Belgium’s national railway company (known as NMBS or SNCB depending on which part of the country you’re from) was paid millions for its services to Nazi Germany, a new report presented to Senate has revealed.
50 million Belgian francs
The findings are the result of an independent inquiry set up in 2022 by Belgium’s mobility minister, Georges Gilkinet, and Senate president, Stéphanie D’Hose. Its purpose was to look into the role played by Belgian railways in the mass deportations of targeted groups during World War II.
🚂Tussen 1942 en 1944 vertrokken 28 konvooien van Mechelen naar #Auschwitz. Aan boord waren 25.843 Joden en zigeuners. Slechts 1.195 keerden levend terug. Voor het eerst toont een studie duidelijk de rol van de Belgische spoorwegen bij die deportaties aan. #Holocaust. 1 /4 pic.twitter.com/bZbk18UK7h
— Gilki (@GeorgesGilkinet) December 8, 2023
Over 25,600 Belgian Jews, as well as Roma people, homosexuals, and political dissidents are known to have been deported from Belgium between 1942 and 1944. They were taken by rail to work and extermination camps during the conflict. Less than 1,244 of them survived.
During the inquiry, the Study and Documentation Centre for War and Contemporary Society (CegeSoma) combed records and found payments adding up to over 50 million Belgian francs, received by the Belgian railways from German Mitteleuropäische Reiseburo (MER).
“Impossibility of refusal”
Having initially closed when the Germans invaded, the Belgian railways, like other parts of the Belgian administrative system, began cooperating with German authorities within a month of the German occupation of Belgium starting in June 1940.
Though many acts of resistance, including networks that helped targeted people to hide and escape, are on record, this kind of civic cooperation was defended as the price Belgium had to pay to retain control over Belgian transport and food supplies. The rail company’s Board was in a “de facto impossibility of refusal”, notes Nico Wouters, Head of CegeSoma.
Military supplies were soon being transported by Belgian railway workers on behalf of the Germans. In addition, Belgian workers were undertaking repairs for German forces. By the time mass deportations began in 1942, the collaboration around “wider military services” had become so “normalised” that even the use of special deportation trains on which the expectation was that only “absolutely reliable” Belgian personnel should be used, seemed not to raise any eyebrows.
“When deportation trains were introduced in 1941 and escalated in 1942, this was not even noted as a new feature,” Wouters points out. “It was simply the continuation of what had long been accepted.”
Compensation?
Though the report’s remit was defined as historical, the evidence it has uncovered increases the possibility that compensation for Second World War deportation victims and their families will now be sought from the Belgian railways.
There is a precedent. Dutch railway operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen paid 43 million euros in Second World War reparations in 2021 to almost 5,500 victims or relatives of victims deported from The Netherlands.
