The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot

by Thomas Maeder

  Petiot himself had invented a weapon, just as he had cured constipation and discovered perpetual motion in 1936 (discoveries he did not mention to Judge Goletty). His secret weapon was short-range, silent, and all wounds it inflicted were lethal. It was ideally suited for sniper operations, and had it been adopted, “a five-ton truck could have carried enough of the gadgets to liquidate the million Germans trampling France under their jackboots.” He himself had tried the weapon on German motorcyclists twice, once on the rue Saint-Honoré, once on the rue La Fayette, both times in broad daylight. The wounds inflicted were so inconspicuous that no one ever suspected the men died of unnatural causes. Petiot had given plans for the weapon to a secretary named Thompson at the American consulate in Paris around 1941 (the American embassy had moved to Vichy), at the time when the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Thompson had passed them on to another consular secretary named Muller, who had spoken with Petiot on the telephone and assured him his invention would be studied closely, but nothing had been done. Petiot did not say why he had never offered his weapon to the Resistance, and now he stubbornly refused to give Judge Goletty even the vaguest description of it.

  At a date he could no longer recall, Petiot received formal training from a man sent from London to organize the Maquis in Franche-Comté, on the Swiss border. He learned unarmed personal-defense techniques as well as the use of Resistance weapons such as the revolver, submachine gun, hand grenades, and plastic explosives. He did not remember the man’s name.

  His medical practice brought him in contact with more and more members of the Resistance, he made himself more and more useful, and he was eventually assigned to head a group that would ferret out and liquidate informers who had infiltrated the Resistance network led by Pierre Brossolette, a famous Resistant who was killed in March 1944. This task in itself should have been minimal, but Petiot and his comrades were so ardent, and felt so strongly that collaborators did more to demoralize the French than the uniformed occupying troops, that they actively searched out and killed collaborators wherever they found them. The slang name for an informer is mouchard, from the French word for a fly, mouche. Petiot named his group Fly-Tox after a well-known brand of liquid fly-killer, comparable to Flit or Raid.

  Some collaborators were discovered through common knowledge or were denounced by patriots, but generally Fly-Tox employed its own special methods to detect them. Members of the group stationed themselves outside the Gestapo office on the rue des Saussaies and observed those who came and went. Non-uniformed employees had to show Gestapo identity cards to the guard at the door. When Petiot’s men observed such a person leaving, they followed him to a secluded place, then identified themselves as plainclothes German police officers and announced he was under arrest. This was done to double-check their suspicions: if the suspect was a collaborator he would protest that there was some mistake since he worked for the Germans himself. Thus condemned by his own words, the victim was shoved into a truck and driven away. Sometimes he was questioned at the rue Le Sueur, but few people had been killed there and the bodies were always concealed elsewhere. More frequently the prisoner was interrogated in the moving truck, then summarily clubbed to death with a rubber hose filled with sand, lead, and bicycle spokes, and buried in the woods near Marly-le-Roi, a few miles west of Paris. Petiot estimated his group had killed a total of sixty-three people—about half Germans, the other half French—and every one had deserved his fate.

  In the course of their Resistance work, Petiot and his comrades heard of escape routes to Spain and South America, and though they did not deal with this specialty themselves, they occasionally passed on the information to people who could use it. Petiot sometimes helped to the limit of his abilities. False identity papers were obtained by the Vichy minister of state, Lucien Romier, from a member of the Argentinian consulate known only by the code name Desaix or De C. A police commissioner in the seventh arrondissement of Lyon provided documents that facilitated the crossing of the Spanish border, and from Spain the travelers could easily go on to Portugal and board a ship for England or South America. A furrier named Guschinov, among others, had taken this route and had written to Petiot announcing his safe arrival in Argentina. The actual passage was effected by a group of specialists under the leadership of André le Corse, whom Petiot had never met. Petiot worked through an intermediary, one of his former patients known as Robert Martinetti. He did not know Martinetti’s real name nor where he could be found. When necessary, they had met at the Paris Auction House on the rue Drouot, a secret contact point where Petiot had spent every afternoon from 3:00 to 6:00 o’clock during the time of the group’s operation.

