LONDON — At the height of World War II, the Dutch railway ran special trains to transit camps where Jews and other minorities awaited deportation to Nazi death camps.
The trains were commissioned by Germany, which had invaded the Netherlands in 1940, ignoring a Dutch proclamation of neutrality, and the Dutch railway, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, complied. By the summer of 1943, most Jews in the Netherlands had been deported.
More than seven decades later, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, known as NS, has said it will set aside tens of millions of euros in compensation for victims and their direct descendants. In what the company called a “moral gesture,” payouts of 5,000 euros to 15,000 euros, or about $5,700 to $17,000, will be made to Jews and to members of the Roma and Sinti communities, NS said in a statement on Wednesday.
In making the decision, NS was following advice from a committee it set up last year to establish the company’s historical responsibility, the statement said. The committee was charged with identifying the groups entitled to compensation and setting the amounts to be paid out. It will also ensure that the program is enacted.
The payouts are the latest compensation offer by companies in Germany and other countries occupied by the Nazis for their roles in the Holocaust.
In 2011, S.N.C.F., the French state railway company, apologized to victims of the Holocaust after lawmakers in the United States moved to block it from winning contracts there if the firm did not acknowledge its role in the shipping of Jews to death camps. In 2014, France set up a $60 million fund to compensate victims.
According to NS, several thousand people could be eligible for the payments, including about 500 survivors and their direct descendants.
Nonetheless, the committee set up by the company acknowledged that “there is no reasonable or appropriate amount of money that can compensate in any way for the suffering inflicted on the persons covered by the scheme.”
When considering the amounts to be paid, the committee said, it noted that “although NS was an essential link in the transport to the concentration and extermination camps, it cannot be held responsible for the existence of these camps and the crimes that were committed there.”
The committee said it saw the payments as “a moral gesture by which NS wishes to express the recognition of its share in the individual suffering inflicted by the occupying forces on those involved and their direct surviving relatives.”
The move was prompted by an activist and Holocaust survivor, Salo Muller, whose parents died in the camps. Mr. Muller has campaigned for years for NS to recognize the role played by its transports and the suffering they caused.
A paper trail that documented the work done by NS existed because the company invoiced the Nazi regime for the transports to the Dutch transit camps, in Westerbork, Vught and Amersfoort, where deportees were sent before being shipped on to the death camps. Last year, NS opened up its archives to researchers and said it would continue to provide assistance to any further investigations.
Source : Nytimes
