The butcher of Paris: the mysterious Dr. Eugène (first chapter)
Lately, French Gestapo had been aware that a large number of Jews had been disappearing in Paris, without the Nazis knowing how this happened or what their fate was. Could this be a sign that the French Resistance had established a new safe escape route for fugitives from the Nazi regime in German-occupied France? In order to unravel this mystery, the Gestapo arrested and tortured the Jew Yvan Dreyfuss, one of several descendants of Adolph Dreyfuss who had joined the Resistance in protest at the anti-Semitism in French society which, a few decades earlier, had culminated in the Dreyfuss Affair.
Yvan Dreyfuss had been coerced by the Gestapo into serving as bait for the capture of Dr. Eugène. Yvan began looking for the doctor who was widely believed to be the creator of the escape route. After a few attempts, contact was made with the doctor and Yvan agreed how much he would have to pay for his escape to Argentina, how much luggage he could take, the time and place of the meeting point.
On the appointed day, he showed up at a beauty salon on Mathurins Street with two suitcases, 10 passport photos and the agreed money hidden in the lining of his suitcase. There he would finally meet Dr. Eugène, “a man with dark brown wavy hair and piercing black eyes”. Under the close watch of the Gestapo, Yvan and Dr. Eugène began the walk towards his office, where Yvan was to be vaccinated and given a false identity before joining the Resistance to flee to Argentina. However, Yvan managed to alert the doctor that they were being followed and they both managed to lose the Germans. After that, Yvan Dreyfuss was never seen again.
Two days later, the Germans managed to arrange another meeting between Dr. Eugène and another would-be fugitive, but once again the doctor managed to escape from prison. However, the doctor's accomplices who were present at the meeting point revealed under torture that Dr. Eugène's real identity was Marcel Petiot.
When the Gestapo arrived at Dr. Petiot's residence, they found an inordinate number of vials of morphine. The doctor was then imprisoned and tortured for weeks on end to make him confess the truth. Despite everything, he continued to deny that he was the person coordinating the escape route for those who wanted to flee the Nazi regime to a country in South America. At the beginning of January 1944, he was released on bail by his brother and a few months passed before the Gestapo realized what a foolish thing they had done.
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Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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