  Petiot admitted he had been unwise in mentioning the escape organization to Fourrier and Pintard. He had originally cultivated them because he thought a barber and a makeup artist would come in handy when members of Fly-Tox required a disguise; but it turned out that Fourrier and Pintard had ideas of their own and set about finding clients only to make money. Unsavory as their motive was, the results were unexpectedly fruitful, since the milieu in which Pintard recruited at the rue de l’Echiquier café was riddled with informers, and a steady stream of victims marched willingly into the Fly-Tox execution den. Petiot proudly admitted the liquidation of François le Corse, Adrien le Basque, Jo le Boxeur, and their friends. They had come not to escape, he said, but to learn the Fly-Tox escape route and expose it to the Gestapo. Eryane Kahan was much the same. Petiot claimed her German lover had listened at the door during their conversations, and that the Jews she sent to him were all traitors in the pay of the Nazis.

  In this delirious proliferation of noble acts, Petiot had also engaged in sabotage. Sometimes he used plastic explosives, sometimes another device he had invented, consisting of a bottle holding gasoline and sulfuric acid separated by a cork. A man would sneak into a boxcar that contained valuable German supplies and suspend two of these bottles from strings thumb-tacked to the roof. During the voyage, the bottles would knock against each other or the walls, break, and start an inexplicable fire. The added advantage, Petiot remarked, was that “this very simple device did not cost over one hundred francs.”

  Though he willingly spoke about his own activities, Petiot was reluctant to identify his comrades; he did not wish to see other brave and innocent men put in the same sad position as himself. One of the few names he mentioned was Cumulo, the code name for the courageous leader of the Resistance group Rainbow, whom Petiot claimed as a close friend. Cumulo was by far the younger man, but Petiot said they had the same brown hair and silhouette and had been easily mistaken for one another. But Cumulo was dead, as were Pierre Brossolette, Lucien Romier, and several others Petiot mentioned. Cumulo, whose real name was Jean-Marie Charbonneaux, had been trapped by the Germans in October 1943. After a daring rooftop chase, rather than be captured and risk giving in under torture, he had grabbed at one of his pursuers and leaped to his death six stories below. For those of Petiot’s colleagues who were not known to be dead, such as Martinetti, there was no proof that they had ever been alive. Petiot had astonishingly few witnesses to confirm his story: he had none at all.

  Petiot said Yvan Dreyfus had been responsible for his arrest by the Germans in 1943, but that though he knew Dreyfus to be a collaborator, he had not killed him. After Fourrier had turned Dreyfus over to Petiot near the place de la Concorde, Petiot had turned him over to Robert Martinetti on the Champs-Elysées (this was, in fact, where the Gestapo shadows lost them). Martinetti took an evasive route to the rue Le Sueur, where “Albert” or another Fly-Tox man was waiting. It seemed probable that his group had killed Dreyfus, and with good reason, but Petiot could not be sure since when the Germans arrested him “the Jew” was still alive at the rue Le Sueur.

  The Gestapo took “Dr. Eugène” to the rue des Mathurins barbershop, where they expected to capture other members of the group. En route, Petiot managed to lay his overcoat down in a nearby café, and to conceal a note in it informing h
is group that he had been arrested and that they should abandon operations at the rue Le Sueur. A bit later, Petiot almost managed to elude his captors, but as he ran, he realized that his wife, son, and comrades would only suffer if he escaped, so he stopped.

  I said to the officer [who was chasing him]: “You see, I could have gotten away.” He replied: “That would be utterly pointless. You need only come to the rue des Saussaies and sign your deposition and you will be released immediately.” As I hesitated and said “But …,” he clicked his heels and said, “You have the word of a German officer!” with which I went off to spend eight months in prison.

