Holocaust claim against Hungary heads to top US court

The nation’s highest court has agreed to intervene in a case over property confiscated from Jews during World War II

The US Supreme Court has agreed to rule on whether Holocaust survivors and their heirs can seek compensation through the American judicial system for property that was confiscated from them in Hungary during World War II.

The high court revealed on Monday that it will intervene in a lawsuit filed 14 years ago by Jewish Holocaust victims against the Hungarian government and its national railway. At issue is whether an American court has jurisdiction over the matter. Supreme Court justices are expected to hear arguments from both sides later this year.

The dispute goes back to 1944, when around 434,000 Hungarian Jews were deported on state-run trains, primarily to the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, over a two-month period. Most of the victims were killed at Auschwitz. At the time, the Hungarian government was cooperating closely with Nazi Germany, which was losing ground to Soviet Red Army forces in the east and Allied forces in France.

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The class-action lawsuit demands compensation for property that was seized from the deportees. US law generally shields sovereign nations from legal liability in American courts, but the plaintiffs have argued that their case qualifies for an exception regarding expropriations that violated international law.

However, that legal exception also requires that the property in question have a “commercial nexus” with the US. Plaintiffs for the Hungarian side have argued that the US legal system has no jurisdiction over the issue. They warned that violating the principle of sovereign immunity would “serve as a beacon for plaintiffs around the world to litigate all matter of grievances in domestic courts, and needlessly entangle the United States in disputes in which it has no legitimate connection.”

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Just three years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in the German government’s favor in an apparently similar case involving religious artwork that the Nazis acquired from Jewish art dealers who fled the country.