Belgian federal Mobility Minister Georges Gilkinet and Senate President Stéphanie D’Hose have ordered an independent investigation into the role of railway company SNCB/NMBS in the wartime deportations of Jews people, Roma and resistance fighters during the German occupation.
Between July 1942 and the end of the war, SNCB/NMBS carried more than 25,000 Jewish people and 353 Roma people from the Kazerne Dossin in the Belgian city of Mechelen to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Not many survived.
The railway company has acknowledged its role in the convoys, but it was never studied in detail.
“The fact that Jewish people were deported by the SNCB/NMBS, by Belgian train drivers, Belgian locomotives … that isn’t a secret, we’ve known that for some time,” Nico Wouters, who heads that Study and Documentation Centre for War and Contemporary Society that’s charged with the investigation.
But when it comes to the decision-making and implementation of the convoys, there are still large knowledge gaps, he added.
The study will also look into the role of about 6,700 members of the resistance who worked for the SNCB, and the extent to which sabotage operations were possible.
