A scream of anguish pierced the dead of the night at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Startled, a flock of birds tumultuously rose against a sullen moon, casting flickering shadows on the tombstones of Molière, Balzac and Sarah Bernhardt. Another wail reverberated off the walls and the monuments ornamenting the eternal silence of the burial grounds. Alerted and alarmed, the guards cautiously moved with their searchlights ablaze in the direction of the lamentation.
Was it a call beyond the grave? As they approached the source of the wailing, their steps became hesitant and uncertain.
The cry came from the mausoleum of a long-departed admiral. Upon closer inspection, the guards saw a ghost-like figure trying to reach out to them through the rusted iron bars at the entrance of the sepulchre.
The woman was not an apparition: her name was Zelda and she had been left for dead, buried in a shallow grave inside the enclosure of the admiral’s tomb. Resurrected and rescued, she unveiled a tale of unimaginable horror about the serial killing of Jews in occupied France by Marcel Petiot, a physician known as Dr. Satan.
Petiot claimed he had developed a secret network of escape to South America and told his Jewish and gentile patients, who were hounded by the Gestapo, that he could save their lives. He asked them to bring hard currencies and jewelry to an apartment building in a secluded suburb of Paris. In the “safe house,” Dr. Satan murdered his clients and stole their cash and gold. He pretended to vaccinate them against tropical diseases, as allegedly required by Argentine immigration authorities, but actually injected them with cyanide.
He then disposed of the bodies in places they would never be discovered. He dumped them in the Seine, dissolved them in quicklime, buried them in the vaults of ancient cemeteries and incinerated them in a furnace he built in a desolate farmhouse. He killed more than 60 people in this fashion.
Friends of Jews who were killed by Dr. Satan simply assumed that the Nazis had caught and murdered them.
In a macabre comedy of errors, the Gestapo suspected that Petiot was helping Jews and other wanted persons escape. Believing that he was running a vast underground resistance movement, they set a trap for him, hoping to arrest all the resistance conspirators. The Gestapo sent a spy named Yvan Dreyfus, who told Petiot that he had bags of diamonds for anyone who would save his life. Not surprisingly, Dreyfus also disappeared after making contact with the merchant of darkness in the City of Light. Sensing that the Nazis were after him, Dr. Satan went underground for a while.
After the crisis passed, he resumed his activities. Finding that it was difficult and dangerous to transport bodies to the farm, he bought a house on rue Le Sueur in Paris. But greed had made him reckless: burning human flesh in the city was a mistake. Neighbours complained about the dark smoke belching from the chimney, the greasy soot that settled on laundry, and the permeating stench.
Dr. Satan, in effect, had established a mini-Auschwitz right in the centre of Paris. When the French police entered the house, they found, according to David King, author of Death in the City of Light, a roaring fire in a coal stove in the basement. In the fire and scattered throughout the house and the garden, the authorities discovered human remains.
A global scandal erupted. He was called the Jack the Ripper of Paris, the Butcher of rue Le Sueur, the Demonic Ogre, a latter day Bluebeard and even the Werewolf of Paris. But Dr. Satan escaped and eluded the police. He changed his appearance, fabricated identity papers and joined the resistance, effortlessly blending into his new surroundings.
In the end, though, crimes of this magnitude are never forgotten, and after a relentless manhunt lasting years, he was eventually recognized and arrested in 1944. Dr. Satan was tried in 1946 and condemned to death. The last sound he heard was the whistle of the heavy blade of the guillotine thundering down toward his neck.
