Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed a bill requiring companies seeking high-speed rail contracts with California to disclose any role they played during the Holocaust.
Under the measure, companies vying for a piece of California’s $45 billion high-speed rail project would have to reveal any involvement in transporting people to concentration, prisoner-of-war, labor or extermination camps during World War II. They would have had to report whether they took remedial steps for their actions or paid restitution to victims.
Supporters say AB619 aimed to promote accountability and help fill gaps in the historical record. The legislation overwhelmingly passed the state’s Assembly and Senate over the summer.
In his Oct. 1 veto message, Schwarzenegger said he sympathized with the victims of the Holocaust and all those transported against their will during the war.
However, he said, “this bill needlessly places the state in a position of acknowledging the activities of companies during that time.”
The state’s High Speed Rail Authority will begin accepting bids for the planned 800-mile rail project next year, and several international railroads have expressed interest.
One of those, the French national railway company, SNCF, was the inspiration behind AB619, according to Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield (D-Woodland Hills) the bill’s author.
SNCF is now expected to bid for a major role in the $45 billion project, which is expected to carry passengers by 2020 from Los Angeles to San Francisco and Sacramento at speeds of 220 miles per hour.
SNCF officials claim the railway’s operations were taken over by the Nazis during the German occupation and that its trains were forcibly requisitioned to transport people to concentration camps. Officials also asserted that the Nazis executed about 800 railroad workers and deported another 1,200 for disobeying orders.
Blumenfield had charged that SNCF had profited from its wartime collaboration and never admitted its actions, disclosed its record or paid restitution to survivors. “Until or unless it does, they do not deserve our trust or our tax dollar,” he said in a press release.
The release also said, “The governor has dealt a devastating blow to the last remaining survivors and families of victims who were transported to unimaginable horrors at World War II concentration camps by a company that now seeks to make a fortune on California’s high speed rail system.
“The Governor apparently feels that the history of a corporation, no matter how extremely horrendous that history may be, has no bearing on its desirability as a contract recipient. Even worse, the veto sends a message to all contractors that the state of California doesn’t even want to know anything about a corporation’s character or background. While choosing ignorance is not the same as condoning past transgressions, it is dangerously close.”
Despite Schwarzenegger’s veto of AB619, SNCF said it intended to fully comply with the measure’s intent.
“The atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during WWII were so horrific that we can never forget, nor should we,” the company said in a Sept. 30 statement. “That’s why SNCF will continue its commitment to complete transparency of its WWII history, and will voluntarily comply, and even exceed, the requirements AB619 would have mandated.”
The Associated Press and JTA contributed to this report.