  He went on to describe his imprisonment, the torture, the periodic threats of execution, Guélin’s and Beretta’s attempts to fool him, and his own absolute refusal to compromise France for his own personal safety. He knew that the Germans had searched the rue Caumartin and his property on the rue de Reuilly, and he assumed they were also familiar with the rue Le Sueur. After all, there had been bills and documents concerning it at the rue Caumartin, they had taken his key to the rue Le Sueur, and two of his former patients who were important buyers for a German agency and closely tied with the Gestapo had been to the building to purchase a chandelier Petiot had bought at auction and stored there. If the Germans had been to the rue Le Sueur—and even Petiot’s questioners had to admit it seemed unlikely that they did not investigate there—they would surely have noticed anything unusual. Mountains of bodies, Petiot explained sarcastically, generally qualify as unusual when found in someone’s home.

  When he was released from Fresnes in January 1944, Fly-Tox had ceased to exist. Some members had disappeared after his arrest, others later; still others were disheartened as the months dragged on and the daily-awaited Allied invasion did not take place. Petiot knew most of them only under assumed names and had no way of contacting them. He was ill and exhausted and went to Auxerre to rest. It was not until February 8 that he summoned the courage to enter 21 rue Le Sueur and face the damage he was sure the Germans had wrought. In fact, the situation was worse than he expected. Valuable medical equipment and furniture had been stolen, the whole place was in complete disarray, and two heavy marble slabs he had cemented over an old manure pit had been shoved aside. When he looked into the pit, he found it was full of bodies poorly concealed under an electric iron, a drill, several boxes, and two large cushions. The odor of putrefying flesh was terrible. He immediately wrote to his brother, asking for 200 kilograms of quicklime to destroy cockroaches, but which he really wanted to disinfect and destroy these unknown corpses cluttering up his house. He pointed out to Judge Goletty that, if he had known the bodies were there, he would have brought the lime himself when he returned to Paris from Auxerre rather than risk implicating his brother in such a dangerous affair, as, unfortunately, he had done.

  Where had the bodies come from? Petiot assumed at first that his Fly-Tox comrades had continued their work and foolishly used his house as a dumping group for dead collaborators and Germans. He angrily reproached the few remaining members for such unspeakable carelessness, but they denied all responsibility and said the Germans must have done it. Still, something had to be done. They had no automobile and their truck was in need of repair, so there was no question of transporting the corpses out of Paris as they had done before. Petiot suspected the Germans were following him, so two comrades offered to take care of the disposal themselves. They apparently hit upon the idea of burning the remains, which Petiot did not know at the time and would not have recommended, since the bodies were still relatively fresh and the lime had desiccated only the exteriors. But on Friday, March 10, the two comrades told Petiot they expected to finish the job by Saturday evening or Sunday morning. Instead, on Saturday evening, the fire was discovered. He arrived in twelve minutes—not the half hour mentioned by the police—“but I saw that the police and firemen, with typical impertinence, had broken open the doors, and there were the firemen, several policemen, and the crowd.”

  He had identified himself to one of the policemen (incorrectly, according to the police) and took the risk of mentioning his Resistance group. The policeman told him to flee and they would see what they could do to hush up the affair. The next day Petiot was to call a Monsieur William or Wilhelm to find out the results, and when he did he was told there was nothing to be done since the Germans already knew everything, and he should disappear. He went in search of Pierre Brossolette; he was told he was dead, and other Resistance members were hesitant to use Petiot since his notoriety would make it dangerous for him to undertake active missions. He was given the new code name of Special 21 and assigned minor administrative duties, which frustrated his eager mind, and he had rejoiced when he was finally able to resume an active role at the time of the Liberation. He admitted stealing Dr. Wetterwald’s papers, but claimed the main reason was that he wished to go on active duty and he stood a better chance if he was thirty-three, as was Wetterwald, rather than forty-seven, as his Valéri papers stated.

