German airline Lufthansa has been fined $4 million for refusing to 128 Jewish passengers to board a flight in 2022, the US government announced on Tuesday. The passengers were wearing a garb specially worn by Orthodox Jewish men and they were not let to board a connecting flight in Frankfurt, Germany. The airline at that time apologized and said it had zero tolerance for “racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination of any type.”
Those passengers were not travelling together and many of them did not know other but the airline treated them as a single group and prevented all of them from boarding for the alleged misbehavior of a few, the U.S. Department of Transportation said.
USDOT said the penalty is the largest it has ever issued against an airline for civil rights violations.
Lufthansa agreed to pay $2 million and the Department of Transportation said it will credit the airline with $2 million that it paid in compensation to passengers.
Lufthansa did not admit to any violations under the consent order and it denied that any of its employees discriminated against passengers. It said as many as 60 passengers onboard at any given time were disregarding crew instructions.
The airline said it regretted and has publicly apologized on numerous occasions for the circumstances surrounding the decision to deny boarding, USDOT said in the consent order.
The airline said the incident “resulted from an unfortunate series of inaccurate communications, misinterpretations, and misjudgments throughout the decision-making process,” the Transportation Department said.
Lufthansa said in a statement Tuesday that since the 2022 incident, it has fully cooperated with the DOT and remains focused on many efforts including partnering with American Jewish Committee to curate “a first-of-its kind training program in the airline industry for our managers and employees to address antisemitism and discrimination.”