Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris (33 page)

Petiot said that he provided security for this man and had even served as a double. This was an odd statement, given that
the twenty-five-year-old Charbonneaux was almost half his age and did not look like him. Petiot also said that he eliminated traitors who attempted to infiltrate Charbonneaux’s organization, though this claim also did not hold up under scrutiny. Charbonneaux could not confirm Petiot’s assertions, either, because he, too, was dead. In October 1943, while fleeing the attack of the feared Belgian torturer who used the false name Christian Masuy (
inventor of the bath torture method), Charbonneaux was shot in the thigh. He staggered to a nearby building at 4 rue Francisque Sarcey, where he made his way up to the fifth floor and attempted to escape via the roof or gutter. Masuy and his men pursued. Charbonneaux jumped, nearly bringing Masuy with him.

Petiot never elaborated on the unnamed man from London who had supposedly trained him, or provide any details on the training he had allegedly received. He only said it had helped him invent his own simple, cheap, and highly effective plastic explosive that consisted of a couple of bottles filled with gasoline and sulfuric acid. Once they were hidden on a Nazi supply train, the bottles—separated by a cork and suspended from the ceiling by a string—would knock and ignite, creating
a powerful explosion. Petiot also claimed that this man from London introduced him to a Resistance network, Agir (Action).

As Yonnet and Brouard knew, this was another legitimate organization with major achievements. Established by Michel Hollard, a French businessman with the gas engine company Maison Gazogène Autobloc, Agir had recruited many railway stationmasters, hotel owners, dockyard foremen, and other patriots to inform on German military positions and troop movements. With more than one hundred agents at its height, Agir had uncovered the exact placement of coastal batteries, departure schedules for ships, and even plans for a new torpedo powered by hydrogen peroxide. Agir’s most dramatic coup, however, was
identifying one hundred V-1 launching sites in northern France and even swiping the blueprint for the inclined platform from the overcoat pocket of a German engineer while he read the newspaper in the bathroom. This information would spare London much grief in the rocket attacks. Eisenhower later suggested that this piece of intelligence had helped ensure that D-Day invasion plans were not postponed, if not derailed.

No one in Agir, however, seemed to know anything about Marcel Petiot or his alleged Resistance activities. Indeed, Petiot’s answers to Yonnet’s and Brouard’s questions were curiously uneven. Sometimes he seemed to show an intimate knowledge of the Resistance; other times he garbled the most basic facts. As for Petiot’s alleged code number, “46,” Yonnet and Brouard said that a ludicrously low number was unknown in the history of the Resistance. Who gave it to you? they asked. Petiot’s answer—that he no longer remembered—was a serious error. Members of the Resistance were trained to give the standard response: “
A guy who did nothing but that.”

A
S Gollety assembled the Petiot dossier, Albert Camus gave Jean-Paul Sartre an extraordinary opportunity. The United States State Department was looking for eight French journalists and former members of the Resistance to take a seven-week tour of the country, all expenses paid. Camus asked if Sartre was interested in representing
Combat
. “
Shit! I’ll run over there,” Sartre said, accepting the offer. Simone de Beauvoir later said that she had never seen him so happy.

On January 11, 1945, Sartre departed on a twenty-four-hour flight with three stops in a nonpressurized DC-8 military plane. It was his first trip outside Europe. He would write thirty-two articles, published in
Combat
and
Le Figaro
, detailing his experiences in a place he had earlier equated with the future: skyscrapers, jazz, movies. In Manhattan, Sartre would dine with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s widow, Consuelo, in her apartment overlooking the East River, which had been decorated for Greta Garbo. Her husband, the author of the previous year’s
The Little Prince
, had disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over Corsican waters on July 31, 1944. Sartre met W. H. Auden, attended a private screening of
Citizen Kane
, and sought out the jazz he’d long loved, including a performance by Charlie Parker on Fifty-Second Street.

