Dutch railway Nederlandse Spoorwegen will pay tens of millions of dollars in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their descendants for their role in transporting people to concentration camps during World War II.
Nederlandse Spoorwegen, known as NS, was commissioned by the Nazis after the occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. The train system was operated as a way to deport Jews and other groups of people suddenly stripped of their citizenship to transit stations, where they were then moved to death camps. The Netherlands is said to have deported nearly all Jewish people by 1943.
The reparations are considered by Nederlandse Spoorwegen to be “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 sums to be paid out range from $5,700 to $17,000 and will mainly be directed to roughly 500 Jewish, Roma, and Senti survivors of the Holocaust and their direct descendants. Nederlandse Spoorwegen had established a committee in 2018 that intended to address their history and compliance in the atrocities that took place during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The decision to pay the large sums of reparations came at that committee’s suggestion.
The committee also identified who would receive compensation, and how much. They are further entrusted with assuring action by Nederlandse Spoorwegen to make the promised payments. A spokesperson said that thousands of people could be eligible for the payments, but “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.”
