Committee on Individual Compensation for Victims of WWII Transport by NS

Committee on Individual Compensation for Victims of WWII Transport by NS

Background and Eligibility Criteria:

The Dutch Railways Fund opened on 05 August 2019, with deadline for all applications of 5 August 2020.

Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), the Dutch state railway company, announced that Holocaust survivors and the families or heirs of Holocaust victims who were deported on its trains to concentration and extermination camps during World War II when the Netherlands was under Nazi-German occupation may be eligible to receive a lump sum payment from a fund established by NS.

The Committee recommends, partly on the basis of an examination of other schemes, that the individual payments be determined as follows:

1. €15,000 for each living survivor transported to Westerbork, Vught or Amersfoort by order of the occupying forces with the aim of transporting them to a concentration or extermination camp outside the national borders with the aim of the occupier to exterminate them as a population group, or from other locations in the Netherlands directly to concentration and extermination camps abroad.

2. €7,500 for the widow/er of each transportee who died during or after the war

3. If the transported person did not have a widow or widower, or if he or she has died in the meantime, children who are still alive may jointly qualify for a payment as follows:
i. if the oldest child still alive was born before 8 May 1945, a payment of €7,500 for the children together;

ii. if the oldest child was born after that date, a payment amounting to €5,000 for the children together.

Legal heirs will replace the person who was eligible for individual compensation on 27 November 2018, the date on which NS decided to create the Scheme but died after that date.

Implementation of this scheme may result in an applicant being entitled to multiple compensations (for example both as a stakeholder and as a widow/widower and/or as a child), for which separate applications must be submitted.

For complete eligibility guidelines, further details and the application form please visit the Foundation at https://commissietegemoetkomingns.nl