Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris
By David King
New York, NY: Crown, 2011
432 pp. $30
Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris is a biographical study of Dr. Marcel Petiot and a history of his serial murder of dozens of people, including Jews trying to escape Third Reich oppression. It is also a record of Petiot’s detection, trial, and execution.
Author David King is an American scholar of European history, and his research credentials are established in his extensive bibliography, forty pages of notes, index, and even a list of illustration credits.
His work follows in the wake of the success of Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2002), a prize-winning, bestselling book that established that recherché, academic history can find a popular audience.
King’s subject is not world-changing in any way, but is fascinating in its narrative of the cunning with which Petiot manipulated German terrorism, French gangsters, and the clandestine machinations of the Gestapo and the French Resistance, to recruit would-be refugees for his false escape-route, supposedly leading from Paris to Portugal and, from there, to Argentina.
Instead, his victims showed up at his two-and-a-half-storey town house at 21 rue Le Sueur (“in the heart of Paris’s fashionable 16th arrondissement”), with all of their negotiable wealth—currency, jewellery, furs—and quickly disappeared.
Although Petiot would later produce postcards and letters, supposedly sent by successful escapees, no actual trace of them would ever turn up, except “a pile of skulls, tibias, humeri, broken thigh bones, and human debris of all kinds”—body parts found near or inside a furnace; but most—along with intact cadavers—found in a lime-filled pit on the property.
The large scale of Petiot’s serial liquidations, undertaken for sheer profit (the theft of his victims’ cash and goods), was underlined by the discovery in a cupboard of 36 cosmetic tubes, 22 toothbrushes, 22 perfume bottles, 22 combs, 16 lipstick cases, 15 boxes of face powder, plus scalpels, fingernail files, hand mirrors, eyeglasses, powder puffs, cigarette holders, gas masks, tweezers, umbrellas, “a walking cane, a penknife, a pillowcase, a lighter, and a woman’s bathing suit.”
50 suitcases were also located, some also bearing contents linked to prospective escapees.
Despite this significant list of articles, and the 27 identified persons with whose murders Petiot was charged, King scruples to point out that “no one has ever established the total number of victims, which could be anything from a handful to 26 (the court’s opinion),” 63 (Petiot’s claim; he said that he slew “traitors” to France), or 150 plus (other experts’ estimates).
Yet, the mounds of body parts, stolen goods, and discarded articles are strongly reminiscent of Holocaust evidence, and support King’s conclusion that “A predator had brutally exploited opportunities for gain, slaughtering society’s most vulnerable and desperate people, the majority of them being Jews fleeing persecution.
“Dr. Petiot had become the self-appointed executioner for Hitler, gassing, butchering, and burning his victims in his own private death camp.”
The story is grisly and gruesome. What is perhaps most disturbing is that Petiot’s victims were seduced by his charismatic megalomania as well as the seemingly credible tale of his affiliation with The French Resistance.
Worse, those with suspicions about Petiot had nowhere to turn. If they were Jewish and went to the French authorities, they could come to the attention of the Gestapo, who were ever zealous in organizing incarcerations, deportations, and mass murder.
Then again, Nazi Occupation meant a free-reign for “legalized” criminality: the confiscation of property; the arrest, torture, and killing of “enemies”; the organization of brothels, et cetera. No wonder that German authorities recruited French crime bosses as underlings: In a sense, they were on the same side.
In the middle were a few good French police, like Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, who, despite German interference, did their best to bring “regular” murderers to justice.
The story of a good police officer caught between a politically connected criminal and criminal-minded politicians reminds me a bit of the 1983 film, Gorky Park. King’s history is abundantly competent, but its real audience will likely be in the cinema.
