A frisson of excitement has swept around the international legal community, presently digesting the implications of a decision by a Toulouse court to find French Railways guilty of being involved in the deportation of French Jews during the Second World War.

If SCNF can be fined – even the modest amount of 62,000 Euros - they speculate whether similar actions might be brought against other railway companies involved in the forced transportation of Jews from one side of Europe to the other. Trainloads of Jews were carried from Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Italy, as well as France, in each case involving the local railway networks, supplying if not whole trains then in some instances engines and cattle trucks, as well as access to track, signaling, stations and railway personnel. German Railways of course provided the bulk of the transport within the borders of the Third Reich and might be thought particularly vulnerable to litigation.

The case that set this interesting precedent was brought by a French Deputy, Alain Lipietz, and his family. Lipietz’s father and uncle were taken by special SNCF trains to internment camps near Paris in 1944 and both survived to tell their tale.

SNCF is appealing against the court’s ruling, claiming its staff was only following orders, a defence used long ago at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, with a conspicuous lack of success.  The judgment was heavily influenced by the successful prosecution for crimes against humanity in 1997 of Maurice Papon, a minister in both the collaborationist Vichy war-time government and later under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Papon was alleged to have put more than 1,500 Jews on trains bound for Auschwitz.