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Christopher Millington, "Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe" (Manchester UP, 2025)
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Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Roland Clark and I'm here today talking to Dr. Chris Millington about his latest book, Murder in Marseille. Chris is reader in Modern European History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He's written extensively about the history of fascism, violence and 20th century France and has published a staggering 11 books in the last 11 years, including the Invention of Terrorism in France, France and the Second World War and A History of Fascism in France. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
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C
Thank you for inviting me on, Chris.
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A
Let's start with the basics. Who was Alexander I and why was he murdered in Marseille?
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C
So Alexander is king of Yugoslavia in 1934 and he's from the Kara Jorgevich royal family. This family had come to the throne in 1903 when Alexander's father Peter had become king. But in 1940 Alexander is declared Prince Regent. So he essentially takes over royal duties because of his father's ill health. And it's in this role that Alexander is involved in discussions over a post First World War state in southeastern Europe. This state comes into being on the 1st of December 1918, and it's known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. So the name gives the clue to. To the ethnic makeup of this new state, this amalgamation of several national minorities. But there are other minorities included within the borders of the state too. And essentially, if we're asking why was he murdered in Marseille in 1934, on the 1 hand, the answer lies in this complex arrangement under this new kingdom in Eastern Europe. So Alexander becomes king in 1921, and all along he seems to have had this vision of a single, united southern Slav people. It's a vision that is summed up in what's known as Yugoslavism later in his reign. And it amounts to essentially the forced homogenization of the country's people. So politically and culturally, Alessander hopes to erase ethnic and national differences that he believes are undermining the state. And he sees the way the parliament works in the kingdom. And he thinks that parliament is too divided because of this national issue. And so he thinks that if he can intervene and unite these Southeastern European peoples onto the identity of Yugoslav, is that everything will work out fine. And he takes steps to do this in January 1929, when he founds a dictatorship and ends parliamentary democracy. And this kingdom is later known after 1930 as Yugoslavia. Essentially, it's a state under Serbian domination. And so the other minority peoples aren't happy about this and think that they begin to think we need to remove Alexander from the throat. The second factor behind why he's assassinated lies in the OR can be explained by the cause of revisionism. So revisionism was an agenda of several states in south and Eastern Europe to change the borders of these nations, the borders that were drawn up in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Now they want to do this either because they. They're disappointed with what they got in 1918, they want to change the borders to better reflect the ethnic makeup of the territory or to, say, foreign policy objectives. Said, for example, Mussolini is interested in acquiring parts of Croatia. And so in the book I say that I argue that the Kyllinger cares because both these groups of peoples, these national minorities who feel repressed, and these revisionists who have ulterior motives or different objectives to the nationalists in Yugoslavia, they find that their goals can be best served together if Alexander is eliminated, because they think this will cause a collapse of the Yugoslav state and the people.
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A
That pull the trigger. So they belong to a movement terrorist group called the Ustasha. People often talk about the Ustasha as a fascist movement, but it doesn't really embrace fascism until the late 1930s. So what sorts of themes were the Ustasha demanding in the early 30s?
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C
Yeah, you're right. And in fact, I don't use the word fascist really to describe the group, because I thought that to do that might erase the fact that the group's politics evolved over time. So they weren't fascist from day one. And in fact, the group's leader, a man called Ante Pavelic, he had engaged with the democratic system in the 1920s, when a legal route to Croatian autonomy may have been possible. I also prefer to describe the group as ultra nationalist, because I thought that that better encapsulated the fact that even if the group did have some things in common with fascism, even in the early 1930s, and particularly with Italian fascism, it was nonetheless focused on the issue of Croatian independence. So I thought it was important to retain that focus. Now, the group from the beginning really is on the extreme right of Croatian politics. It's what I call eliminationist, because it believes that a Croatian state can only succeed if all of the Serbian elements are removed from it. And it's this eliminationist or exclusionary drive, which I argue characterizes right wing terrorism more broadly. The group also adds to this elements that we might consider to be typically fascist, or at least some elements that were shared with other fascist groups at the time, such as a leadership cult around Pavlich, a celebration of violence. They emphasized the virtues of the peasants and traditional ideas of morality, so, for example, a patriarchal family. They also prioritized the rights of people who could prove what they called their Croatian blood. And this rests on some more modern ideas about eugenics, with other ideas which are common on the right, about rootedness in the soil of Croatia. And these ideas are all developed into political manifestos in 1932 and 1933. So in the end, I think it's better to describe them as extreme right wing ultra nationalists. It's okay to say they're fascist if we're looking for a useful shorthand to describe them, but it tends to obscure the nuances.
