A Decades-Long Pursuit of Accountability
Hungarian Holocaust survivors are taking the national railway company to U.S. courts. They seek to hold the firm responsible for its role in deporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Despite years of legal friction, plaintiffs argue the 1944 genocide warrants an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (FSIA), a statute that generally shields foreign state entities from American litigation.
The Barrier of Sovereign Immunity
Enacted in 1976, the FSIA typically grants foreign states and their agencies immunity from U.S. jurisdiction. Attorney Richard Weisberg and other legal representatives for survivors have spent over 15 years attempting to bypass this shield through narrow statutory exceptions.
The strategy has hit hard walls. In 2010, survivor Paul Chaim Shlomo Fischer launched a class-action lawsuit against the Hungarian national railway and several financial institutions. Both lower and appellate courts dismissed the case, mandating that the plaintiffs first exhaust all legal remedies within Hungary.
Dead Ends in Hungarian Courts
In 2016, Iren Gitta Kellner—a survivor of the Auschwitz deportations—traveled to Budapest to satisfy the exhaustion requirement. The Hungarian courts rejected her claims, ruling that the offenses were deemed too old to litigate.
Following that dismissal, legal teams moved to reopen the Illinois class-action suit. They argued that the Hungarian judicial system had failed to provide a path for justice. Federal courts remained unmoved, maintaining that the plaintiffs lacked standing because they were not named in original filings or failed to meet the specific criteria for the FSIA’s commercial exceptions.
The Search for a Commercial Nexus
The battle often centers on the “commercial nexus”—a requirement to prove a direct business connection between the defendant and the United States. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a separate case where victims argued that stolen property was liquidated to fund military purchases and bond issuances in the U.S. The Court ruled the link between historical war crimes and modern financial activity was insufficient to override sovereign immunity.
Richard Weisberg and his legal team maintain their current approach is distinct. They argue their case does not rely on tracing stolen assets into the U.S. financial system, but rather on demonstrating that the railway generates revenue in the United States.
The 1944 Deportations and Their Legacy
During the final months of World War II, the Nazi regime occupied Hungary and initiated a systematic campaign to destroy the country’s Jewish population. Historical records show approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz over a six-week period in 1944, with the national railway facilitating the transport. Estimates indicate roughly two-thirds of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
Iren Gitta Kellner died in 2017, never seeing a resolution to her case. Still, these legal efforts remain a persistent attempt to address the widespread theft and destruction of life from the Nazi occupation. The national railway has not responded to requests for comment regarding the ongoing litigation.
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