A French court today ordered the state and railway operator SNCF to pay fines for their role in the deportation of Jews during World War II.
Alain Lipietz, a Greens European Parliament deputy, and his sister Helene had sued SNCF for transporting their father and three relatives to a wartime transit camp that sent Jews off to Nazi concentration camps.
The French state could not have been unaware that transportation to the Drancy transit camp near Paris was a "prelude to deportation" to concentration camps, lawyer Yves Baudelot quoted the judges as saying.
The SNCF and the French state were ordered to pay total fines of some €60,000 to the plaintiffs, Mr Baudelot said.
The court also said the SNCF had never objected or protested against conducting the transportations, and had put Jews in freight carriages without food or minimal standard of hygiene, Mr Baudelot quoted the court as saying. Baudelot said his client would appeal against the verdict.
"I'm amazed by the ruling. I can't understand it," he said, adding the railway could not be held responsible for the transportation because it had been forced to cooperate with German occupying forces during the war.
"The SNCF had no liberty of manoeuvre. The (Nazis) told the SNCF by letter that they had to do everything the German authorities wanted, and if someone refused, they would be shot," he said.
Alain and Helene Lipietz had told the court their father Georges had been sent by train in mid-1944 from Toulouse to the Drancy transit camp, usually the last stop for French Jews before they were put on trains to death camps. He was freed from Drancy on August 18th, only days before Paris was liberated by Allied forces.
The plaintiffs said the SNCF billed the state for that transport which came two months after Allied forces had landed in Normandy.
A similar suit in 2003 failed when a Paris court ruled it could not establish that the SNCF was responsible for transporting Jews. Of the 330,000 Jews living in France in 1940, 75,721 were deported to death camps and only about 2,500 returned alive.