Marcel Petiot, the "Doctor of Death"

The victims: people trying to escape

The people who died at the hands of Dr Marcel Petiot were, for the most part, men, women and children trying to get out of occupied Paris. Many were Jewish families facing roundups and deportation; others were people with reasons to avoid the police. Historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus, whose 2025 study focuses on the Jewish victims, counts 16 Jews among the 27 people investigators linked to Petiot; another French account puts the figure at twelve. Among those Dreyfus describes are Joachim Guschinow, a furrier on rue Caumartin; Dr Braunberger, a physician barred from practising by Vichy's antisemitic laws in May 1942; and the Wolff family, refugees who had already fled Nazi Germany. A child, René Kneller, disappeared together with his parents, and a boy's pyjamas found among the stolen belongings were later tied to him.

A false way out

From 1943, Petiot, a doctor who had moved to Paris in 1933, presented himself under the name "Docteur Eugène" as the organiser of an escape route to Argentina. People hunted by the Gestapo were told to come to his property at 21 rue Le Sueur, in the 16th arrondissement near the Étoile, at night, bringing luggage, cash and jewellery to pay for the journey. None of those who arrived ever reached their destination. Petiot kept their possessions, and one estimate puts the value of what he took at the equivalent of around 30 million euros today.

Discovery at rue Le Sueur

In March 1944 neighbours, troubled for days by smoke and a bad smell from the chimney of the town house, called the authorities. Sources differ slightly on the date, giving either 10 or 11 March. Firefighters and police entered the building and found human remains in the cellar. Petiot arrived and, according to one account, first pretended to be his own brother, then claimed the dead were Nazis, a story that allowed him to walk away. The house later yielded dozens of suitcases and hundreds of kilograms of clothing and other personal effects. An arrest warrant was issued, and the investigation was led by Commissaire Massu of the Brigade criminelle.

The manhunt and arrest

Petiot disappeared into the confusion of the Liberation. He joined the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur, the armed Resistance units, under the invented identity of "Captain Valéry", and was posted to the Reuilly barracks. He gave himself away by writing to the newspaper Résistance to demand a right of reply to an article about him. Police traced him, and he was arrested on 31 October 1944 as he left a métro station, by Inspector Henri Soutif according to one report.

The trial

The trial opened on 18 March 1946 before the Seine assize court and was billed as the great media trial of the Second World War era, compared in the press to the Landru affair after the First World War. Newspapers called the defendant "Docteur Satan". Petiot, defended by the celebrated lawyer René Floriot, did not plead insanity. Instead he insisted he was a Resistance fighter who had killed enemies of France, claiming 63 victims (one account gives 62), and accused some magistrates of having served Vichy. He could not explain why ordinary missing people, including a child, were among the dead. Judges and jurors visited the house during the hearings. After about three hours of deliberation on 135 counts, the jury convicted him on 4 April 1946 of the premeditated murder of 24 of the 27 victims identified; the remaining charges lacked sufficient evidence.

Execution

Petiot was sentenced to death and guillotined at dawn on 25 May 1946 at La Santé prison in Paris, accompanied to the end by Floriot. What became of much of the property he had taken from his victims was never established.

Why the case still matters

The Petiot affair sits at the intersection of ordinary crime and the persecution of Jews in occupied France. His victims were vulnerable precisely because German occupation and Vichy law had stripped them of rights, livelihoods and safety, leaving them dependent on anyone who promised a way out. Yet, as Dreyfus stresses, the 1946 proceedings were neither a collaboration trial nor a trial for antisemitism, and whether Petiot was himself antisemitic is unknown. His attempt to wrap himself in the Resistance also shows how the chaos of Liberation justice could be exploited. Interest has revived recently: Dreyfus's book L'affaire Petiot et la Shoah (Grasset, 2025), built on police reports, interrogation records and the life stories of the missing, re-centres the case on its Jewish victims, and in September 2025 France 2 broadcast a documentary series, Petiot, un tueur sous l'Occupation, drawing on police interrogations, the trial and Massu's memoirs.