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French Railroad Holocaust Suit Reinstated
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

A federal appeals court in Manhattan has reinstated a three-year-old lawsuit by Holocaust survivors and their heirs against the French National Railroad for delivering more than 75,000 Jews and others to Nazi death camps in World War II.

The court ruled that Judge David G. Trager of Federal District Court in Brooklyn erred in 2001 in dismissing the action because the railroad was an entity of a foreign state immune from American litigation under a 1976 Congressional act. But the ground for dismissal was not that clear-cut, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled on Friday, sending the case back to the lower court.

The issue, the appellate judges said, was whether the State Department in the 1940's would have authorized such litigation, as the executive department was called upon to do before the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act of 1976.

Lawyers who brought the case called the ruling a triumph and said it could open long-secret archives. The suit alleges that the railroad billed the German and French governments per person per kilometer for transporting the victims.

"It's a big victory for us," said Harriet Tamen of Hurt Levine & Papadakis, which filed the case in Brooklyn in September 2000.

Andreas F. Lowenfeld, a professor at the New York University School of Law who argued the railroad's appeal, scoffed at the prospect of determining the intent of the State Department in the 1940's. He said the railroad may appeal.