THE KING OF NAZI PARIS HENRI LAFONT AND THE GANGSTERS OF THE FRENCH GESTAPO
CHRISTOPHER OTHEN Biteback, 290pp, £15
Henri Lafont was the alias of Henri Chamberlin, a petty criminal who rose to become king of the Parisian underworld during the Nazi Occupation through plundering Jewish property and informing on or assassinating resistance operatives. In this ‘highly readable, if gruesome book’, wrote Simon Heffer in the
Daily Telegraph, Othen ‘tells the story of these repulsive men and their exploits with brio... he captures their sordid milieu perfectly’. Othen even argues that ‘by 1943 Chamberlin was the most powerful Frenchman left in Paris’ and that ‘it was not only celebrities such as Maurice Chevalier who came to him for favours (something Chevalier tried hard to live down after the war), but even the head of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, on the grounds that Chamberlin had better access to the most influential Germans than he, a de facto prime minister, did’. Chamberlin told the lawyer who failed to save him from the firing squad that he ‘lived the equivalent of ten lives’ and so ‘the least I can do is give you one of them’.
For Paul Lay, in the Times, ‘the story that Christopher Othen tells, energetically, vividly, sometimes convolutedly, is a grotesque one. The world we enter is that of the sleazy nightclubs and gangster bars of occupied Paris, booming with the money splashed around by the men of the Wermacht’. He ‘captures the seediness and amorality of Lafont, his men and occupied Paris, and
makes you thank God that Britain never had to experience the Grand Guignol of Nazi occupation’.