France approves Holocaust payments

French politicians have voted to create a €53m fund to compensate Holocaust victims deported by French state rail firm SNCF to Nazi concentration camps in a move also intended to protect the company from future US litigation.

About 76,000 Jews were arrested in France during World War Two and transported in appalling conditions in railway boxcars to concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where most died.

The vote was carried despite mass abstentions by France’s conservative opposition, which questioned the validity of the legal guarantees offered by the US.