Supreme Court will review Holocaust survivors’ lawsuit against Hungary

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether a group of Holocaust survivors and their heirs can haul Hungary into an American court to answer for confiscating property from Jews while carrying out mass extermination during World War II.

The dispute turns on technical questions about Hungary’s immunity as a foreign sovereign, and it marks the second time the justices will take up the long-running legal battle.

It is set to be heard during the Supreme Court’s next annual term, with oral arguments likely to be held near the end of this year.

As Nazi Germany neared defeat in World War II, the Hungarian government in 1944 raced to deport and kill more than half a million Jews, one of the fastest and largest mass exterminations during the Holocaust. Along the way, the government confiscated and liquidated Jews’ valuable property.

In 2010, a group of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their heirs brought a class-action suit against Hungary and its national railway, seeking compensation for their stolen property.

The parties in the 14 years since have battled over whether American courts have jurisdiction to hear the case.

Federal law makes foreign nations generally immune from lawsuits in the United States, but the survivors claim their suit falls under the law’s exception for the expropriation of property. 

At issue before the Supreme Court is the exception’s requirement that the property have a “commercial nexus” with the United States. The survivors claim Hungary commingled the proceeds of their stolen property with other funds, and some of the proceeds are now present in the United States in connection with Hungary’s commercial activity.

Though a lower court agreed the lawsuit can move forward under that theory, the survivors agreed the Supreme Court should review the ruling to resolve a split among the nation’s appeals courts on the issue — stressing that the living survivors are now all at least 90 years old.

“They deserve to know once and for all whether they will be able to pursue in this Nation’s courts recognition of and justice for the crimes Petitioners committed against them and humanity,” their attorneys wrote in court filings.

Hungary has long warned of the reciprocal dangers of abrogating foreign sovereign immunity, telling the Supreme Court it “will serve as a beacon for plaintiffs around the world to litigate all manner of historical grievances in domestic courts, and needlessly entangle the United States in disputes in which it has no legitimate connection.”

In 2021, the justices sent the Holocaust survivors’ lawsuit back to a lower court after weighing in on another issue related to Hungary’s immunity.