France agrees to pay $60 million to those deported during Holocaust

Paris (CNN) -- Seven decades after being sent to Nazi concentration camps, survivors of the Holocaust will have the chance to get retribution -- from the government of France.

France plans to sign an agreement Monday with U.S. authorities to pay $60 million to Holocaust

survivors transported to concentration camps on France's national railway, SNCF, between 1942 and 1944, said Arnaud Guillois, a spokesman for the French Embassy in Washington.

U.S. officials created the fund and will administer it. But Americans aren't the only ones eligible for compensation; victims living in nations that haven't signed Holocaust compensation agreements also can benefit, according to the embassy spokesman.

A few thousand people may be eligible for some of the fund, according to Guillois.

This fund had been years in the making, and had come under intense pressure inside the United States, including efforts by American lawmakers to bar SNCF from bidding in U.S. markets until the issue is resolved.

One piece of proposed legislation, the Holocaust Rail Justice Act, stated that more than 75,000 Jews and thousands of others were moved from France to Nazi concentration camps on SNCF trains. Those transported included U.S. citizens and their relatives, as well as American military pilots shot down during the war.

An official at France's national railway declined to comment on the agreement when reached by CNN. Yet Guillois explained that SNCF was not considered liable for the deportation of Jews in France, because it was commissioned by France's Vichy government -- which was formed after the armistice and collaborated with the Nazis -- to do so.

This isn't the first time that France, which was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940 before reaching an armistice agreement with Adolf Hitler's government later that year, has borne some responsibility for the Holocaust.

As Guillois noted, this latest agreement is one of several mechanisms by the French government to compensate Holocaust victims since 1946, the year after World War II ended.

The Nazis systematically killed more than 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, along with millions of other people who were religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, homosexuals or disabled, in death camps situated primarily in Germany and Eastern Europe.

--CNN News