Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (28 page)

E
ARLIER that summer, the French police had begun to release some of Petiot’s suspected accomplices. Fourrier and Pintard were freed on July 4, 1944, for lack of evidence, followed by Simone Neuhausen and Roland Porchon. On September 30, 1944, Georgette Petiot was “
provisionally released.” Maurice Petiot, René Nézondet, and Albert Neuhausen remained in custody.

The police were still trying to identify Dr. Petiot’s likely victims.
Massu, a firm believer in the managed use of the press to aid an investigation, had released a reasonably detailed list of selected items from the suitcases, hoping that anyone with information would come forward.

It was a description of two articles of clothing that caught Marguerite Braunberger’s attention when she read the paper at her home at 207 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. The first was a man’s dark blue shirt with white pinstripes, size 40 collar, made by David at 32 Avenue de l’Opéra; the other was a gray felt hat monogrammed with the initials “P.B.” and fashioned by A. Berteil on rue du Quartre-Septembre. Braunberger’s husband, the sixty-six-year-old physician Dr. Paul-Léon Braunberger, had worn a shirt and hat of that description the day that he disappeared.

At eight thirty on the morning of June 20, 1942, Dr. Braunberger had received a phone call about a patient in distress somewhere on rue Duret in the 16th arrondissement. The caller refused to provide details of the ailment, the name of the person, or even his exact address. He asked the doctor to meet him at eleven o’clock that morning at the L’Étoile métro station.

Such secrecy was not unusual. The Nazis were exerting tremendous pressure on Jewish residents in the occupied zone, who, since the previous month, were now forced to wear a yellow star, about the size of the palm of a hand, sewn onto the breast of their outer clothing. Jews, more than ever, were now at risk of being arrested on the street. The Germans had demanded that French authorities deport a quota of one hundred thousand for the first eight months of 1942.

Braunberger appeared to recognize the caller. He left the apartment on foot, carrying only a small medical bag. Thirty minutes after the time for the rendezvous at the métro station, a special delivery letter arrived at the house of one of Braunberger’s patients, an insurance agent named Raymond Vallée who lived at 20 rue Condorcet. The letter purported to be from Dr. Braunberger, and it was on his stationery.

“
I was almost arrested but managed to escape,” the writer of the letter related. “Tell my wife that I am not coming home, and that she should pack her most valuable possessions in two suitcases and prepare to leave for the Free Zone and then abroad.” Details would be forthcoming. In the meantime, Vallée was instructed not to say a word to anyone, other than to inform Braunberger’s patients that he had fallen ill on a visit in the suburbs and could not offer any medical services.

Confused at receiving such a letter from his doctor, Vallée took it to Marguerite Braunberger, who soon received two letters of her own. In the first one, dated June 22, she was told the same story of her husband’s near arrest and escape, and she was warned to be careful, as she was surely being watched. She should, moreover, write to inform their friends that they were soon leaving Paris, but under no circumstances was she to talk to anyone. Her husband would write soon with further instructions. Like the letter to Vallée, this one was written on
Braunberger’s stationery and appeared to be in his handwriting, if hurried, shaky, and somewhat distorted. Both letters were stamped at the post office on rue de La Boétie, not far from the L’Étoile métro station.

The following day, June 23, a second letter arrived at Madame Braunberger’s, this time on plain paper, informing her that her husband would be limiting future communication given his “fear [that] my letters will be read.” He told her to be courageous, obey his friend Vallée’s instructions, and prepare for her departure. “P.S. Destroy all my letters,” he concluded. Both of these letters were addressed in an odd manner, the first to
“ma
chère amie”
(my dear friend) and the second
“ma
chérie”
(my darling), terms of affection Dr. Braunberger never used. He called his wife
“Ma chère Maggi.”

Everything seemed so peculiar, so disturbing. Marguerite Braunberger knew that her husband was under enormous pressure. Not only did he fear arrest, but a new law was about to remove his right, as a Jew, to practice medicine. But he would not leave her that way, without the slightest hint of planning and certainly not without a good-bye. And he would never confuse her pet name.

Why, too, of all his family, friends, and patients, would he choose to write to Raymond Vallée, a man whom he did not know well and, moreover, never really liked? The two families had met socially because Marguerite Braunberger was a close friend of Raymonde’s wife, Paulette, and the women had insisted on it.

As they tried to figure out what was happening, Vallée received another letter on June 24, with a stranger request:

Vallée was certain that he had never mentioned such a house to Braunberger and could not understand how he could have known about it. As for his “cousin the doctor,” Vallée had no such relative. His wife’s cousin, on the other hand, was married to Marcel Petiot.

The Vallées, the Braunbergers, and the Petiots had met one evening before the disappearance. Madame Braunberger could barely remember the occasion some thirteen years before, calling it “
a baptism or first communion of the Vallée child.” There in the Vallée salon, Dr. Braunberger and Dr. Petiot had discussed many things, from cancer treatments to antique furniture.

After the party, Braunberger had told his wife that Dr. Petiot was “
either a genius or a madman.” Was this meeting why Vallée was selected to receive the letters? He was the only person known at that time who could be traced back to both Petiot and Braunberger. (Actually, there was another connection that the police had not yet found: one of Braunberger’s patients was the makeup artist Edmond Pintard.)

This was admittedly an odd case. Unlike the other disappearances, Braunberger was not about to testify against Petiot and he carried no jewels or fortune with him; the killer would have earned little from such an enterprise. Perhaps this explains the requests for transporting the physician’s property.

