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.

Opposition politician Pierre Lellouche described the fund, the fruit of an agreement reached in Washington last December, as “a kind of French capitulation before a form of permanent judicial, even legislative blackmail by the Americans”.

The fund, managed by the US, will be accessible to those deported from France but who could not benefit from French compensation measures.

It covers victims in countries except Britain, Poland, Belgium and the Czech Republic, which already have bilateral agreements with France.

France’s upper house examines the bill on July 9.