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A
So with ideas like that, you can understand that they weren't particularly welcome in Yugoslavia, which means they set up their training camp in Hungary at a place called Jankapusta. What sorts of things happen to Jankapusta?
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C
Well, this camp, as you say, is based in Hungary, because Hungary is a revisionist power. And there have been several skirmishes on the border between Hungarian paramilitary groups and Yugoslav forces. And so they set this camp up in Hungary, there are other camps in Italy. And in fact, the Ustasha leadership is based in Italy, of course, with the connivance of Mussolini. And in these camps, the USTAA trains its fighters for terrorist attacks. And it also uses these camps as bases from which to launch incursions into Yugoslav territory. So the camp in Hungary opens in 1931. It's on the border between Hungary and Yugoslavia. The Hungarian government is well aware of the fact that it's there. And in fact, the Hungarian police direct some Croatian emigres to the camp. Now they do. At the camp, they do a mixture of hard labor, farm work. They also learn techniques of what the times called the modern terrorist suit. So, for example, small arms training, bomb making. They practice using targets such as cardboard cutouts of Alexander himself. And they also learn about the doctrine of the Ustasha. And they learn to. Or they're inducted into this personality, Kolta Pavelic, too. So essentially, the camp seems to have operated as we might imagine a contemporary terrorist training camp to have operated. And just as today, after the attack in 1934, it became a byword for fanaticism, terrorist fanaticism.
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A
How do we know all this? You listen to your talk. It sounds like you've gotten almost insiders knowledge about the Ustasha training program. But I'm guessing you weren't there at the time.
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C
No, the sources. There are problems with the sources because terrorist groups are secret. They don't want to publicize what's going on in their training camps. And so these sources that we have to rely on come really from the other side of things. And that means Yugoslav intelligence. There's nothing like a diary or memoir from someone who was in the camp. Unfortunately, there is a memoir from a former Ustasha lieutenant, a man called Anti Moshkov, who had lived in the group's camps in Italy. And so I did use his memoir to try to work out how things might have been in what we might call a typical Ustasha camp. However, there is a problem with Moshkov's memoir too, because it was written after 1945, and he'd fallen out with Ustasha and with Pavlich at that time. So, like with all sources, we have to be cautious. But I do think we can learn, or I do think I could learn some things from these sources. So the main one to do with the camp in Hungary is the booklet written by a Yugoslav spy. Her name was Jaelke Pogorelec. She was actually the girlfriend of the camp commander, Gustav Perchec. And there are different stories about how she came to be in the camp. There are some stories that say she was planted there by Yugoslav intelligence. Others claim that she was actually a committed member of the group, but turned on purchase after she fell out with him. Now, whatever the case, in, in April 1934, this booklet of her recollections or her experience at Janka Pusta is published in Croatia. So it's, it's actually a propaganda book published by the Yugoslav government in an attempt to expose the Ustasha. And it portrays the Ustasha as the puppets of Mussolini's government in Rome and as being anything but Croatian patriots. It does describe the conditions in the camp. So Pogorilet claims that most of the people living in the camp were miserable, that they were being coerced into terrorism. And so, and it gives some details of daily life. And so I try to use those to reconstruct what it was like in, in this Hungarian camp. And this, this booklet by Pogorelet becomes very famous after the Marseille attack, not only for what it reveals about the Sasha, but because the press make a great deal of the fact that it was a woman who, who wrote this book. And this woman had belonged supposedly to a terrorist organization.
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A
What an amazing source. Hunch. So the assassination squad who actually kills Alexander has five men and they're snuck into France from Switzerland, plus a woman who meets them when they arrive. What made these people into terrorists and assassins? Were they all brainwashed fanatics?
