The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Inspector Batut drove to Courson and arrested Neuhausen’s wife Simone and Léone Arnoux. The latter was the former maid and mistress of Georgette Petiot’s late father, and it was learned that she had made several mysterious trips between Auxerre and Courson, and had removed some items from the suitcases for herself and for Maurice’s family. Albert Neuhausen was not at home—he was on a business trip in Paris, staying at the now familiar Hôtel Alicot, where he was arrested the next day and charged with accepting stolen goods and obstructing justice. The people of Courson gathered in the square across the street from the Neuhausen residence as a crew of policemen lowered forty-nine trunks and suitcases from the attic window to the sidewalk. The Gare de Lyon baggage tickets were still attached to them; police discovered that eight of the forty-five suitcases sent from Paris were missing, meaning that twelve new suitcases had been stored with the others, and the missing ones must be hidden elsewhere.

  The contents of these forty-nine bags were astonishing and would have filled the shelves of a small store. Among 1,760 items the Police Judiciaire catalogued at the quai des Orfèvres headquarters in Paris were:

  5

  fur coats

  48

  scarves

  26

  women’s hats

  79

  dresses

  22

  sweaters

  42

  blouses

  29

  brassieres

  77

  pairs of gloves

  311

  handkerchiefs

  14

  men’s raincoats

  66

  pairs of shoes

  28

  suits

  115

  men’s shirts

  96

  collars

  104

  detachable cuffs

  3

  nightshirts

  9

  sheets

  13

  pillowcases

  87

  towels

  3

  tablecloths

  3

  cultured-pearl necklaces

  5

  fingernail files

  5

  pairs of eyeglasses

  1

  hatpin

  13

  tram tickets

  Considering that at least Van Bever and Madame Khaït had left home without luggage, and that Petiot had told the other escapees to travel light, what were police to make of three-quarters of a ton of clothing? If such a vast collection of clothes really belonged to the dead, it obviously represented a great many victims. Nor was this all: combined with articles found at the rue Le Sueur, the rue Caumartin, and in Maurice’s two houses at Auxerre, police would end up with a final tally of eighty-three suitcases, plus umbrellas, canes, and assorted other objects. The total weight of the evidence against Petiot was nearly three tons.

  Léone Arnoux, Georgette’s father’s mistress and maid, refused to cooperate with the police. As she did not believe Dr. Petiot guilty of murder, she said, there could be no victims, and hence the contents of the suitcases were not stolen goods and she was not guilty of receiving them. She defended her right to remove articles for the use of the Petiot family. One of these items, a gaudy silk tie with Adrien Estébétéguy’s initials, had been around Gérard Petiot’s neck when police questioned him at his uncle’s house in Auxerre. At one point Léone Arnoux said Monique Petiot, Maurice’s wife, had asked her to hide the suitcases; later she said her instructions were just the opposite. Albert Neuhausen claimed to know nothing about the suitcases; Maurice had simply not wanted to keep them in his own house because he was afraid the Germans might come there, too. He had never gone near them, Neuhausen said at first, but when suspicious sheets and clothing were found in his bureau drawers, he admitted having taken a few things out to dry after melting snow leaked through the roof and damaged some of the suitcases, and he had apparently forgotten to put them back.

  There was also a question about whether Georgette Petiot knew of the existence of the suitcases. Apparently, while staying at Auxerre, she had asked Maurice to stop at the rue Caumartin apartment during a trip to Paris and bring some of her clothes to her. He packed them in a suitcase that was inadvertently mixed up with those sent to Neuhausen’s house. At one point Maurice and Georgette had gone to Courson to find her misplaced things, and on this point the juge d’instruction spent weeks interrogating Georgette, Maurice, and Madame Neuhausen—separately and together—trying to determine whether Maurice had gone to the Neuhausen attic alone, or whether Georgette had accompanied him and consequently knew more than she cared to admit.

