Death In The City of Light

David King, “Death In The City Of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris”, Crown Publishing, 2011, Kindle Library Edition (432pp)

This book details the true story of a Paris serial killer who may have murdered as many as 150 victims, although only charged with the murder of twenty-seven. The Paris 16th arrondissement townhouse at 21 rue Le Sueur and its’ owner Dr. Petiot became infamous. In the 1946 trial it became evident that the Dr. Petiot, during the German occupation, had “brutally exploited opportunities for gain, slaughtering the most vulnerable and desperate people, the majority of them being Jews fleeing persecution. Dr. Petiot had become the self-appointed, for-profit, executioner for Hitler, gassing butchering, and burning his victims in his own private death camp.”

My Notes:
Loc 222: During the WWII German occupation, Paris population went from three million to about eight hundred thousand. The population of Paris, as well as the cities over northern and eastern France, headed south or southwest. The Germans would occupy three-fifths of the country. Over the next four years, France would pay the Third Reich almost 60 percent of its national income.

Loc 276: In al, 75,721 Jewish men, women, and children would be deported from France to Nazi death and concentration camps in the east; this was twenty-five percent of the Jews in France. Thirty-three thousands of them disappeared in the eleven-week period following July 17, 1942. Only 2,800 of them would return home. (Note: (by contrast, the Netherlands deported seventy-eight percent of their 140,000 Jews).

July 16, 1942 (Black Thursday): in the course of forty-eight hours, some 12,884 Jewish men, women, and children were seized by French police, marched into the city’s buses, and then crammed into the sports stadium Velodrome d’Hiver to await deportation.

Loc 3129: Secret memo Nr. 772989/44 of August 23, 1944, informed the German commander of Paris that if the city fell into the enemy’s hands they must find “nothing but a field of ruins.” On August 24th the allies entered Paris.

Loc 4080: A French jury in 1946 had only seven members, and two-thirds majority sufficed to reach a verdict. All jurors were, by law, male. Also, in French law, families of victims may hire lawyers to represent them during the criminal trial and, like the prosecutor, cross-examine witnesses and the defendant.

Loc 5553: Petiot was found guilty of twenty-six of the twenty-seven charges of murder.

Loc 5708: In 1952, an architect bought the rue Le Sueur town house and proceeded to tear down the building ‘stone by stone.’ He was looking for the missing valuables and money from the victims of Petiot, nothing was found.