Kurt Schaechter: Jews were only a small part of the 700,000 people who were transported

Kurt Schaechter, 75, whose parents died after being sent to death camps in Germany, said that the SNCF had operated some 3,000 such trains which had taken prisoners to the concentration camps.

In December, a French Jew now living in Canada filed a similar suit in a French court against the railway. Mr Schaechter has filed the suit with the prosecutor's office in the Paris suburb of Creteil.

Archive research

Mr Schaechter, a French man of Austrian origin, has spent his life searching the archives and photocopying thousands of documents, often without permission, seeking to build a picture of the role of the SNCF in deporting Jews and others to death camps in Germany and Poland.

The SNCF now faces two potential law suits

He is now asking the state prosecutor to start proceedings against the SNCF for crimes against humanity.

Mr Schaechter says that between 1941 and August 1944 almost 800 trains left French soil, transporting deportees in terrible conditions to their deaths, with no more dignity than if they were wood or coal.

'Transporting people for money'

Speaking to the BBC Mr Schaechter said: "They made invoices, they made contracts, they prepared trains ... it was a business."

"I want a judgement (so) that the French national railways may be condemned for crimes against humanity ... we have to clean up the past," he said.

Over 85,000 Jewish men, women and children left in those trains, and most never returned. Records held in the south-western city of Toulouse are believed to hold further information about the activities of the railway authorities.

Jean-Jacques Fraenkel, a retired French expatriate living in Canada, has filed a similar suit against the SNCF and the French government for their role in the deportation of his parents to concentration camps in World War II.

Whether the matter goes any further in France will depend on the local judicial authorities.