Nazi taint sours DC rail project

New York City Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney has renewed her demand that Maryland’s Department of Transportation reject a bid from a French rail company that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.

Maryland’s Department of Transportation recently announced the selection of Keolis, a company that is majority-owned by Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF), to bid on a new Purple Line light rail project in Washington’s northern suburbs. The line will connect to Metrorail at Bethesda, Silver Spring, College Park, and New Carrollton and to other lines.

SNCF collaborated with the Nazis to transfer more than 76,000 Jews and thousands of other “undesirables” to concentration camps, but has not provided any restitution to victims.

“SNCF refuses to hold itself accountable for its role in the Holocaust, and ignores a moral obligation to the survivors and veterans who are taxpayers of Maryland,” wrote Maloney along with Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

“While we look forward to the innovative Purple Line, we do not believe that it should be done through the partnership of Keolis as an entity of SNCF.”

Last year Democrat Maloney and Republican Ros-Lehtinen introduced the Holocaust Rail Justice Act (H.R. 1505) to provide Holocaust survivors their day in court against SNCF. The bill has not yet seen committee action.

Maloney visited Poland and Auschwitz on the 69th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. She joined other members of Congress, including House Majority Leader (R-VA) Eric Cantor, members of Israel’s government as well as parliament members of some European countries, as part of the international Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony on Jan. 27. While there, she contemplated the rail line that brought so many Jews to their death at the camp and noted the horrifying efficiency necessary to accomplish this destruction.

Maloney and Ros-Lehtinen applauded new legislation introduced in the Maryland legislature that will deny contracts to companies that were complicit in the Holocaust unless they paid restitution to the victims. The bill would automatically deny the contract to Keolis and SNCF due to their collaboration with the Nazis and refusal to provide any restitution to victims.

“I think there is a moral obligation on the part of people everywhere to understand, that Auschwitz represents an effort to use all the power and technical efficiency of a modern state to eradicate the Jewish people,” said Maloney. “It is a symbol of man’s ultimate cruelty to man and it stands as a warning about the devastation that can be wrought when nations allow free reign to hatred.”

Maloney called it “an outrage” that a company that “profited off of mass murder and has not yet paid restitution to its victims, should receive a publicly funded contract.”