  It soon became evident that the longer the investigation continued, the more it got bogged down in small details, getting farther and farther away from the few large, central questions. Dozens of small discrepancies arose, and though police had everyone in the case confront everyone else, all parties involved repeatedly changed positions in a bizarre ballet of facts. No two witnesses ever quite agreed on anything, and the exact roles of all the secondary participants could never be determined. While the court held him at the Santé prison, Nézondet had even tried to smuggle a letter out to his mistress, Aimée Lesage, in which he wrote: “Since I am dealing with nothing but bastards, I have made a decision. There is no reason for me to charge Maurice with anything, particularly since I’m not sure that he told me he had seen any bodies.… I am going to write to the judge and tell him that I exaggerated in my testimony about Maurice. That way, they won’t be able to convict anyone.” The letter was intercepted, and when Judge Berry confronted him with it, Nézondet calmly returned to his former position. He had simply been depressed and disgusted on the day he wrote the note, he said, and his original statement had been the absolute truth. Judge Berry began to wonder whether such a thing could exist.

  The contents of the pile of suitcases should have furnished police with tangible clues about further victims, but the investigation was partly baffled by the circumstances of the Occupation. Communication with other parts of France and with foreign countries was difficult if not impossible. The clothing bore more than two dozen different laundry marks and forty-eight different sets of initials—only a handful of which corresponded to the initials of those victims ultimately identified. Judge Berry, in the desperate hope of identifying more people, sent letters to every police department in France asking them to check every laundry in their area. The results were nil. A few suits and shirts bore manufacturer’s labels, and many of them were identified as having belonged to Estébétéguy, Réocreux, Piereschi, and their companions. Henri Lafont, Estébétéguy’s former French Gestapo chief, voluntarily came to Police Judiciaire headquarters and identified Adrien le Basque’s silk shirts. The only new lead was that several shirts and a suit were marked Wolff or Made for M. Wolff.

  M. Wolff’s clothes had all been made in Amsterdam, where it would be difficult to pursue an investigation. As Massu was pondering this problem, an anonymous letter arrived. These were not uncommon: ever since the discovery at the rue Le Sueur, dozens of reports had rained on police headquarters about sightings of fearsome strangers. Scores of people reported missing friends and relatives, but at a time when thousands of people, particularly Jews, vanished without a trace, these reports were difficult to follow up and were scarcely worth the trouble. This particular letter, however, seemed to merit closer scrutiny. Its author said she had known a family of Jews from Holland who had fled to Paris in August 1942. Several weeks after their arrival, they had a close brush with the Gestapo and sought to leave the country. They had met a medical doctor who said he could get them to South America. They were to convert their assets into gold and precious gems. The doctor had come to fetch them in December, and they had never been heard from again. The family consisted of “Madame W …” (about age sixty-three), her son “Maurice W …” (thirty-six), and his wife “L.W.” (forty-six). The writer also suspected that “the family B …”—consisting of two e
lderly people and a couple in their twenties—had followed the same route in January 1943. Only initials were given, the letter was not signed, and the only clue was a Vincennes postmark on the envelope.

  Massu informed the newspapers about the letter and asked them to print his appeal for the anonymous author to come forward and tell the whole story; he assured the writer that her identity would be kept secret (and when she came forth it was, even from the other investigators on the case, until another witness mentioned her name). The correspondent, Ilse Gang, showed up at the quai des Orfèvres headquarters of the Police Judiciaire several days after the commissaire’s appeal; between her testimony and that of Eryane Kahan, arrested six months later, Massu would be able to piece together the circumstances of nine more disappearances.

  The Wolff story, one of the saddest cases, typifies the situation of Jews under the Occupation and the circumstances that facilitated Petiot’s incredible plan. The Wolffs were a wealthy Jewish family from Königsberg in Germany. The patriarch, Sally Wolff, had run the Incona Lumber Company, which had branches in several major European cities. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Sally’s son Moses Maurice Israel Wolff, known as Maurice, moved to France with his wife Lina. When, three years later, Sally, his wife Rachel, and their other son Heinrich moved to Amsterdam, Maurice and Lina joined them there, and after Sally died in 1940 the two brothers took over management of the company. Heinrich disappeared during the war (years later it was learned he had fled to New York), and Maurice continued running the business until it was liquidated under German occupation as a Jewish firm.

