The Destruction of Le Panier
Sixty-five years ago, the Nazis carried out one of their most spectacular atrocities in occupied France, destroying almost an entire quartier of Marseilles. John Gimlette pays a visit to Le Panier, and finds it still physically and emotionally scarred.
It was a place of legendary squalor. Most of the streets were too narrow and steep even for carts, and the fish had to be carried up on poles. Surprisingly, amongst those who’d briefly wallowed in its filth were Napoleon, Casanova, the painter Puget, and a convent of nuns who cut off their noses to scare the Saracen raiders. And the district’s filles de joie were known to sailors everywhere as some of the most obliging and unrepentant in the world.
The Germans detested Marseille. The head of the French Gestapo, Karl Oberg, described the city as ‘a cancer’, and declared that ‘Europe cannot survive until Marseille has been purified’. As for Le Panier, despite the fact that it was no more than a miserable ghetto of refugees, it was referred to in Berlin, rather mystically, as the Kasbah Marseillais.
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