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C
That's a big question. The first thing I can say, though, is no, they were not brainwashed fanatics. Much like many other terrorists, academics have long rejected the idea that they are, they are psychopathic or automatons, and that they, they are brainwashed. And what we, or the, the, the approach that academics or scholars of terrorism tend to take is to look at the processes that lead people to terrorism. So that doesn't mean excuse in terrorism, but it looks at what is there in people's biographies that, that we can say might have pushed them that way. Now it's, it's difficult to do that with terrorists in the past because of course, they're no longer around for us to ask, why did you become a terrorist? And actually at the time, no one was interested in asking them why they became terrorists. So that means you have to look at multiple sources. So for example, the press, police reports, police interrogations, and you have to try and piece together the biographies of these people. And that's what I try to do in the book. In combination with contemporary theories about radicalization and try to work out why these people did the things that they did. And so when we look at the pathways that these people took into terrorism, we find it's difficult to disentangle the ideology from their own personal experiences. And by this, I mean that politics alone is not enough to prompt someone into violence. Now we can pick out members of the group where their political commitments seem stronger. So, for example, Zvonimir Pospil is sort of the deputy leader of this group in France. He seems to be the most politically motivated because he joins the ustasha in the mid-1920s, and he commits acts of terrorism and assassination during that decade. But he is also suffered violence and persecution at the hands of the Serbian state. And it seems to be a desire for revenge against the Serbs that leads into the Ustasha. There are also two other members of the squad, so Ivan Raich and Neo Kral, who seem less political, and they seem to have come to the Ustasha because of an experience of hardship. So Raich has emigrated to South America because he can't find work in Croatia, and he's recruited in South America by the Ustasha. Kral has also left Yugoslavia to look for work, and he's arrested in Austria for vagrancy, and he learns about the Ustasha in prison. So these aren't really brainwashed psychopaths. However, there is one man who seems to fit that image, and that is the assassin himself. So that's Velichko Keri. It seems he has this reputation of an assassin of great experience in southeastern Europe. He actually works for the internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in Bulgaria, and he's loaned to Bustasha for the assassination. And contemporaries portrayed him as a fanatical killer, and historians of the assassination have done the same. So if you read the books about the assassination published previously, he comes across almost like a James Bond villain, and he's indifferent to human life. He's also got several gold teeth as well. He's mentioned as the archetypal terrorist, but he too had suffered persecution as a teenager when the Serbian forces had burned his village to the ground. So we can't really say that that didn't play a role in is turning against or turning to political violence. So I suppose what I'm trying to say is people become terrorists for many different reasons, and politics is only one of them.
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A
And gold teeth is a. Is a key factor for a lot of people.
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C
Yes.
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A
So the assassin. The assassins, they snuck into France, and it's only when they got to Marseille that They found out who their target was. How did the assassination go down?
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C
Yes, you have this assassination squad of five men in France. So Postpashiel, Raich, Krall, Kerin and another man, Eugen Kwaternik, who becomes their leader. They arrived in Paris on the 30th of September. They split up in three of them. So Karin Kral and Kwatinik goes south. Ryich and Postil stay in Paris, likely to kill the King if he survived the attack in Marseille because he was due to go north to the capital. So these three men go south and they meet up with two more Eustachia operatives in the south of France. And these seem to be a married couple, the voyage, who've smuggled the weapons into France. Um, now the team in Marseille spent a couple of days doing reconnaissance and this is held by the fact that in the, in the local press, the, the King's itinerary is printed in detail so they know exactly when and where the King will be when he arrives on 9 October. On that day, Kerin and Krile collect the weapons from the, the Rudra Czechs and this, this married couple leave France and Quarternac leaves France as well. So they leave the two men in Marseille and they go to the city centre and they wait in the crowd for the King to arrive. The King lands in Marseille about 4 o'. Clock. He gets into this open top limousine and he's with the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou and French General Alphonse Georges. And the car sets off and there's hundreds of people cheering but he doesn't go more than about 200 metres when Keren runs out of the crowd, he jumps onto the car and fires into Alexander and the King in fact dies within seconds. And there is actually a film of the attack that you can watch online. However, it doesn't include the moment of the shooting itself. Karen is immediately mobbed by the police and the crowd. He's beater and he's shot and he dies later. His accomplice Crow, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen. And that's because he had chickens out at the last minute and he'd gone back to the hotel where he'd been staying and he tries to escape Marseille later that day. So the, the attack is over. Within seconds. Alexander is dead. Bartu was shot and he would later die, but that was because he didn't receive proper first aid at the scene. He actually, he was, he was shot in the arm and he was given a makeshift tourniquet, but the tourniquet was put below the wound rather than above it. And he was left to make his own way to the hospital in a taxi. And by the time he got there, he lost too much blood and he died. There are also two women in the crowd who are fatally shot, probably by the police. So that's Yolanda Faris and Madeleine Marie Durbeck. And I think it's important to remind people of those names because they are in no way commemorated after the attack. They are forgotten about, probably because the French authorities knew they'd been killed by the police police and wanted to keep it quiet.
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A
So in, in hindsight, probably wasn't a good idea to publish the King's itinerary in the newspaper and to put him in an open, open top car. What was the security around the King? Light, do you think? Part of the reason he died was that French security measures weren't good enough?
