Guy Penaud. “L’Inspecteur Pierre Bonny. Le policier déchu de la ‘Gestapo française’ du 93, rue Lauriston”
Guy Penaud. L’Inspecteur Pierre Bonny. Le policier déchu de la “Gestapo française” du 93, rue Lauriston. Paris, L’Harmattan, Coll. Mémoires du XXe siècle, 2011, 260 p.
Texte intégral
- 1 Jacques Bonny, Mon père l’inspecteur Bonny, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1975.
1Guy Penaud seems particularly well qualified to write the biography of Pierre Bonny. He had a distinguished career in the French police, for which he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. He has also published books on the activities of the SS in occupied France and the Resistance, as well as an account of the Seznec case, in which Bonny was involved. His book is carefully researched and documented, with a detailed bibliography, but it may leave the reader with a certain dissatisfaction. It contains detailed information on Bonny’s life and career and gives some explanation of how he became a traitor and common criminal, but the man himself remains elusive; at times the book reads more like a police report than a fully-fledged biography. This is probably because « personal information » on Bonny is scarce, coming mainly from a biography written by his son1 which apparently tends towards exculpation, not to say hagiography.
2« Gestapo française » is something of a misnomer. Henri Lafont’s organization, which Bonny joined in 1942, was originally established by the Abwehr to purchase supplies for the Germans, i.e. food, clothing, luxury goods and furniture, and it was subordinate to the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. However, its nominal chief was an Abwehr officer, Hermann Brandl, and so were its major purchasers, and it was intended from the outset to provide the Germans with information. Brandl disliked having contacts with criminals (!), so he left his subordinate Wilhelm Radecke to deal directly with Lafont and his men. Lafont himself was a professional criminal who was awaiting deportation to French Guyana when the Germans invaded France – he owed his recruitment to a meeting with some Abwehr agents while in prison. Naturally, he recruited his « staff » in the underworld.
3Pierre Bonny is sometimes presented as a « super-cop », almost a real-life Maigret, who had played a major part in solving many of France’s major criminal cases between the wars – Seznec, the Stavisky frauds, the Prince affair and a number of half-forgotten political scandals. Penaud shows by means of careful documentation that in fact his role in many of these cases was relatively unimportant. He apparently did help to solve the Seznec case, though of course that subsequently added to his ignominy, as he was accused by the Seznec family and a large number of writers on the case of falsifying evidence. Penaud exculpates him of this charge (and in the process demolishes, for this reader at least, the idea that Seznec was unjustly convicted). For the rest, much of Bonny’s police career seems to have consisted in helping to protect various political notables from the risk of scandal. He undoubtedly owed some of his fame to his good relations with the press; many crime reporters were happy to record his ideas and opinions on a fait divers, even when they were subsequently shown to be wrong.
4Bonny also had close relations during his police career with leading underworld figures, notably from the Marseille mafia. Of course France’s first great policeman, Vidocq, was a former master criminal, and all police are obviously required to associate closely with criminals in order to do their jobs successfully. Bonny’s association went further, however. For example, he was not above accepting bribes. He also managed to make himself a number of enemies among his colleagues. As a result he was suspended twice, before being finally dismissed from the police in 1935. An attempt to pre-empt his inevitable dismissal by voluntarily resigning was unsuccessful. Thus Bonny was no longer a policeman when the Nazis occupied France. Between 1935 and 1942 he seems to have subsisted by writing articles for the newspapers and doing some private detective work. He may also have dabbled in minor criminal activities. He never seems to have lost hope of being one day reinstated in the police.
5Bonny was nevertheless in some ways a surprising recruit for the Nazis. He seems not to have been particularly anti-Semitic; as a policeman he had been willing (for a consideration) to help a foreign Jew who wanted to prolong his residence in France. He was also allegedly an active Freemason, and according to Robert Brasillach he was in relations with Lucien Sampaix, a communist journalist and secretary-general of L’Humanité, shot by the Nazis in 1941. These dubious connections or his generally doubtful reputation may have been why the Nazis refused Radecke’s proposal to accept him as an Abwehr agent. Radecke then suggested he should join Lafont’s band. By 1942 the « French Gestapo » was actively tracking Jews, resistants and other « enemies of the Reich », particularly if they were rich. But the band’s members lacked any sense of organization. Bonny was an excellent organizer and administrator, whose police career had taught him how to draw up reports and statements and plan an « operation », and Lafont therefore welcomed him. Bonny apparently had no objections to joining a gang of criminals. He may have seen it in part as a way of revenge for his dismissal.
