French justice recognizes “crime against humanity” during the Second War

Mfrom 83 years after the facts, the investigation failed to identify still alive persons involved in the operation “Sultan”, carried out between 22 and 24 January 1943, declared the national anti-terrorism prosecutor, Olivier Christen, who moved to Marseille, the second largest city of France, to meet the last survivors and the families of the victims.

However, the typification of “crime against humanity” is properly characterized, both in relation to police raids and the looting and destruction of 1,500 properties in the Saint-Jean district, located behind the Vieux-Port (Old Port).

Named “small Naples”, the popular district of Saint-Jean saw its inhabitants — largely Italian immigrants — being removed by force. The facts are “relatively unknown to our fellow citizens (...), although we are facing a police raid of absolutely colossal proportions,” Christen stressed during a press conference.

The atrocities “targeted the inhabitants of a neighborhood because they were considered sub-inhabitants, sub-populations,” the prosecutor added.

The investigations of the Central Office for Combating Crimes against Humanity were initiated in 2019, after a complaint by the Marselhian lawyer Pascal Luongo, to which 19 survivors or descendants were added.

“ It is something extraordinary that, finally, the French Justice recognizes the tragedy of the port of Marseille”, said Antoine Mignemi, 89 years old.

In 1943, Mignemi was five years old, but remembers the “daunted face of the mother, terrified” when she woke him up at six in the morning, because the French police were at the door and needed to “leave immediately” of Saint-Jean.

This series of police raids – one of the largest, along with the Vel’ d’Hiv’, which took place six months earlier in Paris – was carried out by decision of the Nazis, with the active collaboration of French and under the orders of the Secretary-General of the Vichy Police, René Bousquet.

About 800 Jews, especially from the Opera district, were sent to death in Nazi extermination camps.

Another 20,000 people were expelled and thousands were temporarily confined in a detention camp in Fréjus, according to the prosecution. The investigation also confirmed 1,600 deportations, with 600 people sent to Germany.

“ Like a flock of sheep, the French police led us to the harbor. Then we were handed over to the Nazis,” Mignemi says.

“Bird wagons” took us to the camp in Fréjus, where men were separated from women and children. They spent a week there “in unhealthy barracks, without beds, sleeping on the ground on straw infested with worms, almost pressed against each other,” Mignemi said.

With tears in his eyes and his voice overwhelmed by emotion, this descendant of a Sicilian family recalls the daily life in Saint-Jean, marked by harmonious coexistence in a community of Italians, but also Greeks, Armenians, Spaniards, North Africans and Senegaleses — workers, sailors, dockers or craftsmen.

The “cosmopolitan neighborhood” was “deleted from the map” by the Nazis, in conjunction with the Vichy regime, “because the people who lived there were the most recent immigrants (...) that is, ‘desirable’,” Luongo told the AFP news agency.

Luongo's grandfather, of Italian origin, was among those arrested in Fréjus. “This recognition of crimes against humanity has a moral reparation value,” the lawyer said, stressing that this “history is unknown, even in Marseilles.”.

French President Jacques Chirac was the first in 1995 to acknowledge France's responsibility for police raids and deportations of Jews during World War II.