The Dutch national railway company (NS) announced Tuesday it will pay damages to relatives of Holocaust victims for its role in helping to deport Jews to Nazi death camps during World War Two. 

"The NS during World War Two operated trains commanded by the occupier," the company said in a statement.

"It was a black page in our country's history and also for our own company. It's a past which we cannot ignore."

A commission will now be set up "to look at how the NS for moral reasons can pay individual compensation," it went on.

Following Germany's occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, NS trains helped transport tens of thousands of Jews to a transit camp in the country's northeast, known as Westerbork, from which they were then sent to Nazi death camps, such as Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen.

The railway company earned millions of euros in today's terms by doing so, according to Dutch national broadcaster NOS.

In all, some 107,000 of the country's 140,000 Jews went through Westerbork, including teenager Anne Frank, whose diary remains one of the most widely-read accounts of the occupation.

In 2005, the NS officially apologized for its role during World War Two but this is the first time it has agreed to pay compensation to the victims or their relatives.

Atoning for WWII

Over 70 years after the end of the war, the issue of reparations to Holocaust victims and their descendants remains a major headache.

Compensations so far have largely come from governments. Germany, Austria, Belgium, Hungary and others have tried to atone for their actions during World War Two by paying damages – often after a lengthy negotiation process and under intense public pressure – to those who were deported, interred and persecuted by the Nazis, had their property stolen or confiscated, or were forced to flee.

But a number of companies that collaborated with the Nazi regime, or employed and profited from forced labor during the war years, have also been made to pay reparations.

Slave labor

Most notoriously, German companies like IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens and Dynamit Nobel – chemical and pharmaceutical firms, as well as weapons manufacturers – forked out several million U.S. dollars in the 1960s and 1980s in slave labor settlements, according to the Claims Conference, an organization that has helped negotiate reparations for Holocaust survivors.

Deportation

In 2014, France agreed to pay 60 million U.S. dollars to Holocaust victims who were deported to Nazi camps by French national rail company SNCF. The company's trains ferried some 76,000 Jews to concentration camps during the war. Only about 3,000 survived.

Banks

Some companies did not participate directly in the Holocaust but nevertheless came under fire for profiting financially from the disappearance of millions of Jews and others.

Swiss banks famously became embroiled in scandal in the 1990s over the millions of francs that lay in dormant Jewish accounts, unclaimed by owners who were either killed or unable to prove their identity after emerging from the camps. 

The banks finally agreed to pay a 1.25-billion-U.S.-dollar settlement in 1998 to Holocaust survivors.

Insurance

That same year, an International Commission on Holocaust-era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) was set up to process insurance claims by Holocaust victims and their families. Through the commission, over 48,000 survivors and relatives won more than 300 million U.S. dollars from some of Europe's top insurers, including Allianz, Generali, AXA, Winterthur and Zurich, the ICHEIC said in its final 2007 report.

Still, many insist not nearly enough has been done to help survivors and their descendants. Over seven decades after the events, the last few remaining victims and their families are still fighting for long-due compensation.

Last year, the World Jewish Restitution Organization said that of some 500,000 Holocaust survivors still alive, half were living in poverty.

(With input from agencies)