The Holocaust could not have happened without the railways.

Preeminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg underscored that almost everyone murdered at a camp arrived by train, including Jews, political prisoners and other “undesirables.” Since the 1990s, groups of survivors have asked European railway companies to acknowledge and atone for their critical role – a reminder that war, genocide and other atrocities cannot occur without corporate participation.

One long-running attempt met a setback on Feb. 21, 2025, when the U.S. Supreme Court threw out an appeals court ruling in favor of survivors seeking atonement from Hungary’s state railways. The lower court held that plaintiffs could sue the company over looting during the deportation of 440,000 Jews, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Supreme Court disagreed, however, saying the case did not warrant an exception to law protecting foreign governments from being sued in U.S. courts.

Even without legal rulings, however, survivors have sometimes mobilized enough public support to force rail companies to confront their complicity.

I wrote a book about one such case: the French national railways’ multiple roles in World War II, and the company’s 30-year struggle to make amends. I dug through archives and legal documents and spoke to over 120 experts – including historians, legislators, executives and more than 90 Holocaust survivors – about what obligations, if any, they believe railways have today.

The French national railways’ wartime activities and slow roll to accountability helped me better understand and articulate productive ways that companies can respond to demands for atonement decades or more after the events.

The French railway company, known as the SNCF, played more than one role during the war. Depending on which facts you focus on, you can see the company as a victim, hero or perpetrator.

With roughly 500,000 employees at the time, the company found itself in the crosshairs of the Nazi occupation. When France capitulated to Germany on June 22, 1940, the country was divided into occupied and free zones, and the French national railways were put under German command.

Unlike companies such as Hugo Boss, which made Nazi uniforms, the SNCF did not financially profit from the occupation. To the contrary, Germans rarely paid the rail company the full amounts due. Machines were destroyed, an estimated 24,000 railway workers were sent to forced labor, and 2,229 railway workers were murdered.

After the war, the acts of the brave railway workers came to light. Some slowed trains so deportees could jump off; some found other ways to facilitate escapes. Near the city of Lille, some SNCF workers helped save dozens of Jewish children. Most importantly, some workers coordinated with the French Resistance on D-Day, sabotaging trains to prevent German armaments from reaching the Normandy beaches and fighting off the Allies.

After the war, the SNCF amplified heroic stories with the help of the French government, using a film, pamphlets and other means.

These stories are true – even if those workers made up less than 1% of the workforce. Surely, some stories were never told. But even if we double or triple the number, such resistance was an exception, not the rule.

Senior executives reported on acts of sabotage and did little to save their own Jewish colleagues. In fact, Vichy France – the wartime collaborationist government – put the head of the SNCF, Pierre-Eugene Fournier, in charge of liquidating Jewish businesses. He did so efficiently and complained only about German interference.

The SNCF transported approximately 76,000 Jewish deportees in merchandise cars to the German border, where a Nazi train driver carried them on to their deaths. While it’s possible the company didn’t understand the mass murder occurring at Auschwitz or other camps, drivers knew they carried unwilling passengers crammed together with little food, water or air in extreme weather without stopping. The deportation trains continued for two months after D-Day.

Yet SNCF’S image as part of the Resistance lived on in France until the 1990s, when survivors first approached the company for atonement. SNCF escaped legal liability, but public pressure forced the company to respond. Though it never financially compensated victims directly, the SNCF did commission an independent study, opened its archive to the public, made statements of regret and contributed to Holocaust commemoration and education.

The conversation then moved beyond French borders. In 2014, after Holocaust survivors protested the SNCF’s bids for contracts in the U.S., French and American ambassadors hammered out a US$60 million fund to compensate survivors who were not covered by other programs.

The SNCF’s journey toward accountability encouraged debates involving rail companies in the Netherlands, Belgium and Hungary, which had also transported hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths.

In 2019, Holocaust survivor Salo Muller successfully lobbied the Dutch state-owned railways for an apology and compensation for deportees. The company gave €15,000 – about $16,500 – to each survivor who had been forced to pay for their own ticket to be transported in horrific conditions to death camps. In the case of deceased survivors, the railway offered half that amount to heirs.

In 2012, historian Michael Marrus invited me to join him at Corporate Liability for Human Rights Violations, a conference at the University of Tel Aviv. There, he slapped his hands on the table and all but shouted to his senior colleagues, “It’s not about the money!”

Judicial rulings and financial payouts make headlines and create important precedents. But my interviews with survivors confirmed the spirit of Marrus’ words: “People want to set the record straight, to tell the story, and to have their history constitute a warning.”

Liliane Lelaidier-Marton took me to the Shoah Memorial in Drancy, France, where her parents had been interned before deportation. She appreciated the memorials and visitor center, which acknowledge her loss and their suffering. Renée Fauguet-Zejgman and I went to a ceremony in Paris together so she could read her murdered father’s name – an opportunity sponsored, in part, by the SNCF. Daniel Urbejtel, one of the youngest to survive Auschwitz, didn’t hold on to special anger against the railways. But when I told him about their statement of regret and funding of memorial sites, he said, “I’m glad that they did that.”

Leo Bretholz, who jumped out of an SNCF train bound for Auschwitz, wanted a verbal acknowledgment of the harm and an apology along with compensation. Stanley Kalmanovitz, who received over $200,000 from the 2014 settlement for his deportation to Auschwitz, told me, “The money came at a good time in my life … but this is not a settlement of conscience.” He knew the railway company was trying to win U.S. contracts and saw the money as a way to get survivors out of the way.

Motivations aside, Kalmanovitz wondered what people today expect from the SNCF workers during the war. He said, “What was the French railroad supposed to do? Someone has a gun at your head, what do you do? You take the bullet? Then, if everyone takes a bullet, who’s left?”

Historians only know of one French train driver who defied orders to drive his train. Léon Bronchart refused to drive a train filled with either German soldiers or political prisoners. He lost his bonus and title, but not his life.

While a number of survivors I spoke with wanted SNCF to atone, others expressed misgivings about holding today’s company accountable for the actions of its predecessors.

Today, some companies are trying to address their connections to mass atrocities: not only the Holocaust, but also other genocides, the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and even ecological destruction.

I encourage companies, institutions and ambassadors to focus on addressing harm, rather than on calculating their institution’s percentage of guilt or complicity. These difficult – if not impossible – calculations distract institutions from supporting the innocent people grappling with the aftermath and from preventing future harm.

While money matters, people also want their dignity restored and suffering acknowledged – and companies can do this work without lawsuits prompting them. When they do it on their own, stakeholders see their efforts as evidence of a moral conscience rather than an economic necessity.

This look back encourages stakeholders to consider how today’s corporate actions may be judged in the years ahead. Will future generations celebrate or condone their use of natural resources, labor practices or any participation in the deportations of their day?

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Sarah Federman, University of San Diego

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Sarah Federman received funding from the Fondation pour la Memorial de la Shoah to conduct research on the SNCF in France. During her time as a doctoral student, George Mason University's Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution awarded Federman the Presidential Scholarship in support of this research.