A Jewish group in Belgium is set to sue the country’s government and national rail operator, SNCB, for Holocaust-era collaboration.
The Nico Gunzburg Foundation (NGF) is taking the SNCB and the state to court over its cooperation with the Nazi occupation during the Second World War.
Specifically, the suit cites 28 trains, most of which were directly Auschwitz-bound, that departed from the Dossin Barracks in Mechelen, a city sitting between Brussels and Antwerp, between August 1942 and July 1944.
The passengers of those trains included roughly 25,000 Jews and several hundred Roma and Sinti. Only a few thousand of the deportees would survive.
Per the NGF, historian Nico Wouters discovered that SNCB was bribed to cooperate with the Nazis in facilitating the deportations. The Belgian state is also being held responsible as a shareholder in the SNCB.
The NGF is aiming for both financial compensation and an acknowledgement of the Belgian state’s alleged complicity and collaboration.
There have reportedly been talks held between the NGF, the SNCB, and the Belgian government, so far to no avail.
Once both the government and the SNCB head into negotiations open to the idea of compensation, the legal process will be paused, the foundation added.
The government has previously acknowledged its role in perpetrating the Holocaust within Belgium. Then-Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt formally apologised for and acknowledged the role that the Belgian state played in carrying out the Final Solution in 2007.
Verhofstadt’s apology came on the day of the findings of the Submissive Belgium report, a government-commissioned study that confirmed the active collaboration of Belgian authorities and local elites with the Nazis, were released.
Before the Second World War, 50,000 Jews resided in Belgium. Roughly half were murdered during the Holocaust.
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