07 June , 2006
France's government and the state-owned railway company SNCF have been ordered to pay compensation for deporting Jews during World War II. The case was brought by Alain Lipietz, a Green Party member of the European Parliament, and his sister Hélène, whose father and three relatives were deported by train to a transit camp at Drancy near Paris during the Nazi occupation of France. More than 75,000 French Jews were transported from the camp to death camps in Germany. A court in the southern city of Toulouse now found that the French state and SNCF had been complicit in crimes against humanity and ordered a compensation payment of € 60,000 (US$ 80,000) to the family. Campaigners have called a landmark decision, but SNCF says it plans to appeal. "I am amazed by the ruling. I cannot understand it," Yves Baudelot, a lawyer acting for SNCF, was quoted as saying by "BBC News". He said the company could not be held responsible because it had been forced to cooperate with German occupying forces during the war. "The SNCF had no liberty of maneuver. 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."
Alain and Hélène 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 German trains to the death camps. Lipietz was freed from Drancy 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.