  Goletty asked why he had not turned himself in after the Liberation. If his case was so simple, surely he could have cleared it up quickly and gone on with his work?

  I felt that the accusations against me were so manifestly false, I was so convinced that my innocence would be obvious to anyone who gave the least bit of thought to the matter, that I did not imagine I ran any risk of imprisonment. Nonetheless, I did not go to the police because the police had not yet been purged of collaborators, and because I was more useful to France continuing the fight than discussing my personal affairs.

  Mysterious “political enemies” in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne had been responsible for every accusation brought against him; now he dismissed charges or refused to answer questions on the grounds that the purge was not over—“It is being done with eyebrow tweezers when what we need is a shovel!”—and hidden traitors were just waiting to use his information to the detriment of the French Republic. He snickered at the charges and said it was only at his lawyer’s insistence that he had deigned to answer them at all.

  * This letter was never sent. The prison authorities screened Petiot’s correspondence, and several letters, such as this one, were held and placed in his dossier.

  * Petiot reported the theft on December 12, 1941. He did not mention that, to replace the missing machine, he seems to have simply stolen another one. A bicycle license plate was found at the rue Le Sueur registered in the name Ginette Mielle. Mademoiselle Mielle’s bicycle had been stolen from a shopping area in the nearby suburb of La Garenne-Colombes on December 17, 1941.

  13

  “I WISH TO EXPLAIN MYSELF IN COURT”

  Petiot was placed in cell 7 of sector 7 at the Prison de la Santé—death row, despite the fact that he had not yet been convicted. His room measured nine feet by twelve feet, contained a bed, chair, and deal table, and the judas was always open and a guard stationed outside his door twenty-four hours a day. Petiot did not seem to mind at all. He took up smoking, and was almost never seen without a cigarette dangling from his lips. He wrote poetry, and also turned out a three-hundred-page manuscript called Le Hasard vaincu (Beating Chance, or Chance Defeated), which described methods for winning, or minimizing losses, at the races, roulette, lotteries, poker, and other gambling activities.

  Le Hasard vaincu, which would be published at Petiot’s expense in manuscript facsimile at the time of the trial, is a curious and virtually unreadable book filled with interminable digressions and irrelevant, if mildly amusing, anecdotes. The overall tone toward the reader is deprecating, and repeatedly cautions him to do the calculations for himself, since he is suspected of laziness. Those parts of the book that are coherent are generally neither original nor instructive. Petiot relates strange wartime anecdotes, bits of his own experience, and occasionally comments on the Resistance and collaboration or the rue Le Sueur affair. “Follow me well,” he tells the reader on one page, “as the barber said, lathering the customer’s face and preparing to tell the interesting story of the vampir
e of the rue …”; and as a footnote to a calculation he fears might give the reader misgivings about the author’s mental state, he say: “To reassure you, I would like to let you know that 3 experts have found me perfectly sane. But since these gentlemen obstinately refused to be examined and have their own sanity gauged, I do not know whether one can have the slightest confidence in their conclusions. Nonetheless …” More often, one finds curious illustrative digressions such as the following, which occurs in Petiot’s introductory explanation of the laws of probability.

  At the end of that memorable battle between God the Father and Lucifer, they sent out diplomats, signed an armistice, and set up rules for eternal Peace based on an equal division of the mortal souls yet to come between “the two Major Powers.”

  Lucifer had the best of it, since he did not even have to bother manufacturing them: like the broom-maker who steals brooms ready made, while his competitor has to steal the bristles, handles and wire.

  What I am telling you may clash with tradition, but if you think about it a bit you will see that Lucifer, who before the war had been Jehovah’s right-hand man, his Chief of Staff, was perfectly familiar with strategy and armaments before he began his revolt.

  He would not have risked the coup d’etat had he thought he would lose. The celestial phalanxes clothed in shining armor with their white and luminous wings—easy targets—with only the antiquated artillery depicted in Milton, were no match for the V-2’s and atomic bombs Satan knew well before we did.