6Once installed in the rue Lauriston, Bonny seems to have abandoned whatever scruples he may once have had. He subsequently said that he viewed his « Gestapo » period as a bout of madness, but no doubt he welcomed the security and power of his position. He attempted at his trial to depict his role as purely administrative, but there is ample evidence that he not only actively pursued resistants and other « enemies of the Reich » with enthusiasm, but took part in torture sessions. His most notable achievement, which was purely accidental, was the capture of Geneviève de Gaulle, the General’s niece and an active Resistance worker. This probably told heavily against him at his trial, particularly as she was lucky to survive her ordeal, which included a period at Ravensbrück. It also emerged clearly at his trial that Bonny took orders from Standartenführer Knochen, the head of the SIPO-SD in occupied France, whose remit also included Belgium. Indeed, Bonny acquired an SS rank himself (Obersturmführer) as an officer directing the « North African Brigade ». This unit of North Africans, many with criminal records, was originally established with a view to action in Tunisia, but it was eventually deployed in the Corrèze region to fight the Resistance. In fact, as an account by the Prefect of Trouillé shows, it behaved more like an invading army, committing all kinds of violence against the local inhabitants, whether or not they had the slightest connection with the Resistance. Bonny’s role during this « invasion » was to carry out interrogations. These events took place in spring and early summer 1944, just before the Allied invasion.
7Bonny probably also played a part in the mysterious disappearances of some members of the Lafont gang. He may have been assisted in disposing of them by the infamous serial killer Marcel Petiot, who claimed at his trial to have been a distinguished Resistance leader, responsible for the deaths of 63 traitors. By the time Petiot was tried in 1946 Bonny was dead, and Petiot’s relations with the « Gestapo française » remain obscure. (The « real » Gestapo took him seriously as a Resistance leader, to the point of arresting and torturing him – he held out until his release and won the admiration of the genuine resistants imprisoned with him). A number of Petiot’s victims were German Jews – according to him they were German agents, which may have been true in one or two cases, but certainly not the majority. They were rich enough to be able to pay to escape from France, though. But Penaud’s book contains no evidence that Bonny was involved in or aware of these activities, or indeed that he played any special part at all in hunting Jews as a member of the « French Gestapo ».
8Perhaps surprisingly, Penaud’s account of Bonny’s trial and execution in 1944 is very short, shorter than his chapter on Petiot. According to Bonny himself in a letter to his wife, he was not questioned in detail before being tried. He and ten other members of the « Bonny-Lafont » gang were tried between December 1 and 12, 1944. The chief judge was assisted by four judges/jury members chosen for their membership of the Resistance. This does not sound exactly like an impartial court, but impartiality must have been difficult to find in those times. Among the specific charges in the indictment were the executions of three Resistance leaders whose capture was attributed to Bonny, and the « invasion » of the Corrèze region. Penaud does not mention any other specific charges concerning him, but he was undoubtedly guilty of belonging to what Belgian law calls an association de malfaiteurs, and for the court the fact that he had been under German orders was sufficient to condemn him. He and nine other members of the « Bonny-Lafont » gang were executed by firing squad on December 27, 1944.
9It seems unlikely that Bonny supported the Nazi ideology in any way. He said himself that his downfall was largely due to the times he lived in. He joined the Lafont gang for reasons of expediency; he would probably have been just as willing to work against them under a different regime. This is reminiscent of certain German professional policemen who sank to depths of criminality under the Nazi regime. The names of « Gestapo » Müller (not even a member of the Nazi Party) and Artur Nebe spring to mind, as well as those of lower-ranking policemen such as Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl. The dividing line between a « super-cop » and a « super-crook » can be very thin. It is perhaps a pity that Penaud does not reflect further on the role of the French police during the Occupation, but this is a subject which many historians of the period have preferred to avoid. Indeed, the whole question of relations between the Nazis and national police forces in the occupied countries is particularly delicate. It would merit more than one detailed study, and such studies might also throw some light on how our present police are recruited, their role in our societies and how they do their work.
Pour citer cet article
Référence papier
Sash Lewis, « Guy Penaud. “L’Inspecteur Pierre Bonny. Le policier déchu de la ‘Gestapo française’ du 93, rue Lauriston” », Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire, 113 | 2012, 174-177.
Référence électronique
Sash Lewis, « Guy Penaud. “L’Inspecteur Pierre Bonny. Le policier déchu de la ‘Gestapo française’ du 93, rue Lauriston” », Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire [En ligne], 113 | 2012, mis en ligne le 16 avril 2025, consulté le 20 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/temoigner/13801 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13rje
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