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Wall Street Journal

‘Marseille 1940' Review: Port of Exit

The author of 'Marseille 1940' suggests by his title that we focus on a specific place and time. The events that unfold in his book occur mainly from May to July 1940 in Marseille, the second-most populous city in France. It was then the largest port on the European Mediterranean and a short trip to North Africa and Spain, destination points for all those, both French and others, fleeing Europe. During a brief period, this coastal metropolis was the most important port in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Wehrmacht invaded France in May 1940 and within a month had defeated the Continent's largest and most admired army. The rest of Europe was stunned, and all anticipated that the United Kingdom would be the next victim of this ferocious dictatorship. The U.S. was especially anxious, for it had believed that France and the U.K. would keep the Atlantic safe from the German navy. The German invasion had succeeded so quickly and definitively against the French army that thousands upon thousands of French citizens, along with refugees from a dozen other nations threatened by Adolf Hitler, sought immediate safety in Marseille. Uwe Wittstock, a German journalist, has done extensive research in the latest available archives and explains in his book how chaos replaced order in what had previously been a confident nation. The Germans soon realized that they could not occupy all of France bureaucratically and militarily, so they established a collaborationist government, with Marshal Philippe Pétain, the famed hero of the Great War, as its leader. Pétain was allowed a small armed force to police resisters, mostly communists, who had immediately formed in response to the Nazi occupation. It had taken the Vichy police and the Gestapo weeks to control the port, and many saw Marseille as their last option for escape. Mr. Wittstock's book, ably translated by Daniel Bowles, is replete with examples of those persons—both domestic and foreign—who felt they had to flee France in 1940 or else be arrested by the Gestapo. Paris proper had a population of two million; about half that number had already fled. These included Jews and others who believed they might be targets of German oppression. Many of the latter eventually returned to their homes but, for the first few months after the invasion, the bombed railroads and major thoroughfares prevented Paris from being repopulated.