Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (26 page)

While the Allies marched up the Italian peninsula, seizing Rome and Mussolini, anxious and hopeful Parisians speculated about the long-expected Allied attack on Occupied Europe. Winston Churchill would call this undertaking “
the most difficult and complicated operation that has ever taken place.” On the early morning of June 6, at 0630, H-hour of D-Day, or
J-Jour
to the French, the massive Allied armada of some 175,000 troops, 11,000 planes, and more than 5,000 vessels swarmed over the rough English Channel in what would be the largest seaborne invasion in history.

One week and thousands of casualties later, as the Allies fought through the bocage of Normandy, with its thick hedges and sunken lanes
protected by three elite SS Panzer divisions, Adolf Hitler unleashed a new “wonder” weapon: the long-range, pilotless, and jet-powered V-1 flying bomb, to wreak vengeance on the city of London. Carrying a one-ton warhead and moving at a speed of 700 km an hour, which was faster than any Allied plane or anti-aircraft gun, the V-1 “Hell Hound” or “Fire Dragon” would, by end of summer, kill 6,184 people and destroy 75,000 buildings. The war, it was clear, would not be over anytime soon.

Nor, it seemed, would the search for Marcel Petiot. Reported sightings continued around Paris and its surrounding area for weeks. On June 24, 1944, a man showed up at police headquarters with a strange tale.
He introduced himself as Charles Rolland, a former cinema film projector operator who had briefly served the French army in Tunisia. He claimed to know Petiot well.

Seven years earlier, Rolland related, he first met the murder suspect.
It was in Marseille, when a prostitute named Solange approached him and asked if he wanted to make a quick 100 francs. All he had to do was have sex with her while one of her rich clients looked on. Rolland, struggling financially, accepted the offer. The man who paid to watch was Marcel Petiot.

After this incident, which culminated with the three of them engaging in a ménage à trois, Rolland further alleged, Petiot recruited him to sell drugs in Marseille. The two men would meet at the Cintra-Bodega Bar in the Old Port, where Rolland would receive the cocaine and then proceed to sell it at the American Bar on the Canebière. Then, after finding a customer, Rolland would hide the narcotics in a tank above a certain toilet in the men’s room. At the appointed time, the customer arrived, picked up the packet, and handed the money to Petiot as he entered the bathroom.

Petiot in Marseille? Yes, Rolland said that he stayed at a hotel on rue Panier, and their partnership had continued until early January 1938, when Rolland volunteered for the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment and sailed to Tunisia. The following year, when he was discharged for “physical incapacity,” Rolland decided to come to Paris and reconnect
with his rich friend. Rolland allegedly resumed the business of selling cocaine for Petiot, working the Café de la Paix and the Dupont-Bastille bar in the Opéra district.

Although he was eventually arrested in late 1940 on an unrelated charge, Rolland said he saw Petiot two other times. The first was in January 1943, when he stopped by unannounced at his house at 22 or 21 [
sic
] rue Le Sueur. Petiot, he said, appeared anxious. “
He seemed in a strange condition and did not want me to stay.” The physician declined to renew their working relationship, handed Rolland 500 francs, and sent him away, claiming that he expected clients at any minute. Rolland said the room smelled heavily of chloroform.

The second time was a fortuitous meeting at the end of the following month, at the Cintra-Bodega in Marseille. The doctor was allegedly more welcoming. He told Rolland of his latest invention, a powerful new aphrodisiac that he claimed to have tested on more than sixty women. Then, when Rolland said he needed some important papers to join the P.P.F., Parti Populaire Français, a pro-Nazi collaborationist outfit, Petiot helped him obtain false certificates. Petiot also decided to join the military-political organization under a fake name, “Marcel Sigrand,” and the two of them often met near the beach at Les Catalans or in the Old Port. Later Rolland heard that Petiot had been seen that spring in Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, wearing a Nazi uniform and hunting down French Resistants.

