A stone’s throw from Avenue des Champs-Elysées and just around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe runs rue Le Sueur. It is not a very long street and it is quite narrow. Unless one lives on the street there is perhaps no reason to walk along it. But it is the Paris street with the darkest past.

In the early evening of Saturday, March 11, 1944, police were summoned to the street. One Jacques Marçais from the apartment building at Number 22 had called the cops because five days previously the chimney of an uninhabited townhouse had started to spew a pestilential smoke and all the street’s residents were feeling sick. Two cops turned up on their bikes – it was wartime and France, thus Paris, was occupied by Hitler’s Nazi Germany and because of gasoline (petrol) rationing the bike had become the major means of transport. After a while of standing around they asked their station house to send some fire fighters to what had once been the most elegant property on the street but which had become dilapidated, it having stood uninhabited for a few years.
The firemen, having broken into the bolted house, found that someone or perhaps a group of people – they had the Gestapo whose security and intelligence service (the Sicherheitsdienst) was just around the corner on Avenue Foch in mind – was getting rid of a large number of bodies by burning them in the furnace of an old rusty water boiler in the house’s basement.

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