  In June 1942, the German attitude toward Jews everywhere in occupied territory grew more severe. One day in June, the Germans ordered all Amsterdam Jews to report to the nearest police commissariat to register for “work in Germany.” Few reported, and the following weeks and months saw mass raids and the deportation of thousands of Jews directly from the Netherlands to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The Wolffs—Maurice, Lina, and Maurice’s mother Rachel—sold all their possessions at a great loss and left Amsterdam on July 12, 1942, with an estimated F309,575 worth of valuables and cash in various currencies. Under the name Wolters they crossed the border into Belgium without difficulty. Since the French frontier posed a more serious obstacle, Rachel and Lina waited in Antwerp while Maurice tried to cross into France with the money.

  Maurice Wolff was arrested at the border by French customs officials on July 23 and taken before the court at Rocroi, in the Ardennes. His court-appointed lawyer, Maître René Iung, was sympathetic, and Maurice gradually told him his whole story. Iung arranged to smuggle Rachel and Lina over the border and hid them in his house at Rocroi for nearly a month, after which the customs director concealed them in a convent near Charleville for several days before arranging their departure for Paris. Iung discreetly explained the situation to the court officials at Rocroi, and though they could not just release Maurice Wolff without arousing German suspicion, when the case came up ten days later, they sentenced him to exactly the time he had already spent in jail, forgot about the money he had, which they should have confiscated, and set him free. Wolff joined his wife and mother at the Hôtel Helvetia on the rue Tourneux, just off the avenue Daumesnil in Paris. When Maître Iung went to Paris a few weeks later to bring them their money, jewels, and original identity papers, he found them living under the name Walbert.

  On September 2, 1942, the Wolffs were visiting Lina’s old friend Ilse Gang in her apartment near the Etoile and were about to return to their hotel when its proprietress telephoned to say that another of her guests, a young Jewish girl, had been arrested earlier that day for not wearing the mandatory yellow star. She felt sure the Germans would now search the entire building. The Wolffs stayed at Madame Gang’s for three days, then moved to the Hôtel du Danube on the rue Jacob in the Quartier Latin. On October 1, the Germans announced they would requisition that hotel on the fifth; the Wolff-Walberts moved several doors away to the Hôtel Jacob. On the fifth, it turned out that the Hôtel du Danube was requisitioned not by some innocuous administrative office, but to house personnel from the rue des Saussaies Gestapo bureau. Whenever the Gestapo moved to a new place, they carefully checked out the occupants of the adjacent buildings. The Wolffs had to flee again. As Jews who had entered France illegally, they would be deported as soon as they were found. The Wolffs asked Madame Gang if she knew of an apartment for rent, and Madame Gang in turn asked a friend of hers, a dental surgeon, who asked one of her patients, Eryane Kahan. Kahan was able to find a place in her own building at 10 rue Pasquier, a small street intersected by the rue des Mathurins.

  Rudolphine “Eryane” Kahan was a fifty-year-old Rumanian Jew who looked half her age. Police were never able to determine her source of income, though Petiot would claim she had told him she “liked business better than whoring,” intimating that she had experience in both. If nothing else, she was an opportunist, and when a new venture presented itself, she pursued it with vigor. The Wolffs told Eryane of their wish to leave France for Switzerland or America; she, too, she said, felt the Gestapo was after her and wanted to leave. Around November or December 1942, Eryane’s physician, Dr. Louis-Théophile Saint-Pierre, a shady individual with a police record for swindling and abortion, chanced to mention to her that another of his patients had heard of an escape organization. Eryane met the patient, Robert—really a pimp named Henri Guintrand, alias Henri le Marseillais—who led her to a café near the Madeleine and introduced her to Pintard. She told him of the Walberts’ wish to escape, and Pintard escorted her to the rue des Mathurins. Dr. Eugène-Petiot arrived ten minutes later. He questioned her at length about herself and the Walberts, showing particular interest in their state of mind and financial situation. During the conversation Petiot apparently learned that Fourrier and Pintard had once again quoted double his asking price; he burst into a violent rage, threatening to drop the two if they sullied a noble cause with their own petty greed again. Eryane was very impressed and quite convinced. Dr. Eugène—the only name by which she knew him—told her the Walberts could leave, but since he was unable to take more than three people at a time, and also because she was such an intelligent person and fluent in several languages, she could be of further use to the escape organization. He would prefer that she wait until a subsequent trip.

