Holocaust survivors and the families of victims who were Nazi death camps during the Second World War, are to be compensated by the Dutch national railway Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS).

Calling its role in transporting more than 100,000 Jews and other minorities “a black page in the history of the company”, the firm said it had accepted a recommendation to offer around €15,000 (£13,500) to each of the estimated 500 living survivors from a fund of €50m (£45m).

It will also pay compensation to an estimated 5,500 relatives of victims, including €7,500 to their widows or widowers or €5,000 to their children.

The agreement was announced by chief Roger van Boxtel at a ceremony in the Utrecht Railway Museum.

It followed a campaign by 83-year-old Salo Muller, whose parents were transported from Amsterdam to a Dutch transit camp before being sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

Mr Muller sent his first letter to the company in 2015 and later raised the issue with Mr Van Boxtel in person.

As a result NS established a commission to look into individual reparations in November last year.

“I am relieved that it is all over,” said Mr Muller. ”But when you consider why we’re getting compensation, it makes me very sad. People were murdered.”

Some 70 per cent of the Dutch Jewish community did not survive the war. Among them was Anne Frank, who was transported from Amsterdam to the Westerbork transit camp following her arrest in August 1944.

NS was paid by the Nazi occupiers for sending the victims to the border, where they were put on German trains and taken to concentration camps

Job Cohen, the former mayor of Amsterdam who led the commission, called the payments a “moral gesture”.

“It is not possible to name a reasonable and fitting amount of money that can compensate even a bit of the suffering of those involved,” he said.

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The German government has paid around €70bn in compensation for Nazi crimes, mainly to Jewish survivors, while France has paid nearly €5.5bn to French citizens and certain deportees.

In 2011 French railway company SNCF apologised for its role in transporting around 76,000 Jews to Germany during the war.