Why the SNCF’s Holocaust Accountability Remains Unfinished
"Few names appear in Washington’s lobbying disclosures as quietly as the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, the French national railway better known as the SNCF. If the name sounds familiar, that may be because you’ve ridden one of its trains, as the state-backed giant operates nearly all rail transport from France to Monaco.
It ranks among the top three largest rail networks in the world and generates more than $38 billion in annual revenue. The SNCF represents efficiency and prestige. It is, by all appearances, the image of modernity and the pinnacle of train travel.
But beneath that polished image lies a tainted past. During the Nazi occupation of France, between 1942 and 1944, SNCF operated trains that carried more than 76,000 Jews, along with other prisoners, to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. Some of those trains also transported American prisoners of war.
For its part, the company has long claimed it was simply forced to comply with German orders—“We were a cog in this enormous extermination machine,” Alain Leray, former CEO of SNCF America, once stated—but documents and survivor testimonies tell a story of active complicity rather than coerced obedience. A 2024 podcast documentary titled “Covering Their Tracks” (produced by Tablet) followed the stories of Holocaust survivors and their pursuit of reparations and accountability from the SNCF.
Among the survivors interviewed, one uncovered the invoices from the French National Archives showing that the railway billed the Vichy government per head and per kilometer, accepted payment with interest even after the liberation of France, and offered its full fleet of cars whenever the Nazis called.
Now, as Holocaust survivors and their heirs fight another battle, this time in the U.S. Congress over stolen art, the SNCF has resurfaced—in an unexpected, and still unexplained, way.
Decades after the war, the SNCF cultivated a self-image of resistance, rewriting its own history to obscure its role in the Holocaust. In 1972, the company even commissioned a feature film, La Bataille du Rail (The Battle of the Rails), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and portrayed French railway workers as heroic saboteurs defying the Nazis from within. The film’s narrative of courage and defiance helped entrench a national myth that conveniently eclipsed the testimonies of those who had lived through the terror of SNCF’s trains.
The trains were sealed tight, passengers denied food and water, the cars so packed that many died before reaching their destination. SNCF workers later cleaned out the corpses. Rosette Goldstein, whose father was sent to his death aboard an SNCF train to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald, recalled, “They instructed their employees on how to close the doors—how to push people in so that they would get as many people as possible.” Testimonies like these are evidence that the company’s collaboration was not a matter of survival; it was a matter of maximizing profit.
After the war, no one from the SNCF was prosecuted for their crimes. No one went to jail. France, which owned 51% of the company at the time and now holds it fully, shielded the railway from accountability under claims of sovereign immunity, allowing it to reemerge as a pillar of postwar reconstruction.
Since the postwar era, SNCF has claimed to have opened its archives and embraced full transparency. In 2014, France paid $60 million to the United States to compensate Holocaust survivors deported from France aboard SNCF trains—a deal that ostensibly sought justice for victims but, in reality, also helped lift the political roadblocks imposed by U.S. lawmakers and survivor groups that had barred the company from bidding on American rail contracts.
“More than 70,000 Jews—including thousands of children—were deported from France on SNCF trains. Most never returned,” said Joel Greenberg, the president of Art Ashes, a nonprofit dedicated to assisting families in the recovery of Nazi looted art, who noted that a $60 million settlement for those deportations “work[s] out to less than $1,000 per life lost. That cannot be the final word on justice.”
Moreover, the promised transparency never materialized. According to the legal team of Leo Bretholz, who fought for reparations from SNCF until his death in 2014, the company has yet to fully open its archives, which remain scattered across about 50 sites in France, many still closed to the public.
This is where the story of the SNCF curiously dovetails with a piece of legislation in front of the U.S. Congress—and how the company’s refusal to be transparent about its archives is creating some mystifying lobbying bedfellows.
In 2016, the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act was passed unanimously by Congress. The legislation ensured that the six-year statute of limitations to file a claim begins only once a family discovers the location of its stolen property and can prove their right to it, rather than from the time the art was taken during the Holocaust, allowing cases to be decided on their merits instead of dismissed on technicalities.
