In January 1943, German soldiers blew up the harbor district in Marseille. The occupiers deport thousands of people, including hundreds of Jews. French police officers from the Vichy regime helped. France is struggling to commemorate the victims. This year, the country succeeds for the first time at the highest level.
In Marseille, a commemoration event was held for the first time to commemorate the raids against the Jewish population and the demolition of the old port district during the Nazi occupation in January 1943. It took 80 years for a mayor and minister to jointly recognize the events as “crimes against humanity,” said Marseille Mayor Benoît Payan. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin was also present at the event.
In a first raid on the night of January 22, 1943, the French police, who were responsible for the Vichy regime collaborating with Nazi Germany, arrested men, women and children in 1865 in the port district of Marseille, where numerous Jewish residents lived. The following day, German soldiers surrounded another, rather impoverished neighborhood north of the old port, inhabited by dockers and also by many Italian immigrants. For the Nazis, the quarter was a nest of resistance and a “pig sty”. French police arrested another 635 people there.
Finally, in the early morning of January 24, German soldiers and French police officers penetrated the entire district and transported around 15,000 residents to a camp in Fréjus, about 140 kilometers east of the city. Authorities then blew up 1,500 buildings in the area. After the raids, around 800 Jews were put into cattle cars and deported to German extermination camps. A total of 1,642 people were deported as part of Operation Sultan.
At the time, as a “cosmopolitan city in which people of all identities are in contact with each other,” Marseille represented everything “that the Nazis hated,” said left-leaning Mayor Payan at the commemoration event. At Payan’s initiative, Marseille celebrated the first large-scale commemoration to commemorate the events of January 1943. These have been “forgotten for too long and almost erased from our collective memory,” Payan said. Interior Minister Darmanin said in Marseille that he was “at the personal request” of President Emmanuel Macron at the commemoration event to close the “gap” in the French culture of remembrance.
French collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation and Vichy regime of World War II remains a hot topic in France to this day. In 1995, then-President Jacques Chirac was the first head of state to recognize France’s responsibility – also as a state – for raids and deportations in the country.
