French justice on Wednesday qualified as a “crime against humanity” the raids carried out in Marseille in the Old Port district in January 1943, a recognition long demanded by survivors and their descendants.

Published on: 09/30/2026 - 2:20 p.m. Modified on: 09/30/2026 - 2:48 p.m.

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A district of Marseille dynamited by the Nazis and the Vichy regime, 20,000 people displaced, 1,600 deported including Jews exterminated in the camps: French justice on Wednesday, September 30, described the raids on the Old Port of 1943 as a "crime against humanity", recognition demanded by survivors and their descendants.

More than 83 years after the events, the investigation has not, however, made it possible to identify any still living officials involved in Operation "Sultan", carried out from January 22 to 24, 1943, declared the national anti-terrorism prosecutor, Olivier Christen, who came to France's second city to meet the last survivors and the victims' families. But the offense of "crime against humanity" is well characterized, both for the raids and for the looting and destruction of the 1,500 buildings in the Saint-Jean district, behind the Old Port.

“Relatively unknown to our fellow citizens”

Nicknamed “Little Naples”, the working-class neighborhood was forcibly emptied of its inhabitants, many of them Italian immigrants. The facts are "relatively unknown to our fellow citizens (...) while we are faced with a raid of absolutely colossal scale", underlined Olivier Christen during a press conference. The abuses “targeted the inhabitants of a neighborhood because they were considered sub-inhabitants, sub-populations,” he added.

Investigations by the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes Against Humanity (Oclch) were launched in 2019, after the filing of a complaint by Marseille lawyer Pascal Luongo, joined by 19 survivors or descendants. “It is something extraordinary that French justice finally recognizes the tragedy of the port of Marseille,” confides Antoine Mignemi, 89 years old.

In 1943, little “Toinou” was five years old. He remembers the "decomposed face of my frightened mother" when she comes to wake him up at six in the morning: the French police are at the door and they must "leave immediately" from Saint-Jean.

Also read: Vél d’Hiv raid: meeting with the last witnesses

Nearly 800 Jews deported

This series of raids, among the largest with that of the Vel' d'Hiv' six months earlier in Paris, was carried out by decision of the Nazis, with the active collaboration of the French, under the orders of the secretary general of the Vichy police, René Bousquet. Nearly 800 Jews, notably from the Marseille Opera district, were sent to die in Nazi extermination camps.

In total, 20,000 people were expelled, several thousand temporarily interned in a retention camp in Fréjus, according to the complaint. The investigation also confirmed 1,600 deportations, including 600 people sent to Germany. “Like a flock of sheep, the French police led us to the port quay. There, we were taken in by the Nazis,” says Antoine Mignemi.

“Cattle wagons” take them to the camp in Fréjus, the men are separated from the women and children. They will spend a week there "in unsanitary barracks, without beds, on the ground in straw soiled with vermin, pressed almost against each other." With tears in his eyes and his voice choked with emotion, this descendant of a Sicilian family evokes a daily life in Saint-Jean marked by "living together" within a community of Italians, but also of Greeks, Armenians, Spaniards, North Africans and Senegalese. They were workers, sailors, dockers or artisans.

“Written off the map”

The "cosmopolitan district" was "wiped off the map" by the Nazis in consultation with Vichy "because the people who live there are the last immigrants (...) that is to say 'undesirables'", Me Luongo told AFP. "We are truly in the fiction of the elimination of 'parasites'".

His grandfather, of Italian origin, was one of the internees in Fréjus. “This recognition of crimes against humanity has a value of moral reparation,” he said, recalling the extent to which this “History is little known, even in Marseille.”

Also read Vél d'Hiv raid: when Chirac finally recognized the responsibility of the French state

The President of the Republic Jacques Chirac was the first in 1995 to recognize France's responsibility in the roundups and deportations of Jews during the Second World War. In 2023, Marseille town hall launched unprecedented commemorations for the Old Port raids.

Fernand Riberi, 76, whose grandfather "recognized as a political deportee" died in the German camp of Sachsenhausen, welcomes the court's decision. “It’s the feeling that my grandfather did not die anonymously.”

With AFP

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