The Marseille´s Roundup took place in the Old Port of Marseille, under the Vichy regime, on 22, 23 and 24 January 1943. Assisted by the French police, which was directed by René Bousquet, the Nazis organized a raid to arrest Jewish people. The police controlled the identity of 40,000 people, and the operation unfortunately succeeded in sending 2,000 Marseillese people first to Fréjus, then to the camp of Royallieu near Compiègne, in the Northern Zone of France, and then to Drancy internment camp, last stop before the extermination camps. The operation also encompassed the expulsion of an entire neighborhood (30,000 persons) before its destruction. Located in the Old Port, the 1st arrondissement was considered by the Germans as a "terrorist nest" because of its small, windy and curvy streets[1] For this occasion, SS Karl Oberg, in charge of the German Police in France, made the trip from Paris, and transmitted to Bousquet orders directly received from Himmler himself. It is a notable case of the French police's willful collaboration with the Nazis.
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The operation was intended to reshape the area of the Old Port, a popular neighborhood whose small, curvy and windy streets were considered dangerous by the German authorities. The German used for this an urbanist plan prepared by French architects who supported the ideology of the "National Revolution" (Révolution nationale) supported by Vichy. They decided the quasi-total destruction of the 1st arrondissement of Marseille. Furthermore, according to Himmler's orders, the arrested population was to be evacuated to the concentration camps in the Northern Zone of France, in particular Compiègne. The Old Port itself was to be searched house by house by the German police, assisted by their French counterparts, and then the buildings dynamited.
Mandated by the head of Vichy, Pierre Laval, Bousquet demanded on 14 January 1943 that the operation be postponed for a week to better organize it and have reinforcement from police force. Furthermore, while the Nazis were about to limit themselves to the 1st arrondissement of Marseille, Bousquet spontaneously proposed to extend the operation to the entire city. According to historian Maurice Rajsfus, he also requested complete freedom of action for the French police, which he obtained from SS Karl Oberg.
According to historian Jacques Delarue, who was a witness of the operation, 200 police inspectors from Paris and elsewhere, 15 compagnies of GMR (the ancestors of the current CRS anti-riot police), and squads of constabularies (Gendarmerie) and of mobile guards (guardes mobiles) were brought to Marseille for the operation. In total, "approximatively 12,000 police men found themselves concentrated in Marseille.".[2] On 22 January 1943, the Old Port was completely locked-out. The city was searched house by house, apart of the more wealthy, residential, neighborhoods, during 36 hours. "In total, following tens of thousands of controls, nearly 2,000 Marseillese... found themselves in the death trains." wrote historian Maurice Rajsfus. 1,500 buildings were destroyed.
The Prefecture of the Bouches-du-Rhône published a public statement on 24 January 1943:
"For reasons of military order and to guarantee the safety of the population, the German military authorities notified the French administration of the order to proceed immediately with the evacuation of the north end of the Old Port. For its part, the French administration decided on the grounds of internal security to carry out a vast police operation to rid Marseille of certain elements the risks of whose activities weighed heavily on the population. The French administration worked hard to avoid mixing up the two operations. Sizeable police forces carried out numerous searches in the quarter. Entire neighbourhoods were surrounded and identity checks were made. More than 6,000 individuals were arrested and 40,000 identies were checked."[3]
The newspaper Le Petit Marseillais of 30 January 1943 added:
"We are making it clear that the operations for the evacuation of the Old Port were carried out exclusively by the French police and that they did not give rise to any incidents.[4]
On the other hand, German newspapers also acclaimed the operation. Walther Kiaulehn wrote in Signal, a German military newspaper:
"In the future, when we shall write the history of Marseilles, we will underline this remarkable feat that by having evacuated the old patrician neighborhood, which had been dishonored by the 20th century, the operation had used French and German policemen, as a group of engineers and physicians."[5]
A photo taken during this operation, and known since the beginning of the 1980s, show head of the French police René Bousquet posing alongside the SS Bernhard Griese, head of the German police in that region, of Totenkopf, a high level officer, of Marcel Lemoine, regional prefect, and of Pierre Barraud, delegate prefect to the prefectoral administration of Marseille.[6]
While 30,000 were expelled from their neighborhood, people from the criminal underworld, such as Paul Carbone, had voluntarily surrendered in the beginning of the week, to be jailed while the "horrible show" happened[7] Several hundreds of Jews of Marseille, whether French citizens or foreign, were first sent to Fréjus, than to the camp of Royallieu near Compiègne, and finally to Drancy internment camp, from where they were sent to the extermination camps. In total, 2,000 Jews found themselves on the death trains. On 23 March 1943, SS Röthke note that the French Jews arrested in Marseille were almost all "criminal scoundrels" ("canaille criminelle"), "as the French police repeatedly told me without being asked for", and that "when they were transferred from Compiègne to Drancy, they first had to be submitted to a special cleaning operation because they were so dirty and flea-bitten that the French direction of the camp judged an immediate intervention necessary to avoid epidemics in the camp".[8]