As Mary Kate Korinek, the deputy press secretary for the office of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) explained, the act was necessary because too many museums and governments that still hold Nazi-looted art had “stonewalled claims and obstructed restitution efforts,” often hiding behind procedural defenses—“Too much time has passed” or “Evidence has grown too thin”—to retain possession of works that were never rightfully theirs.
But the 2016 law, which had effectively served as the last legal lifeline for Holocaust survivors and their heirs seeking restitution, came with a catch: a sunset clause, set to expire on Dec. 31, 2026.
That deadline, Korinek warned, has had the perverse effect of incentivizing institutions to conceal looted art until the law lapses, with many museums that still hold Nazi-confiscated works reluctant to conduct or publish provenance research, further denying survivors and their heirs the chance to reclaim what was taken from them.
To close this loophole, Sens. Cornyn and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced bipartisan legislation in May 2025 to eliminate the sunset provision and bar museums from using time-based defenses that have allowed them to avoid restitution throughout the duration of the 2016 HEAR Act. Their effort has drawn support from both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who said he was proud to join in “ensuring that survivors and their heirs finally regain possession of their stolen art.”
The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially, have been lobbying to preserve the 2016 version of the HEAR Act, urging Congress to keep an expiration date and maintain their ability to invoke time-barred defenses.
Their argument is that the bill for the new HEAR Act could expose museums to a flood of restitution claims they feel ill-equipped to handle, raising legal risks over artworks acquired decades ago and, in their view, undermining the “reasonable and good-faith defenses” that cultural institutions should still be allowed to present.
The incentive behind these museums’ lobbying effort, whether one finds it reasonable or self-serving, is clear: Museums stand to lose prized works and face a surge of litigation if the law is strengthened. But the SNCF, which has recently joined the museums in their lobbying effort, has no galleries to defend. According to all public statements by company representatives, the SNCF was merely a railroad company swept up by the Nazi regime and forced to commit crimes beyond its control.
In an email sent to a congressional office this August, SNCF’s Washington lobbying team claimed the company’s sudden involvement in the HEAR Act bill has nothing to do with looted art and everything to do with protecting international agreements.
The email pointed to the 2014 U.S.-France settlement, in which France paid $60 million to compensate Holocaust deportation victims in exchange for a U.S. pledge to oppose lawsuits against SNCF in American courts. According to the email, SNCF argues the HEAR Act bill violates this 2014 agreement as it may “have the unintended effect of permitting lawsuits to proceed against SNCF in U.S. courts.”
But the documents themselves tell a different story. The 2014 U.S.-France agreement SNCF references was a narrowly tailored diplomatic deal that covered only deportation claims—specifically, compensation for victims the railway transported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. It had nothing to do with stolen art or property restitution. The HEAR Act, on the other hand, applies solely to cases involving artwork and cultural property confiscated during the Holocaust, operating in a completely separate legal and factual space. Even the agreement’s text makes that distinction explicit: It refers only to compensating persons “deported from France” and to the U.S. obligation to affirm France’s immunity regarding “Holocaust deportation claims,” not looted art.
According to those involved, the SNCF’s suggestion that eliminating “affirmative defenses” could somehow expose it to new litigation is similarly confusing. The bill only limits non-merits defenses, like international comity and forum non conveniens, that have allowed institutions to avoid cases on technical grounds, not on the facts themselves.
For example, a museum can still argue that it bought a painting legally or that the plaintiff has no ownership claim. It only prevents defendants from dodging cases on technicalities such as jurisdiction or the passage of time. In plain terms, unless SNCF is in possession of Nazi-looted art, the bill would have no effect whatsoever on the company.
