Death Libri GmbH Death by Appointment

On the evening of March 11, 1944, firefighters forced their way into a smoke-filled townhouse on the Rue Le Sueur in German-occupied Paris and descended to the basement. What they found stopped them at the threshold: human bodies burning in the furnaces, dismembered remains in a quicklime pit, seventy-two suitcases packed for journeys that would never happen. The building belonged to Dr. Marcel Petiot.The Doctor of the Dead is a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that reconstructs one of history's most extraordinary criminal careers against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied France. Over thirty-five chapters, James Hyde traces Petiot from his disturbed childhood in Auxerre through his double life as a respected physician and serial murderer, his elaborate fake Resistance network that lured Jewish refugees and criminals to their deaths, his eight months of interrogation by the Gestapo who failed entirely to understand what they had captured, his brazen enrollment as an FFI intelligence officer during the Liberation, and his sixteen-day trial that became the most sensational criminal proceeding in the history of the liberated Republic.This is not only the story of a monster. It is a forensic study of how occupied France created the precise conditions - the persecution, the clandestinity, the forced desperation - that made Petiot's industrial predation possible. And it is, above all, a book that insists on remembering the dead by name.