Lufthansa airplanes are parked on the tarmac at Frankfurt airport, Germany.
Ralph Orlowski | Reuters
Germany’s flagship airline has been fined $4 million by the U.S. Department of Transportation over allegations it discriminated against a bunch of Jewish passengers.
The regulator said Tuesday that Lufthansa had prohibited 128 people wearing traditional Orthodox Jewish clothing from boarding for a connecting flight in Germany as they made their way from Recent York City to Budapest in May 2022.
“Based on the alleged misconduct of some passengers,” DOT said, Lufthansa staff “treated all of them as in the event that they were a single group and denied them boarding,” despite lots of the passengers not knowing one another nor traveling together.
Some individuals within the group allegedly violated the airline’s mask policy. Video of the incident on the time showed Lufthansa staff telling passengers that “everyone has to pay” for the mistakes of a couple of, then defining “everyone” as “Jewish coming from JFK.” On the time, German media reported that staff denied boarding to people they determined were Jewish because they were wearing skull caps or had sidelocks.
The penalty is the most important ever issued by the DOT against an airline for a civil rights violation.
“Nobody should face discrimination once they travel, and today’s motion sends a transparent message to the airline industry that we’re prepared to analyze and take motion at any time when passengers’ civil rights are violated,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a press release.
Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s special envoy against antisemitism, told NBC News in 2022 that the main points of how the airline had treated the passengers were “unbelievable.”
“[When] I first heard it, I said, ‘Oh, this should be incorrect. Someone should be misreporting this.’ After which in fact, it turned out to be precisely right — and worse than we even thought,” she said.
In a press release Tuesday, the airline said it had fully cooperated with the DOT because it conducted its investigation and that it had partnered with the American Jewish Committee within the wake of the incident.
“Through our ongoing collaboration, we’ve curated a first-of-its kind training program within the airline industry for our managers and employees to handle antisemitism and discrimination,” it said. “Lufthansa is devoted to being an envoy of goodwill, tolerance, diversity, and acceptance.”
On the time, the carrier apologized for the incident, saying it had “zero tolerance for racism, antisemitism and discrimination of any type.”
Lipstadt said in 2022: “If any airline had done it, it could have been outrageous. However the terrible, awful irony of it coming from the German national airline was outrageous.”