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C
Yes. As is often the case with these things, the investigation after the attack shows up serious failing. So I'll. I'll just mention the most, the most significant. So firstly, in the planning stage, there's the lack of coordination between the national police authorities and the local authorities in Marseille, and that's essentially due to institutional rivalries. So the prefect and the mayor argue over who has jurisdiction. There is also general incompetence. So the official from Paris who's meant to organise the trip, a man called Charles Cisteron, he is meant to oversee the plans for the King's visit, but he's largely absent in the planning phase. In the week before the visit, it looks like he's absent because he takes advantage of a trip to the south to go and visit family and no one can get in touch with him. Secondly, there's a problem with the number of police presence on Marseille in the day. So there were only enough officers to stand one to every six metres in front of the crowd. So of course that's. That's not enough to hold people back from getting to the King. And that meant it was easy for the assassin to run from the crowd to the car. There was also a problem with the length of the route going through Marseille. So it was meant to be 6km long, and that meant there were just simply not enough policemen available. There have been suggestion that they could use soldiers from the local barracks to feeling for the police. But the problem with that suggestion was that there were only black colonial troops left, and the French government decided that that would be an insult to the Yugoslav royal family. So they were just. It was decided they would be left in the barracks. And finally, the fatal error was that as the King's car was preparing to leave, this man sisterhood dismissed a group of police cyclists who'd been asked to cycle alongside the car as it went through the town, because he said that they would be blocking the view of the King from the French on the pavements, who were wanting to see this visiting monarch. And that meant that instead of being flanked by a dozen officers on bikes, this open top car was flanked by just two officers on horseback. So it's difficult to get around the fact that there were these very serious security failings. However, on the other hand, when we look at the Eustache's plan, it was highly sophisticated, it was well planned, it was well funded, it was organised to the last detail. And so you have this poorly organised and inadequate policing setup, meeting this highly organised terrorist operation which then succeeds. But I do like to, in the end, bear in mind, of course, something that the IRA tells Margaret Thatcher after she survived the bomb attack in Brighton in 1984, that we only had to be lucky once, but you have to be lucky always. So Alexander had survived assassination attempts before, but on the 9th of October 1934, is Lord Granada.
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A
So isn't one of the. The guy that pulls the trigger dies straight away. And once they catch the assassins who survive and they interrogate them, it sounds like these men were quite happy to tell the police everything that they wanted to know. Why were they so willing to admit everything after it had all happened?
- [25:32]
C
Yeah, you're right. The. The assassin dies almost immediately. The. The other men who are involved in this assassination team, so Prosper shield KRAU AND riots. Their escape is a complete shambles. And it's. It's really because the Ustasha hasn't planned for them to escape. So I said that this was a very organized plot. It's organized to the last detail, up to the moment of the assassination, but after that, there is no plan to get these men out of France. They do not know the geography of the country. They cannot read or speak French. I'm not sure how they were expected to get out or even if they were expected to get out. So they're caught pretty quickly, partly because they do things like they get on the wrong train. They don't hide the fact that they are foreign. When the police are on the lookout for foreigners, they flash the cash in cafes and restaurants that they've been given, which draws attention to them. So they're arrested pretty quickly. And once they are in custody, they pretty much tell everything about the Plot note, it does sound strange. It could be due to the fact that these confessions might have been beaten out of them. So the French police have a reputation for brutality. There are also Yugoslav officials present under the eyes of the Yugoslav intelligence chief, a man called Vladeta and Milicevic, who they also have a reputation for brutality. But I think there are other reasons. So firstly, the interrogations provide an opportunity for this man to propagandize. Remember, they are terrorists. They want to promote their cause. And so, especially in the interrogations where Yugoslavia agents are present, you see these men framing the Ustash as this mobile organization whose part of his crusade was to get rid of Alexander. Secondly, these men have nothing to lose, so it's unlikely that they're going to escape punishment. It's unlikely that they're going to be freed. They. They have taken oaths of secrecy not to say anything about the Ustasha, but to maintain that silence wouldn't achieve anything anymore. So an it seems like they may have thought if they confessed everything, it might have brought leniency in court, so they might have escaped the death penalty. They may have also felt abandoned by the Ustasha, cut adrift. And so I think too, if we think of terrorists as, say, brainwashed fanatics, then we should be surprised that they said anything at all. Or if we think of terrorists as rational people who are capable of assessing the situation that they're in and acting accordingly. Their best course of action was to confess, to try and avoid the most severe punishment.
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A
Eventually, these guys go through two separate trials. What approach did the lawyers take to defending them? Like, how do you defend a terrorist in court?
