The passengers, most of them identifiable by the traditional garb of Orthodox Jews, were detained in Frankfurt on a NYC-to-Budapest flight to attend an event honoring a rabbinical leader. Once deplaned in Frankfurt, they were informed, “Due to an operational reason, we have to cancel your flight.”
The airline claims that certain passengers failed to comply with German government pandemic rules requiring masks, and were congregating in aisles and galleys despite being told not to do so. But instead of just detaining those in violation, Lufthansa, according to the DOT, denied boarding to all 128 Jewish passengers.
A video blog shows an airline employee explaining the situation to a passenger, saying, “It was Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems.”
It would profit Lufthansa to invest some money and time in weeding out the bad apples in their midst.
Although most of the passengers in question did not know one another, those interviewed by the DOT’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection said the airline “treated them all as if they were a single group and denied boarding onto [the flight] to everyone for the apparent misbehavior of a few because they were openly and visibly Jewish,” the DOT stated in its report.
“Unbelievable,” was US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt’s reaction to the news, citing the “outrageous” irony of the offender being the German national airline. “When I first heard it, I said, ‘Oh, this must be wrong. Someone must be misreporting this,’” she said. “And then, of course, it turned out to be precisely right—and worse than we even thought.”
The airline denied the allegation of bias, admitting instead to “errors in company procedure and communications” and attributed the incident to “inaccurate communications, misinterpretations and misjudgments throughout the decision-making process.”
“Lufthansa is dedicated to being an ambassador of goodwill, tolerance, diversity and acceptance,” it said in a statement.
The airline, however, has agreed to pay the $4 million penalty, half of which the DOT will credit back to Lufthansa for the $2 million it has already paid in compensation to the affected passengers.
Lufthansa has also publicly apologized for the incident numerous times, adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism (the first airline to do so) and partnered with the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in a joint initiative to combat global antisemitism. As part of the airline and advocacy group’s Memorandum of Understanding, AJC staffers will train Lufthansa employees to spot antisemitism when it happens and to effectively respond to it.
It would profit Lufthansa to invest some money and time in weeding out the bad apples in their midst. This would be in keeping with their recruitment video, where happy, smiling employees agree that “our differences are precisely our strength.”
Management clearly wants to move past the incident and clearly wants the world to know that it is not a company of bigots. That there are some bigots on board is also clear from the more than 40 discrimination complaints from Jewish passengers that led to the DOT investigation. And those bigots—albeit a few—have cost Lufthansa millions in civil rights penalties and many millions more in ghastly press and horrific PR.
As Lufthansa staff told the detained passengers it was discriminating against, “everyone has to pay” for the actions of a few.