These claims were extraordinary, and indeed far-fetched. For one thing, when Rolland claimed to have worked with the doctor in Marseille, Massu knew for a fact that Petiot was in Paris practicing medicine and running his false escape organization. He was not in Pont-Saint-Esprit then either, as he was convincing Adrien the Basque and other gangsters that he could help them leave Paris. Even more damaging to his credibility, Rolland had made several errors in his testimony.

Petiot’s house was not located, as he said, “on the corner” of rue Le Sueur. He did not live on rue Le Sueur or own the building in 1939 or 1940, when Rolland claimed to have visited him at that location. Rolland also incorrectly identified the address as the 15th arrondissement, and
other descriptions also proved inaccurate. Petiot did not have only one floor, as Rolland claimed, but the entire building, and there was no concierge there either. Rolland’s tale seemed wrong on so many points as to be dismissed outright as worthless.

When he was
later criticized for spending so much time speaking with Rolland, Massu explained that he had to follow a lead, no matter how outrageous it might first sound. Indeed, Rolland’s testimony illustrated the degree to which many false rumors about Petiot flourished in the demimonde and were soon picked up by many newspapers.

On July 26, 1944, the
New York Times
announced, “
The Greatest Bluebeard of all time was reported from Paris to have been discovered at last.” Petiot was identified as a member of a French division of the Waffen SS, an elite Charlemagne unit of fanatical Nazi supporters.
Three weeks later, Leonard Lyons noted in the
Washington Post
that civilians leaving France confirmed that Petiot, an Iron Cross recipient, had joined the SS. The French, the columnist added, blamed the police for missing the obvious.

But what, in the summer of 1944, was obvious about the Petiot case? Did Rolland come to help the police catch Petiot or mislead them, or did he have some other motive? Was he simply a deluded or grossly misinformed attention-seeker? Who, if anyone, sent him? When the police, and later the media, wanted Rolland for additional interviews, he was never found. The question of the peculiar informant became more charged because this outrageous and largely false tale would soon play a key role in helping the police unravel the mystery of Petiot’s disappearance.

D
ESPITE the international media coverage, the Petiot Affair drew increasingly less attention that summer in French newspapers. This was not just because the landing in Normandy overshadowed its coverage; nor was it simply a reminder of how cold the police trail had become. By May 1944, it looked unlikely that Petiot would be found alive, and many police officers feared he was already dead. But there was another cause for the dramatic decline in media attention.

Although evidence is elusive and the files were long ago purged, there is reason to believe that the German Occupation authorities intervened to stop the police investigation. Georges Suard, chauffeur for the commissaire of police at the Sûreté National, M. Béranger, heard about German obstruction in late April 1944. His source was the head of the French police himself. In an interview with Commissaire Louis Poirier on October 9, 1945, Suard revealed that, when he had been driving his boss, then an associate under Vichy Ambassador Fernand de Brinon, he was told that the French police would never find Marcel Petiot as long as the Germans occupied Paris.

Béranger, he added, “
told me that he had been present at a meeting when a German figure gave the order to de Brinon to quash the affair from the French police point of view.” The German leader was not identified. Neither Béranger nor
de Brinon would ever admit to interfering
with the Petiot investigation. After the Liberation, when both men stood trial for collaboration with the enemy, it is not surprising that they would deny taking any action that blocked the arrest of the suspected serial killer.

The time Suard first heard of the German intervention—late April—moreover coincides with a sudden media silence on the Petiot case. Immediately before that, the press speculated on his whereabouts, ending with a noticeable spike in stories of witnesses reporting that the physician had been captured or found dead. On April 21, the Nazi Transocean News Agency asserted that Spanish authorities had arrested Petiot after “a
vain flight across the French frontier into Spain” and handed the fugitive over to the police at Bordeaux.

Interestingly, Commissaire Massu always denied that the Germans had hindered his investigation, claiming only that the French police had to file daily reports on the affair and never received any reaction to them whatsoever.
But Massu was not privy to decisions made in the upper echelons of the Occupation authorities. Count Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s ambassador to the occupied zone, answered to the German authorities and gave orders to the prefect of police, Amédée Bussière, who was, in turn, Massu’s supervisor. Not surprisingly, too, Massu carefully denied German interference but not French.

