French Lawmakers Pass Controversial Holocaust Compensation Bill
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.
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.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
