At Supreme Court, Holocaust survivors seek right to sue for compensation of seized property

It has been nearly 80 years since World War II officially ended in Europe. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the latest chapter in efforts by the victims of the war’s atrocities to recover confiscated property. At issue is whether a lawsuit by survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust, seeking to recover property that was seized, can go forward, or whether – as the Hungarian government alleges – it is barred by the federal law governing lawsuits against foreign countries in U.S. courts.

More than 560,000 Jews in Hungary, over two-thirds of the country’s pre-war Jewish population, lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis and the Hungarian government during the Holocaust. Most of those deaths occurred in a three-month period in 1944. In November 1944, the Hungarian government declared that all valuables owned by Jews were part of the national wealth. The government then confiscated virtually all of the property – including cash, jewelry, art, and gold – owned by Jews in Hungary.

In 2010, a group of survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust, along with their heirs, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., against the Hungarian government and Hungary’s national railway, MÁV. They contended that the Hungarian government worked with the Nazis to kill Hungarian Jews and take their property; MÁV, they argued, transported Hungarian Jews to death camps and took their property before they boarded the trains.

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