Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [46]
They boasted about their executions, took cigarette cases, jewels and money, which were recorded and locked up in a strong box to be handed over later. But what became of the booty afterwards was never revealed. ‘Considering their youth,’ wrote Muggeridge, ‘they behaved with horrifying callousness, arrogance and brutality.’ He was not surprised to hear later that their leader had been arrested and found to have a record of collaboration.
The most notorious false resistant was Dr Marcel Pétiot. Between 1942 and 1944, Pétiot set up his own escape line. Jews, members of the Resistance, even gangsters being hunted by the police, were directed to the doctor, who said he could arrange safe passages to Argentina. On the pretext that the Argentinian authorities demanded inoculations, he gave his clients a lethal injection of cyanide, then watched them die in agony. Pétiot disposed of the bodies efficiently, at least at the start of his grisly career: they were dissolved in quicklime, and what was left was incinerated. Towards the end, however, the sheer quantity of corpses gave him away. On 11 March 1944, noxious smoke and a hideous stench prompted neighbours to call the fire brigade to 21 rue Lesueur. On breaking in, they found dismembered trunks, arms and legs, scalped heads with flayed faces, all waiting to be burnt in a coal-fired stove already overflowing with human remains.
What happened next gives some idea of the tortuously difficult position of the Paris police in the months leading up to the Liberation. The man put in charge of the case was one of the most famous police inspectors in Paris: Georges-Victor Massu, who (with his predecessor) was the inspiration for Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. Massu soon established that the author of these crimes was Dr Pétiot. What he did not know was whether Pétiot was killing to order.
Very early on in the investigation, Pétiot himself had appeared at the scene of the crime, on a bicycle. Posing as the leader of a Resistance network, he had told two of Massu’s subordinates that the bodies were those of ‘Boches’ and ‘collabos’ executed on Resistance orders. He had then vanished into the crowd – the police, who did not want to be in trouble at the Liberation, had let him go.
Yet the proximity of the charnel-house to the rue Lauriston, where the Gestapo’s henchmen tortured and killed their victims, had raised the possibility that Pétiot might be working for them. It was not until he had ascertained that the Germans had nothing to do with these murders that Massu felt able to proceed with a criminal investigation. Seven months later, Pétiot was caught – at a Paris métro station, wearing FFI uniform.
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Rough justice, in the form of severe beatings, was another form of reprisal. French railwaymen, known as cheminots, had played a courageous and important role in the Resistance, sabotaging German rail movements. Many were members of the Communist Party and a considerable number had been shot for their activities. It is not surprising that the treatment of colleagues suspected of collaboration was brutal. During the autumn of 1944, seventy-seven managers, stationmasters and senior engineers were ‘made incapable of working’. None, however, is recorded as killed.
It was not just the FFI who mistreated captives. The old Brigades de Surveillance du Territoire, which remobilized themselves at the Liberation and purged the police, were controversial in their methods. Even women were said to have been tortured in the camp of Queueleu near Metz. ‘The BST of Metz,’ according to one lawyer’s report, ‘were unashamed of using methods for which the Gestapo was condemned – prolonged ducking in a bath – freezing – the plank torture – bastinado, etc….’
In Paris, those accused of collaboration by Resistance groups or denounced anonymously by a neighbour or concierge were usually arrested early in the morning, before they had a chance to dress.