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C
Well, one important point is that you don't defend a terrorist in court, because at this time, terrorism isn't the case. Crime in France, it only becomes a crime in 1943. So these men are not charged as terrorists. They're charged with conspiracy and complicity in murder, and complicity in attempted murder. They go through two trials. So November 1935 and February 1936, the French charged them with. With criminal acts. They try to avoid charges of, say, political murder, because they are hoping to extradite the Ustasha leadership from Italy. So Pavlic and Quaternica are in Italy, and the extradition agreement between Italy and France allows extradition for criminal acts, but not political acts. This extradition process is. Is unsuccessful, though, because Mussolini wants to protect the Ustasha leadership. So in. In the first trial of the three men in November 1935, when the trial begins, it looks like the men who've confessed everything to police, are prepared to recant their confessions, to say that it's all been made up by the interpreter, by the police authorities. The. The interpreter was present in the interrogations. And this is because this is in line with the strategy of the lawyer, a man called Georges Desban, who was very sympathetic to the Eustache. And throughout the case he tried to obstruct proceedings. And this all came to a head in the trial when, after several attempts by De Bonne to throw into question the legitimacy of the trial, he questioned the impartiality of the court and the judge. And this leads to de Barn being ejected from the court and struck from the bar. So he's no longer permitted to be a lawyer either. Now the court appoints a second lawyer to represent the men. But the trial quickly ends because this lawyer says he simply doesn't know the case well enough to defend the men adequately. And so the men come back to trial in February 1936. And it's at this trial that the defence's strategy centres on framing the men as noble warriors of this oppressed Croat people. It's likely the defence lawyers wanted to win over the sympathies of the jury with stories of violence against Croats to try and explain why these terrorists assassinated a tyrant. And to some extent it works. So the jury finds the men guilty, but it grants them extenuating circumstances. So what that means is they avoid the death penalty. So they are guilty of the crime, but they acted under particular circumstances and so they cannot receive the most severe punishment. Interestingly, they are convicted of complicity in the murder of Louis Barthou as well. And it was by no means certain that Batu had been killed by the assassin's bullet. The two civilian victims that I mentioned are not, not, not on the charge sheet at all. They. They are. The deaths are hushed up, there are no charges, there is no follow up as to who kills these, these two women, because it's likely the police did this too. So, so the men are found guilty, they escape the death penalty and they are very relieved at this outcome.
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A
One final question. What do you think this story tells us about right wing terrorism and assassination in the 1930s? Are there any general lessons we can learn from it about things don't ride in an open top car?
- [32:49]
C
Yeah. In terms of general lessons or firstly, what can we learn about fascism and terrorism in the 30s is that. I think there's a lot of. In the literature, there can be a lot of emphasis on, I suppose what we might call public political violence. So street violence, so the violence of paramilitaries. And we're all familiar with the violence of uniforms, jack booters, men going to beat up the communist enemies in beer halls or meeting halls. I would argue there's less attention on the connection and the use of the connection between fascism and terrorism and the use of terrorism by fascists and fascist governments at this time. So this, this is an act of state sponsored terrorism. It's sponsored by Italy and Hungary. It operates thanks to a transnational fascist network in existence in Europe. And it's not the only example. So in France in the late 1930s, there is a terrorist group known as the Cagul who are also funded by the fascist government in Rome. So I think it reminds us that right wing groups at this time and right wing regimes are prepared to use terrorism alongside street violence to achieve their goals. As for general lessons, I think it's interesting to look at the pathways that these people take to violence and how these pathways are rooted in the context of the societies in which terrorists come from. So it's important to examine this context in combination with the terrorist group ideology, in combination with how the terrorists relate to the state, because it's an amalgamation of all of these factors that push people to violence. And as an aside, we can't ignore women in terrorist movements, something that scholars of terrorism are now very familiar with. Women in terrorist groups. But the average person reading the news may still think that women are the so called unusual suspects in terrorist groups. And the last thing is, I think that the attack shows that there can be, we can draw lines of continuity between historical right wing terrorism and contemporary right wing terrorism. So right wing terrorists today, like their counterparts in the past, are eliminationists. They, they attack enemy groups, usually minorities, or they attack the political establishment. And that reminds us too that right wing terrorism is insurgent. It seeks to use violence to bring about real political change within domestic regimes and structures. And with the rise of right wing populism at the moment, we shouldn't be surprised when the right turns to violence to achieve its aims against these groups and against these political establishments.
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A
It's all such a fascinating story. That's all we have time for today and thank you so much for sharing it with us.
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C
Thank you very much.