Railways were essential to the Holocaust – decades later, corporate responsibility continues to be taken

The Holocaust could not have occurred without trains.

Holocaust scholar Roel Hilberg has emphasized that almost all those murdered in the camps arrived by train, including Jews, political prisoners, and other “undesirables.” Since the 90s, survivor groups have demanded that European railway companies recognize their critical role and make reparations—a reminder that wars, genocide, and other atrocities cannot exist without corporate involvement.

One long-running battle hit a snag on February 21, 2025, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an appeals court ruling in favor of survivors suing the Hungarian state railways. The lower court had ruled that the defendants could claim compensation for looting during the deportation of 440,000 Jews, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the Supreme Court refused to apply an exception to the law that protects foreign governments from lawsuits in U.S. courts.

Even without legal decisions, survivors sometimes mobilized public support to force railroad companies to confront their complicity in the crime.

I wrote a book about such a case: the multifaceted role of SNCF, France’s national railways, in World War II, and the company’s 30-year struggle to provide compensation and apologize. I examined archives and legal documents, and spoke to over 120 experts—historians, legislators, and executives—and more than 90 Holocaust survivors to find out what they thought the obligations of railway companies were today.

SNCF's wartime activities and the slow awakening to its responsibility helped me understand how companies can respond productively to demands for compensation and reckoning with the past—even decades after the events.

During the war, SNCF suffered from the destruction of stations and machinery, some 24,000 of its employees were sent to forced labor, and 2,229 of them were murdered. At the same time, some railway workers risked their lives to slow down trains, enable escapes, save dozens of Jewish children, and even assist the French underground in rounds of sabotage on trains on the eve of the Normandy invasion. The French government later promoted these stories of heroism in propaganda films and pamphlets.

However, SNCF officials reported acts of sabotage but did not act to save their Jewish colleagues. The Vichy government appointed the company's head, Pierre-Eugène Fournier, to command the evacuation and boycott of Jewish businesses, and Fournier did so effectively, his only complaint being about German interference.

The train drivers transported some 76,000 Jews in freight cars to the German border, where a Nazi driver transported them to the death camps. While the company may not have understood the scale of the mass murder at Auschwitz and other camps, the drivers knew they were carrying unwanted passengers, crammed into cars without food, water, or ventilation, in extreme conditions and without stops. The deportation shipments continued for two months after the Normandy landings.

In the 90s, when survivors first approached SNCF demanding compensation, the company escaped legal liability, but was forced to respond to public pressure: it commissioned an independent study, opened the archives, issued statements of apology, and contributed to Holocaust commemoration and education.

In 2014, after Holocaust survivors protested proposals to award the company contracts in the United States, the French and U.S. ambassadors proposed a $60 million fund to compensate survivors not covered by other programs.

SNCF’s fight for accountability has also sparked discussions among railway companies in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Hungary, which also participated in transporting the murdered. In 2019, Holocaust survivor Slo Müller pressured the Dutch state-owned railways to apologize and compensate: each survivor who had forcibly bought a ticket was awarded compensation of 15,000 euros; in the case of deceased survivors, the heirs received half the amount.

Not just about the money
At a conference on corporate responsibility for human rights abuses at Tel Aviv University in 2012, historian Michael Marus emphasized: “It’s not just about the money!” Lawsuits and legal settlements set important precedents, but many survivors wanted first and foremost “to preserve an accurate historical memory, to tell the story, and to remind the world of the warning.”

Survivor Liliane Lalydier-Marton acknowledged her family’s suffering at the Holocaust Museum in Drancy. Renée Pouget-Zeigman read her father’s name at a ceremony in Paris, organized by the SNCF. Daniel Orbeittle, one of the young men who managed to escape the train to Auschwitz, held no particular grudge, but said of the apology and funding announcement: “I’m glad they did it.”

In general, some survivors wanted the SNCF to publicly atone and bear moral responsibility, and some feared a modern society's obligation to the past actions of its predecessors.

Restoration of honor
Today, many companies are trying to deal with their involvement in mass atrocities — not only in the Holocaust, but also in the Rwandan genocide, the slave trade, and colonialism.

I urge companies and their representatives to focus on restoring the dignity of the victims and acknowledging their suffering, rather than calculating percentages of guilt. Such calculations distract from innocent people still dealing with the consequences and delay the prevention of future atrocities.

Money matters, but people also need to have their dignity recognized and their suffering documented—something that companies can do on their own initiative, without legal action. Such an action would be seen as a testament to their moral values, not just an economic necessity.

This retrospective encourages us to consider how their corporate actions will be judged in the future: will resource stewardship, working conditions, or involvement in tragic events be criticized or celebrated?