French Railway Compensates Family Sent to Gestapo Camp
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PARIS – A French court ordered the state and the national railroad company to pay $79,530 to the family of a French European Parliament Green member, Alain Lipietz, whose relatives were deported to a French transit camp during World War II.
The state and Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer, or SNCF, were condemned by the administrative tribunal of Toulouse for deporting Mr. Lipietz’s father and uncle by train from the southern city to the camp at Drancy, north of Paris.
This is the first time the French state and a government-owned company have been found guilty for the treatment of deportees during the Nazi occupation of France.
The court said the prisoners were held “in the Toulouse penitentiary administration following their arrest by the Gestapo” on May 8, 1944. They were transferred to Drancy on May 11 until Allied forces liberated the camp on August 17, 1944.
The state was responsible because it couldn’t have been unaware that their transfer to Drancy was the “prelude to deportation” to concentration camps, the court said.
Drancy was set up in 1941 as a transit point for Auschwitz in Poland and other Nazi camps, where some 75,000 French Jews died.
SNCF “never objected nor protested against carrying out these transports,” according to the ruling. The company billed the government for a third-class ticket for each prisoner, the Toulouse court said.