  Petiot met the Walberts the next day in the apartment of Adrienne Ginas, the concierge at 10 rue Pasquier. They sat drinking tea and spoke of music and the arts. As the Wolff family’s lawyer later put it, Petiot appeared to be “a man of vast culture and fine sentiments, whose magnanimity and character fully explained his devotion to the noble cause of clandestine passages.” Petiot told the Wolff-Walberts they could take all the money they wished and two suitcases apiece, and that they would have to remain hidden in a Paris house for a few days before their departure. They should not carry identification papers or clothing bearing marks or labels—instructions none of them heeded, since they left carrying sheets, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, and clothing with embroidered initials or name tags. The women’s jewels were sewn into the shoulders of Maurice Wolff’s jacket.

  One day at the end of December 1942, the Wolffs spent the afternoon with Ilse Gang. They told her about the doctor, who was coming for them that evening. Ilse Gang heard nothing further of them, though two months later a woman in dark glasses now known to be Eryane Kahan stopped at her home and asked if she would like to follow the Wolffs. She refused.

  Two weeks after the Wolffs left, Dr. Eugène saw Eryane again. He said the Walberts had left safely and asked whether she knew a couple named Baston, some friends of the Walberts who were also interested in leaving. Eryane did not know them; two weeks later, though, Madame Ginas told her that a couple named Baston had moved into the Wolffs’ old apartment at 10 rue Pasquier. Petiot was apparently already in touch with them. They were nice people, Madame Ginas said. The Bastons wished to depart accompanied by four relatives from Nice.

  The story of the Baston group is complex
, and it took some time for the police to decide just how many of them there had been, since the six people in the group used ten different last names. All of them were German or Polish Jews who had long resided in the Netherlands and adopted the nationality of that country, though each had a set of false papers giving his birthplace as Belgium. Gilbert Baston was the general representative in the Netherlands for the French perfume company Rigaud, and though he had been known to French friends as Baston for over ten years, his real name was Basch. His wife was Marie-Anne Basch, though she also used the name Baston, as well as the two parts of her originally hyphenated maiden name, Hollander and Schonker. The relatives from Nice were Mrs. Basch-Baston’s parents and her sister and brother-in-law. Chaïma Schonker, her father, used the pseudonym Stevens, while his wife Franziska used both of them, as well as her maiden name, Ehrenreich, and the pseudonym Eemans. Brother-in-law Ludwig Arnsberg, the former Netherlands representative of the French firm Jean Patou and the German company Junge and Gebhardt, used the name Anspach, while his wife Ludwika also called herself Hollander and Schepers.

  The Bastons had been in Paris for some time, but they were growing increasingly worried about the German persecution of Jews. Old friends of the Wolffs, they had frantically moved with them from one hotel to another and had followed their escape plans with interest. The Stevens and Anspach couples, on the other hand, had only fled Amsterdam in August 1942, when they paid a passeur F1 million to smuggle them into France and across the demarcation line to Nice. Since then they had been hiding in Nice, using false names and pretending to be Catholic, while waiting for the opportunity to escape to Switzerland or South America. They dressed modestly to avoid attention, though they still possessed valuable furs, jewels, and, one assumes, a great deal of cash. They stayed at the four-star Hôtel Continental on the rue Rossini, which was largely filled with wealthy Jews in flight, but also with officers of the Italian army’s intelligence service. (This curious cohabitation with the enemy was not so strange as it seems. By July 1943 fully one-fifth of the surviving Jews in France had fled to the eight southern departments held by Italian troops. Mussolini did not share or approve of Hitler’s racist ideas, and though the Italians generally simply overlooked German orders on the Jewish issue, they were occasionally more active in their opposition. When a diligent Vichy prefect in the Alpes-Maritimes ordered raids on Jews, the Italian consul at Nice posted carabinieri in strategic positions with orders to arrest or shoot any French policemen who bothered the Jews. After the Italian armistice in September 1943, the retreating troops even took many Jews with them to protect them from the advancing German army.)