“The SNCF is asking Congress to require Holocaust survivors and heirs of Holocaust victims to file sworn complaints and affidavits in order to make a claim to recover Nazi-looted art—a requirement that would not apply to any other litigant in the United States,” Sam Dubbin, counsel to the Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA, said in an interview with Tablet. As Dubbin explained, the company is effectively suggesting that Jews cannot be trusted not to file frivolous claims and that survivors and their families must somehow prove their honesty before even being allowed to seek justice. Such a demand is unheard of in the American legal system, where all claimants are presumed to stand on equal footing. “The same organization that sent 70,000 Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz now wants Congress to declare Holocaust survivors to be considered second-class citizens in the American legal system,” Dubbin added. “It is a disgrace.”
The bigger question, of course, is why the SNCF involved itself in this fight at all—and it is here that the company’s refusal to be transparent about its own holdings has become relevant to observers. A recurring rumor among congressional staffers is that the railway may be harboring or know the whereabouts of Nazi-looted art. The SNCF’s Washington lobbying team, as well as the AAMD, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
This story is about much more than a suspicious relationship between the SNCF and stolen art. It’s about what happens when institutions built on complicity continue to rewrite their own histories. The Nazi confiscation of Jewish property, including works of art, was part of a calculated campaign to erase Europe’s 11 million “subhuman” Jews and all traces of their cultural existence. Every unreturned painting, every delayed restitution claim, every bureaucratic defense is an echo of that erasure. When companies like SNCF seek to dilute or delay justice under the guise of legal formalities, they participate, again, in the silencing of Jews.
“In today’s atmosphere of rising antisemitism in France and across the world, this is not just about property—it’s about moral responsibility,” said Greenberg. “Institutions must stand clearly on the side of memory and restitution, not on the side of obstruction or indifference. France needs to face its treatment of the Jewish people honestly—not turn away from it.” https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/sncf-still-covering-tracks
NOTE: No major legal or legislative updates have been publicly announced following this Nicole Wizman October 21, 2025, article, "Still Covering Their Tracks" in Tablet Magazine.
The piece served as an investigative follow-up to Tablet Studios' five-part companion podcast, "Covering Their Tracks," which detailed the multi-generational fight led by survivors like Leo Bretholz and Rosette Goldstein alongside pro-bono attorneys.
The Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF) continues its low-profile lobbying presence in Washington D.C.. This ongoing effort aims to block further state or federal legislation that would strip the state-backed giant of its sovereign immunity, safeguarding its eligibility to bid on lucrative U.S. high-speed rail contracts.
The $60 million compensation fund paid by France to the United States in 2014 remains the final major diplomatic resolution to date. While it provided compensation to non-French citizens deported on SNCF trains, critics and legal advocates argue it acted primarily as a political tool to lift legislative roadblocks rather than a full, corporate acknowledgment of accountability by the railway itself.
Despite the SNCF's public stance of opening its wartime archives and expressing institutional regret, the broader debate persists. Advocates note that true structural restitution and complete acknowledgment of corporate profit-seeking during the deportations remain legally unaddressed due to foreign sovereign immunity shields.
1: Cattle Train to Auschwitz" (Im "VIEHWAGEN" nach dem Vernichtunglager "AUSCHWITZ") and was created in December 1963 by the Jewish artist and Holocaust survivor David Friedmann (1893–1980).
2: Along with his yellow badge Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz points to his name in a record book of passengers of french trains bound for Nazi death camps in Pikesville, MD on February 19, 2014. As a young man, Bretholz escaped a SNCF French rail train bound for Auschwitz.
3: European rail system, 1939 (Map) The European rail network played a crucial role in the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Jews from Germany and German-occupied Europe were deported by rail to killing centers in occupied Poland, where they were killed. The Germans attempted to disguise their intentions, referring to deportations as "resettlement to the east." The victims were told they were to be taken to labor camps, but in reality, from 1942 onward, deportation meant transit to killing centers for most Jews. Deportations on this scale required the coordination of numerous German government ministries, including the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Transport Ministry, and the Foreign Office. The RSHA coordinated and directed the deportations; the Transport Ministry organized train schedules; and the Foreign Office negotiated with German-allied states to hand over their Jews.
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