France Will Pay $60M in Reparations to American Holocaust Survivors
After a year of negotiations with the Obama administration, France has agreed to pay reparations to American survivors of the Holocaust who were deported to Nazi death camps in French trains.
The bilateral accord with the U.S. government will be signed on Monday and offers a $60 million lump-sum payment to be distributed among the eligible Holocaust survivors, their spouses and any eligible heirs, according to the Washington Post.
In return for these reparations, the United States is expected to help lift impediments that have kept the French national railway company, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français, from participating in railway projects that, due to the company’s actions during WWII, U.S. lawmakers have tried to bar the company from.
Between the years 1941 and 1944, the rail company transported 76,000 Jewish people to Nazi camps during the Holocaust.
Three years ago, the railway company formally apologized for transporting European Jewish people to the French-German border in 76 cattle cars where the people were then transported to Nazi death camps.
Company chairman Guillaume Pepy said, according to The New York Times, “In the name of the S.N.C.F., I bow down before the victims, the survivors, the children of those deported, and before the suffering that still lives.”
Stuart Eizenstat, the State Department’s special adviser for Holocaust issues who negotiated the agreement, according to The Washington Times, said survivors “could receive payment well over $100,000.”
In recent years The S.N.C.F. has made several attempts to amend its past, signing a partnership with the Shoah Memorial Holocaust museum in Paris, opening an archive center in Le Mans, and even commissioning an independent 900-page report on their participation in the death camp transfers.
Some French historians have qualified the company’s past WWII actions, noting that the Nazis occupied France and the Germans co-opted French national institutions at the time of the transfers.
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