Leaving behind the despair of post-Liberation Paris, mired in shortages, continued rationing, and the ever-present threat of being denounced as a collaborator, Sartre was flown coast to coast and
shuttled between stops in a limousine. He attended a Washington, D.C., cocktail party hosted by Walter Lippmann, toured a Hollywood studio, flew over the Grand Canyon by plane, talked with trade union leaders in Chicago, interviewed farmers in the Midwest, and in the South experienced the deep social and racial divisions that permeated the “
land of freedom and equality.” On March 9, he was treated to an evening at the White House. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told him about how much he loved France, how he had biked throughout the country as a boy, and showed him his collection of miniature donkeys, which, Sartre noted for his French readers, was the symbol of his Democratic Party.

But the most significant event for Sartre that year occurred back in Paris. On October 29, 1945, five months after his fortieth birthday and his decision to quit teaching to pursue a full-time writing career, Sartre delivered a public lecture entitled “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” The former teacher came out to a crowd of two or three hundred people, with no notes, his hands in his pockets, and defined the philosophic system soon to be inseparable from his public persona. Existentialism, he said, was “
that doctrine which makes human life possible.”

War and its atrocities had spread disillusionment. Sartre’s philosophy was already sometimes cited as emblematic of the anguish and despair that gripped the postwar world. Despite what both his conservative and Communist critics said, Sartre would present his philosophy instead as a “doctrine based on optimism and action”:

Maurice Nadeau titled his article in
Combat
about the talk: “
Too Many Attend Sartre Lecture. Heat, Fainting Spells, Police. Lawrence of Arabia an Existentialist.”

Others were less impressed. A reporter for
Samedi Soir
wrote that Sartre might be a hero to “
the hairy adolescents of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” but for more discerning readers, he was a “murderer,” stealing his ideas from German philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and crowning his bastardized philosophy with a “barbaric name” that no one understood and yet “everybody speaks of it over tea.” For sheer promotional talent, Sartre had surpassed everyone since P. T. Barnum.

But this review, like the positive one in
Combat
and other papers, also helped spread Sartre’s name and awareness of his philosophy beyond the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Other Parisians began to seek out Sartre’s works, including the monumental treatise he published two years before that had been ignored,
Being and Nothingness
. Existentialism was on its way to becoming
what the historian Ronald Aronson called the first postwar media craze.

T
HE last French Occupation media craze, meanwhile, was nowhere near subsiding. As the capital prepared for its first Christmas in four years without German soldiers, a certain Parisian aristocrat was celebrating a midnight supper with a masked ball with the theme of Marcel Petiot.
A journalist asked the hostess if a ball based on a mass murderer was appropriate. Yes, she said, she and her friends also needed their fun.

While Yonnet and Brouard investigated Petiot’s alleged Resistance activities, Gollety appointed a team of psychiatrists to examine the suspect’s mental health. The committee consisted of three men: Dr. Paul Gouriou, director of the Psychiatric Hospital of Villejuif, who had examined Petiot at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne when he was accused of stealing oil cans and concluded that he was insane; Dr. Georges Paul Génil Perrin, of the Henri Rouselle Center at Sainte-Anne’s Neurological Hospital, in contrast, found Petiot only a “
constitutional delinquent” who exploited legal loopholes by emulating well-known symptoms. The third member, Dr. Georges Heuyer, a leading specialist in pediatric
neuropsychiatry and juvenile delinquency, had not previously rendered an opinion on the suspect.

In the first psychiatric evaluation, conducted in late December 1944, the doctors probed into similar territory covered by Judge Gollety and the DGER lieutenants. Petiot, however, showed more arrogance and disdain for his medical colleagues. He emphasized that rue Le Sueur had served as a center of Resistance activity, with Fly-Tox helping Frenchmen escape from German camps, liquidate his country’s enemies, and fetch arms caches dropped by Allied planes. “At one time,” he boasted about his property, “there were over sixteen hundred pounds of arms hidden there!”