But why would Occupation authorities want to block the investigation? There was still no obvious answer. Likely, though, the ramifications would strike at the heart of the messy, complicated Petiot case, and any unraveling of the mystery would indeed, as the chauffeur said, have to wait until after the Germans left Paris.

B
Y late July 1944, Allied armies had finally broken through Nazi defenses in the bocage of northwestern France. Caen had fallen not after one day, as planned, but fourteen, and then the Allies conquered a pile of ruins. As Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army continued moving slowly, methodically eastward from Caen, Patton’s Third Army
was nearing the Seine, just southeast of the capital. The question for the Allies was whether to head straight for Paris to liberate the city or race to the Rhine with the hopes of reaching Berlin as soon as possible.

At the forward post of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), then located about two miles inland from the Normandy beachhead at Granville, on the Cotentin Peninsula, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to postpone the Liberation of Paris. The top priority, in his assessment, was defeating the Nazis. Paris, by contrast, fulfilled no overall strategic or tactical objective. Besides, the German army had comparatively few troops in the capital; the Allies could always liberate it later. Eisenhower did not want to provoke unnecessary street fighting, potentially wreaking untold destruction and creating a Stalingrad on the Seine. Never mind the logistical nightmare of supplying the minimum
four thousand tons of material daily to feed and fuel a city of two million people, when dwindling supplies of gasoline could be marshaled for a direct attack on Germany.

Charles de Gaulle disagreed. In addition to disarming the launching sites for Hitler’s V-1 flying bombs in northern France, de Gaulle called Paris “
the key to France” and pressed for an immediate seizure of the capital for enormous symbolic and humanitarian reasons. There were also political realities. Continued Nazi occupation, he believed, would only play into the hands of his Communist rivals. He already feared that they were plotting an insurrection to seize power themselves.

While he sent representatives to plead his case with Eisenhower, de Gaulle ordered General Pierre Koenig, his chief of staff and the leader of the irregular army of the Resistance, the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (French Forces of the Interior, or FFI), to prevent a revolt from occurring in the city without his consent. The task was difficult.
De Gaulle wanted an insurrection, but he did not want to give the Communists a chance to exploit it for their own purposes. He then ordered Philippe de Hauteclocque, better known by his nom de guerre, General Jacques Leclerc, of the French Second Armored Division, under the authority of the US Third Army, to head for Paris. Leclerc was instructed to disobey Patton and Eisenhower if necessary.

Some nine hundred miles away, at the Wolf’s Lair, then Nazi field headquarters in an East Prussian forest, Adolf Hitler had other plans for the city. “
Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins,” Secret memo Nr. 772989/44, of August 23, 1944, informed the commanding general of Greater Paris. To carry out this destruction, Hitler had appointed Dietrich Von Choltitz, a forty-nine-year-old general who was notorious for his hardness, experience, and not least, his ability to follow difficult directives without question. It was Von Choltitz who had given the order in May 1940 to firebomb the inner city of Rotterdam, and then in July 1942, he oversaw the massive destruction in the siege of Sevastopol.

Von Choltitz had arrived in Paris on August 7 to replace General Karl von Stülpnagel, who had been implicated in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Stülpnagel had in fact arrested the entire SS in Paris. But when word arrived that the Führer had survived, Stülpnagel was recalled to Berlin. Instead of following orders, he hopped into a black Horsch, drove to his old battlefield at Verdun, and tried to blow his brains out. Blinded but still alive, he was captured by German soldiers. Stülpnagel was brought back to Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, where he hanged himself.

While Allied armies succeeded on the fifteenth with a second major landing near Saint-Tropez in southern France, the Gestapo struck at police headquarters, attempting to seize its weapons.
The French police rebelled.
Under the leadership of several Resistance groups inside the police, particularly the Front national de la police, L’Honneur de la police, and Police et patrie, the police refused to hand over their weapons, and then to patrol the streets—a shutdown that was part of a widening breakdown of city services. Workers in the métro, the railway, the post office, and the Bank of France were also on strike. Electricity, gas, and many other services no longer worked. Then, as Paris threatened to erupt, the police seized the prefecture.