Revisiting the Diversity of Victims in Marseille on the Edges of the Holocaust

Nils H. Roemer, Director, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies
Shefali Sahu, MS in Information Science
Yannis Soonjung Kwon, Undergraduate Research Apprentice

In the interwar period, Marseille, France’s second-largest city, was a provincial port at the edge of the Mediterranean and functioned as Sheila Crane’s excellent book suggests, as a “Mediterranean crossroad” between the French Empire and its colonies. The ebb and flow of colonial subjects had rendered the port city already a transient space before the rise of Hitler Germany. During the 1930’s Marseille became the destination of refugees as one of the few ports still open to the world. Along many Jewish refugees were many others; According to Alma Werfel’s diary, ”The city swarmed with refugees. They had been Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Poles; now most of them were stateless, many without passports, some without any papers, all wanting only to get out, to go far away.”    

Refugees, citizens of France, and new arrivals from several European countries and colonies rubbed shoulders in the cafes and streets of the harbor city.  Even before the deportations began, many refugees managed to leave Marseille such as on the famed refugee ship from Marseille to Martinique that allowed the escape of German writer Anna Seghers, photographer Germaine Krull, and painter Wifredo Lam. 

Marseille was an escape route to many famous European Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, but this case study is not indicative of the Jews who escaped through Marseille, but the individuals who were eventually deported to the East. Amongst the deportees from Marseille were individuals born in North Africa, the Middle East, and across Europe. Foreign-born Jews outnumbered French-born Jews 729 to 598. While Marseille had become the destination for many German and even Polish Jews, their total combined only 147 in comparison to 221 natives from Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey. 

The data of deportees reveals an interesting gender difference amongst the deportees of significantly more men than women; nearly 69% of non-European and 65% of European foreign nationals were men. The discrepancy possibly suggests that many unmarried men amongst the foreigners had come to France in search of work but not as part of a chain migration of larger families. However, this does not indicate a complete lack of presence of non-French families, as some of the 256 children and teenagers born in Marseille were the children of foreign nationals. The deportations of foreign nationals consisted of a significantly older population born before 1900 (266 out of 412), while deportations of French-born Jews had a higher presence of teenagers and children born after 1920 (256 out of 598). Despite foreign-born Jews constituting 55% of the deportees from France, they were murdered at more than double the rate of French-born Jews from 1941–1943.  

The urban space of Marseille thus created a unique context for the Holocaust, where victims of the Holocaust came from both sides of the Mediterranean. Our statistical analyses help to make otherwise invisible victims visible. To be sure, Jews of North Africa do not represent a large number of the victims of the Holocaust, but they do represent a significant number of the Jews who were deported from Marseille. Studying the profile of victims in particular urban settings allows us to nuance and pluralize the background and experiences of the victims.