It was simply impossible for him, Petiot said, to liquidate dangerous collaborator gangsters like Jo the Boxer and Adrien the Basque by himself. This was the work of an organization, not one man, let alone a medical doctor. “You forget it was I who was imprisoned and tortured by the Germans at Fresnes for eight months, then the bastards framed me with the bodies they stuffed into my house.”

The doctors asked about the enormous wealth Petiot had accumulated, reported by the media at the time to include “over fifty properties worth millions” and a fortune worth, according to one police estimate, approximately 200 to 250 million francs.

“I did not acquire my fortune from my alleged victims,” Petiot said. “I made five hundred thousand francs per year from my medical practice. I spent hardly one hundred thousand per year. My wife is very frugal and my servants very cheap. Then my secondhand and my antique business brought me profits.” Petiot mentioned an oriental rug that he purchased for 17,000 francs and then sold later that same day for 60,000. He also claimed to have profited from his real estate investments, though of course such methods did not explain how he could have purchased the property in the first place.

But the question, it was soon clear, was not only the source of his fortune, or even its amount; it was also its fate. Petiot’s answers then and later were never satisfactory. The interrogators, ill-prepared to deal with his financial situation, did not at this time probe further. Instead Petiot
took the offensive, noting that he had joined the Resistance, “ready to make any sacrifice,” and now he found himself being “labeled both a murderer and a monster.”

After the interview and physical exam, which showed Petiot to be in good health except for slow reflexes and a cholesterol spot in his left eye, the doctors evaluated his mental state. They were impressed by his intelligence—undoubtedly highly intelligent, with a solid understanding of psychology and forensic medicine, and well read in the literature of mental disorders. At the same time, they could find no sign of mental instability, noting only that he appeared “completely amoral.” Most important for the upcoming trial, the committee concluded that Petiot should be held responsible for his actions.

On May 3, 1945, the military security team Yonnet and Brouard also submitted the conclusions of their six-month investigation. It was a scathing verdict.

W
HEN it came to stealing the identity of Dr. François Wetterwald, Petiot’s methods had been brutally simple.
On September 11, 1944, he had shown up at the apartment of sixty-eight-year-old Marthe Wetterwald, whose son was held at the concentration camp of Mauthausen. Petiot claimed to be a representative of the International Red Cross responsible for negotiating the release of French prisoners still held in Germany.
He wanted to help her son.

To facilitate his efforts, Petiot asked to inspect his identity papers. Overjoyed, Madame Wetterwald complied. When some of her son’s military documents, including his army paybook, were not handy,
Petiot asked her to find them. Two days later, he returned as planned and began leafing through the items. When Madame Wetterwald left the room, he slipped some important documents into his pocket, and then later used them to obtain his false identification cards. Madame Wetterwald’s son would remain at the concentration camp until the Allies liberated it in May 1945.

The real François Wetterwald was not only a physician, he was also a prominent member of the Resistance.
He was a leader of the group Vengeance, which collected information, sabotaged German sites in preparation for D-Day, and conducted other raids, most notably stealing German cars and uniforms, the latter often grabbed in the changing rooms of swimming pools. Among its many other activities, Vengeance operated an evasion network that helped Allied soldiers leave Occupied France.

Assuming Wetterwald’s identity proved to be advantageous. Petiot gained instant credibility as a Resistance fighter, and he had not been shy to exploit it.

B
EFORE the pretrial questioning ended, three last victims would be added to the official total. In the fall of 1945, the French Ministry of Justice received a letter from an American Jew living in La Paz, Bolivia, named Siegfried Lent. The letter was originally addressed to the Jewish Deportees Service of the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York, and in it Lent asked for any information about his relatives, Kurt Kneller, his wife Margareth (Greta) Lent Kneller, and their son René, who had lived in Paris during the Occupation. It was known that this family tried to escape with the services of a doctor, but they had been missing since the summer of 1942.