Dutch firm apologises for deporting Jews

Sixty years after the end of Second World War, the Dutch national railway company apologised yesterday for its role in deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

Aad Veenman, chief executive of Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), acknowledged for the first time that his firm had collaborated with Nazi occupiers by deporting 107,000 Dutch Jews 70 per cent of the country's Jewish community to death camps in Germany and Poland.

"On behalf of the company and from the bottom of my heart, I sincerely apologise for what happened during the war," Veenman said at a ceremony that launched an anti-racism poster campaign across 66 Dutch railway stations.

The apology, which comes at a time of increasing religious and racial tension in the Netherlands, was made at Muiderpoort station in Amsterdam, from where 11,000 Jews were deported.

One poster read: "Previously, the train to Auschwitz left from here. When will the world become wiser?"

Another said: "In 1940-45, the Jews had to go. Who is next ... Isn't the hatred reviving?" Last year's murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh sparked a wave of attacks on mosques, religious schools and churches in a country once renowned for its tolerance.

The NS decided to apologise and acknowledge its role in the Holocaust a difficult subject it avoided for decades after the Netherlands' main Jewish organisation, CJO, proposed the poster campaign.