Burden of History: French rail company SNCF ferried Jews to their death during the Holocaust. It faces new pressure to open its archives. Image by getty images

French lawmakers voted on Wednesday to create a $60-million fund to compensate Holocaust victims deported by French state rail firm SNCF to Nazi concentration camps in a move also intended to protect the company from future U.S. litigation.

About 76,000 Jews were arrested in France during World War Two and transported in appalling conditions in railway boxcars to concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where most died.

The vote was carried despite mass abstentions by France’s conservative opposition, which questioned the validity of the legal guarantees offered by the United States.

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Opposition lawmaker Pierre Lellouche described the fund, the fruit of an agreement reached in Washington last December, as “a kind of French capitulation before a form of permanent judicial, even legislative blackmail by the Americans.”

The fund, managed by the United States, will be accessible to those deported from France but who could not benefit from French compensation measures. It covers victims in countries except Britain, Poland, Belgium and the Czech Republic, which already have bilateral agreements with France.

U.S. politicians have for years sought to stop the rail firm taking part in tenders on their territory, asking for the French company to first provide compensation.

The agreement is intended to guarantee a judicial immunity that will mean SNCF can no longer be directly targeted by lawsiuits or excluded from tenders.

France’s upper house examines the bill on July 9.

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