the puzzled prison authorities, who could not understand why she was there. Madame Couchaux added that during her detention at Reuilly a cellmate, speaking of Petiot, had said: “It’s really terrible. The officer who questioned us was wearing on his fingers the rings which were stolen from me and which I had come to complain about.”

  Even more compromising was an incident that apparently took place under Petiot’s orders and may, indirectly, have led to his arrest. On September 16, Corporal Jean Salvage and Lieutenant Jean Duchesne, both FFI men from Petiot’s sector at the Caserne de Reuilly, and a civilian with the Rabelaisian name of Victor Cabelguenne had gone to the home of Monsieur Lareugance, the elderly mayor of Tessancourt, at Versailles, ostensibly to make inquiries into Lareugance’s alleged collaboration. They didn’t do much of that. Instead they blew open a safe with hand grenades, stole F7 million in cash and a stamp collection valued at F5.5 million, then led the old man out to a country road, battered his head in, and finished him off with a revolver shot in the temple. Three youths witnessed the killing and reported it. They were referred to the killers’ superior officer, Captain Henri Valéri, who called the witnesses hoodlums and threw them in prison. A lieutenant who was ordered to lock the youths up found the situation suspicious and planted a man in the cell with them. The plant soon learned the real state of affairs, and the lieutenant went to Captain Valéri who, he assumed, had misunderstood and was unaware of the accusation the youths had made against the FFI men. Valéri told the lieutenant to drop the case; Salvage, Duchesne, and Cabelguenne were in prison, he claimed, the stolen stamps had been given to a Captain Grey, and he, Captain Valéri, didn’t know where the money was. Captain Grey later reported that the stamps had also disappeared, and Petiot’s subordinates did not remain long in prison—if, indeed, they were ever sent there.

  When this story came out in the days following Petiot’s arrest, police picked up Cabelguenne and Duchesne just as they were preparing to flee Paris and learned some even more startling information. Valéri had befriended them and Salvage and had often spoken to them of his Resistance activity. He told them he had killed sixty-three collaborators, including a “boxer.” What was more, both Cabelguenne and Duchesne (and presumably Salvage) had been told by a Captain Warnier on October 28 that Captain Valéri was really Dr. Marcel Petiot, and they assumed several other people at the army post knew this as well, though the question of identity was never discussed with Valéri himself. Captain Warnier had also told them he was going to the Police Judiciaire for a copy of Petiot’s fingerprints; but he never did this, and police apparently never spoke with him to discover if he had really identified Petiot and if so, how. For several days before his arrest, Petiot had been staying in an apartment owned by the family of Jean Salvage on the rue Paul Bert in the suburb of Saint-Mandé. Few people other than Salvage himself knew of this arrangement, yet the Saint-Mandé-Tourelles station where Petiot was captured was where he caught the métro to work in the morning. In addition, just before he was assigned to Captain Valéri’s sector, Salvage had served under Captain Simonin, Petiot’s mysterious captor.

  Police inspectors were eager to question Salvage on these points, but they ran into unexpected difficulties. The juge d’instruction was inordinately slow to issue a warrant, and the military authorities said Corporal Salvage had been sent on a mission; they would not specify where, and could not say when he might return. The police concluded he was protected by important people. At first they thought it was because he had played an important role in Petiot’s arrest. Later they felt sure of this, but they no longer believed Salvage’s actions had been oriented toward his duty to society, but rather toward personal interest, and they could not figure out who might be shielding him. It seemed as though Salvage and Simonin, and perhaps others, had conveniently disposed of Captain Valéri when he no longer fitted into their own particular plans. It was rumored that during the next year several people who offered to give information on Simonin met sudden deaths. This puzzling aspect would never be cleared up, even though the journalist Jacques Yonnet wrote increasingly virulent articles about it as late as 1946 and implied that the Petiot affair was but the tip of something much more important and widespread.

  * Some time after Petiot’s arrest, an army lieutenant who had fought at the République told police that during the fighting a bearded man who looked like Petiot had approached him and said: “I cannot tell you who I am. Nonetheless you know me. Everyone knows me. If I told you my name you would be terrified.” The lieutenant had not noticed this man fighting.

  12

  PETIOT: HERO OF THE RESISTANCE

  Petiot’s line of defense was absurdly simple. He was innocent, he said, of any crime. Indeed he had killed, but as a soldier and a Resistant liquidating the enemies of France—a perfectly legitimate and even praiseworthy enterprise at the time. He challenged the judge and police to prove anything against him, and peacefully settled back into his new role of martyred hero. From his cell in the Santé prison he wrote to a Colonel Ruaux, his former commanding officer at the Caserne de Reuilly:

  Mon Colonel,

  You are receiving the first letter I have been able to write from my cell.

  In it, you will find no protestations of innocence, for they would be utterly useless.

  Captain Valéri is, as you know, incapable of having committed acts which would make an honest man blush with shame.

  His only regret is being no longer able to fight our enemies at your side.

  His only hope is that you will not forget him, and that, later, he might resume his place among his friends and participate in the last battles in whatever capacity you may choose to assign him.

  With deepest respect, sincerely yours

  PETIOT

  Captain Valéri

  Sector 7 – Cell 7*

  Juge d’instruction Ferdinand Goletty had taken the Petiot dossier from a Judge Mariotte, who had held it for about a week after the original magistrate, Georges Berry, was transferred to collaboration cases. Goletty was new on the case, but he had studied it carefully, and this attitude of innocent patriotism was the last posture he or anyone else expected Petiot to take. It was a good one: by calling himself a Resistant, Petiot was introducing a whole new set of complications, particularly at a time when passions ran high and sometimes obscured reason. Even a judge had to be extremely careful with such delicate material, and the main emphasis of the investigation suddenly veered from the murders to the question of whether or not Petiot had belonged to the Resistance. At times, this confusion seemed to turn the question upside down altogether, leading Petiot’s lawyer, René Floriot, to complain that the prosecution had “left aside the question of his innocence or guilt, and seem[s] to say simply that if Petiot was not a Resistant, then he was a murderer and should be condemned, Q.E.D. What sort of justice is this? What sort of logic?”

  Except under scrutiny,
even Petiot’s story itself was good. He had, it seems, made it up long before, since he had repeated the same tale to Dr. Gérard, Redouté, his comrades at the Caserne de Reuilly, and even to his cellmates at Fresnes back in 1943—well before any defense was needed and at a time when this particular one would have earned him death at the hands of the Germans. Petiot had planned carefully. Either that or he was telling the truth. The story he told Goletty, and to which he held until the end of his life, is as follows.

  Petiot’s Resistance activity began shortly after the Germans arrived in Paris in 1940. Initially, he provided falsified medical certificates to Frenchmen eager to avoid forced labor in Germany, and later he came into contact with a group of anti-Franco Spaniards in the Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret. “I did some very good things with these people, but I do not want to tell you about them since my case is a simple one and I have no desire to complicate matters.” He did not know the names of these comrades, since they worked under pseudonyms such as Gómez and Alvarez, nor could he specify the exact dates of his work, though he pointed out that during this period his bicycle had been stolen and he had filed a complaint at the commissariat de Levallois-Perret.*

  Another phase of his activity consisted of gathering information from wounded or sick workers returning from Germany. They were first sent to a German organization on the rue Cambon, and there a French sympathizer—an Alsatian, Petiot believed, though he had never met him—referred many of them to him. Through cautious questioning he was able to elicit details on German troop movements and weapons developments. Among others, he had learned of a new weapon formed of a three-bladed propeller that operated on the boomerang principle and which was being tested on the banks of the Elbe about forty miles southwest of Berlin.