About one in the afternoon on June 30, the Braunbergers received an anonymous telephone call. When the nurse at the doctor’s practice, Marie-Cécile Callède, answered, a man on the line immediately launched into the details of Braunberger’s fate: “
I’m going to give you news of the doctor. I guided him through to the Free Zone but he went a little nuts. In the métro, he already began to act strange and at the border he nearly caused our arrest. Let Madame take care of herself as best she can. I will not guide her through. I have been too poorly paid.” All of this was spoken as if it were being read from a sheet of paper.

Asked about Braunberger’s health and whereabouts, the man said that he was on his way to Spain and Portugal. The nurse pressed for details and tried to coax the caller over to the apartment with the offer of a reward, but he refused. He said only that he had another letter, which
he was supposed to deliver but preferred to put in the mail. He didn’t say anything else, other than mention that Braunberger’s brother, Marcel, would be well advised to leave Paris too.

The letter arrived the following day, sent from the post office at quai Valmy, not far from the Braunbergers’ apartment. Using the same, if incorrect, pet name for Dr. Braunberger’s wife, it was a short, undated note on ordinary white paper instructing Madame Braunberger to “follow the person who brings you this letter.” He promised that they would meet soon and wished her “all my love,” again using unusual phrases and signing the letter, uncharacteristically, with his title, Dr. Paul Braunberger.

Madame Braunberger had not heard anything else, either by letter or telephone. But, on July 3, a young man in a Nazi uniform identifying himself as “German Police” visited her building and inquired about a doctor who had previously served as a medical captain in the First World War and now owned a private practice. The concierge said no one fitting that description lived there, which, given Braunberger’s recent disappearance, was technically not incorrect. The man left. She never learned the purpose of the visit.

The police never determined if this was in fact a real German soldier or another imposter. At any rate, whatever the purpose of the visit, Madame Braunberger did not immediately report her husband’s disappearance. The timing of the visit was curious, coming, as it did, just one month after Petiot escaped damage from the narcotics cases with no more than a token fine.

Reporting the case of Dr. Braunberger to the authorities would not have done a lot of good anyway. Jews in Occupied Paris had no formal legal recourse, and Madame Braunberger certainly could not count on any sympathy from authorities. She had kept quiet for another three months, when finally, on September 25, 1942, at the maid’s insistence,
she reported her husband’s disappearance to the police station at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. At that point, she felt she had nothing to lose. The police officer on duty filed a report.
The case was closed on January 9, 1943, on the tragically incorrect grounds that Braunberger had returned home.

“T
HE
Mad Butcher was no Nazi propaganda myth,” United Press foreign correspondent Dudley Ann Harmon wrote on August 31, 1944. He was “a swarthy, sinister-looking [man] with the sadistic features of a Krafft-Ebing nightmare and the cleverness of a scientist.” The Liberation of Paris had finally put to rest the rumor that Petiot was a Gestapo fabrication. As one policeman remarked, he wished the murderer had been a myth: “
He is only too real.
We have identified 54 victims, and heaven only knows how many more there are.”

Paris-Soir
was also estimating that the total number of victims was probably about fifty. Parisians, however, continued to attribute new murders to the serial killer. One anonymous letter accused Petiot of slitting the throat of
a twenty-nine-year-old Italian woman named Laetitia Toureaux on a train on May 16, 1937—the first murder on the French métro. Another suggested that he planted the bomb that killed socialist minister of the interior Max Dormoy in late July 1941, and a third one claimed that he killed Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two anti-fascist Italian refugees, near Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, receiving payment of one hundred semiautomatic guns from Benito Mussolini. Each of these allegations was far-fetched, and the murders showed few, if any, of the characteristics that the police ascribed to the assassin of rue Le Sueur. A more
likely suspect, in every one of these cases, would later emerge: a French fascist group, CSAR (Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action), known informally as La Cagoule, or the “
hooded ones.”

As Paris was transforming itself again in the autumn of 1944, the French police were still no closer to finding Petiot.
Perhaps he had fled to Germany with retreating Nazis, as many people believed, the
New York Times
reported. Other newspapers, like
La patrie
, suspected that Petiot had remained in Paris. Sightings of the murder suspect were again on the rise.

Possibly to lure Petiot out of hiding, the French police handed over the dubious tale of Charles Rolland to the young journalist and Resistance fighter Jacques Yonnet. On September 19, 1944, Yonnet published an article in
Résistance
, one of the many underground papers that had emerged as popular dailies in post-Liberation Paris. After opening with a disclaimer that he could not vouch for the truth of the allegations, Yonnet proceeded to outline Rolland’s deposition in vivid detail. He titled the article: “Petiot, Soldier of the Reich.”

A few days later, there was a dramatic breakthrough in the investigation. A long, handwritten response signed by someone claiming to be Marcel Petiot arrived at the newspaper’s offices,
forwarded by attorney René Floriot. To verify its authenticity, the police obtained a sample of the physician’s handwriting and asked leading graphologist Professor Edouard de Rougemont to study the two specimens. The letter, he concluded, was genuine, and Petiot’s full rebuttal was published on October 18, 1944.

“
Dear Mr. Editor,” Petiot began. “All accused persons should be considered innocent until proven guilty.… Because of law and justice I have the right to defend myself and to ask you to print my answer.” Indignant and scornful of the article’s many errors, Petiot accused the police of inventing the absurd so-called Charles Rolland and then having the “sick imagination” to attribute such worthless claims to him.

As a longtime member of the Resistance, Petiot said, he had fought valiantly against the Nazis, only to be arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, and imprisoned for almost eight months. Many high-ranking members
of the Resistance, including some now holding “public office,” he said, were trying to find a way to reveal the truth about his patriotic activities without exposing themselves to danger. Petiot outlined his alleged services to the Resistance, which had for so long been slandered by the German-controlled press.