From the BBC:
“Holocaust: Dutch rail firm NS confirms compensation”
The Netherlands' state-run rail company NS has said it will
pay tens of millions of euros in compensation to Holocaust victims and their
families. The company earned millions in today's terms by transporting Jewish
families to a Nazi transit camp. Some 107,000 Jews were taken to Westerbork and
deported, mainly to deaths camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Only 5,000 survived.
NS said the deportations were a "black page in the history of the
company". It apologised in 2005 for its role in helping the Nazi occupiers
in World War Two, but it only set up a commission to decide how much to pay in
November last year. Its decision to "learn, honour and remember in an
enduring way" followed a campaign by Salo Muller, whose parents were
murdered at Auschwitz. "It is estimated that several thousand people are
eligible for the allowance, including an estimated 500 survivors. NS will set
aside several tens of millions of euros for this in the coming years," NS
said in a statement. Each survivor will receive €15,000 (£13,000; $17,000),
while €5-7,000 will go to children and widowed spouses of victims.
What was Dutch railway's role in deportations?
NS said in November that it had operated trains on behalf of
Germany's Nazi occupiers, but it did more than just run the trains. "The NS complied with the German order to
make trains available," Dirk Mulder from the National Westerbork Memorial
told Dutch TV last year. "The Germans paid for it and said the NS had to
come up with a timetable. And the company went and did it without a word of
objection." NS made an estimated €2.5m in today's terms, Dutch public
broadcaster NOS estimates, in transporting Jews from across the Netherlands to
the Westerbork camp. Westerbork became a transit camp in 1941 and the first
deportees left on 15 July 1942. The final train left on 13 September 1944, with
279 Jews on board. Among those deported from the camp were 245 Sinti and Roma.
Who is Salo Muller?
Salo Muller challenged the Dutch rail company after hearing
of a successful campaign in the US Salo
Muller is a former physiotherapist at top Dutch football club Ajax. In 1941,
when he was five, his parents were arrested by the Nazis and put on a train
from the capital Amsterdam to Westerbork, where they spent nine weeks before being
deported to Auschwitz and murdered. He decided to act when he heard that the
French government had agreed a $60m compensation fund with the US to be
distributed among thousands of survivors and their relatives.
^ This is long over-due. Every company, business, national
government, etc. that collaborated with the Nazis during World War 2 should be
required to compensate the survivors and their families. ^
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