French court overturns Holocaust compensation case

A French court has struck down a ruling that had ordered the state owned rail operator SNCF to pay compensation to the family of a Jewish man transported to an internment camp in Nazi-occupied France. An appeals court in Bordeaux overturned a landmark verdict in June last year, which could affect hundreds of other potential lawsuits against SNCF by victims of wartime deportations or their families.

An administrative court last year ordered the French government and SNCF to pay 61,000 euros to the family of Georges Lipietz, a Polish-born Jew arrested by French police and taken to a transit camp near Paris in 1944. The SNCF, which has received 1,800 requests for compensation since the ruling, said it had been forced to obey the orders of the government at the time.

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