Toulouse, France - Railway Sued For Wartime Transport Of Jews

Toulouse, France - Alain Lipietz, a Greens European Parliament deputy a French politician and his sister Helene, sued France's state-run SNCF railway on for transporting their father and three relatives to a wartime transit camp that sent Jews off to Nazi concentration camps, they accused the SNCF of organizing the transport of French Jews to the Drancy transit camp near Paris and billing the wartime government for its services. Of the 330,000 Jews living in France in 1940, 75,721 were deported to death camps and only about 2,500 returned alive. "The SNCF was quite autonomous when it came to earning money, so it has to assume its responsibility for its choices in how it treated the Jews," said Alain Lipietz.

A lawyer for the railway argued the statute of limitations had run out for the deportation of Jews, which stopped with the end of the four-year German occupation in 1944, and that the SNCF had been run by the collaborationist Vichy government.

The judge in the administrative court case said he would take three weeks to reach his decision. A similar suit in 2003 failed when a Paris court ruled it could not establish that the SNCF was responsible for transporting Jews.