Henri Lafont was a petty criminal who became the most powerful crook in Paris thanks to the Nazi occupation of France. A chance encounter in a prison camp led to a life of luxury running a ruthless mob of gangsters who looted the city on behalf of the Nazis who recognised Lafont’s talent for treachery and deceit. Lafont recruited ‘the French Gestapo’, a motley band of sadistic grotesques that included faded celebrities, ex-footballers, pimps, murderers, burglars and bank robbers. They wore the best clothes, ate at the best restaurants, and did whatever they pleased. They lived on the exclusive rue Lauriston where they mixed with celebrities and Nazi officers, while down in the cellar of their building, the rest of the gang tortured resistance prisoners. Then the Allies came, and a terrible price had to be paid.
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-07-14 - Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Henri Lafont was a petty criminal who became the most powerful crook in Paris thanks to the Nazi occupation of France. A chance encounter in a prison camp led to a life of luxury running a ruthless mob of gangsters who looted the city on behalf of the Nazis who
By the summer of 1943, Henri Lafont had become the most powerful Frenchman in occupied Paris. After spending his early years as a petty criminal scavenging from bins and running from the French police, Lafont was recruited by the Nazis. From this point on his life changed for ever. Lafont
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-09-07 - Publisher: Faber & Faber
Miss Dior is a wartime story of freedom and fascism, beauty and betrayal and 'a gripping story' (Antonia Fraser). 'Exceptional . . . Miss Dior is so much more than a biography. It's about how necessity can drive people to either terrible deeds or acts of great courage, and how
"Death in the city of light" is the true story of the hunt for Marcel Petiot, a respectable physician by day, who turned out to be a brutal serial killer by night in Nazi-occupied Paris. Petiot was charged with 27 grisly murders, though his victims - many of whom were
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004 - Publisher: Stanford University Press
The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan