Dutch Railway Will Pay Millions to Holocaust Survivors

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.