AMSTERDAM — The indispensable role that German railroads played as part of the Nazi machinery of genocide during World War II has long been known. But it may be only now that the Dutch are beginning to fully reckon with the role that their own national railroad played in the Holocaust.

For several decades, according to the historian David Barnouw, many Dutch people regarded the wartime performance of their railway system, the Nederlandse Spoorwegen, or N.S., as heroic. In September 1944, the Dutch government in exile in London ordered the railway workers to strike, which they did for almost eight months until the end of the war.

This strike, however, came after the Dutch national railroad had already deported some 107,000 Jewish residents of the Netherlands — of 140,000 people who identified as Jewish in 1941 — to transit and extermination camps such as Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, on commission from the German occupying forces. Only 5,100 survived. In addition, thousands of Sinti and Roma people, as well as gay men and lesbians, disabled people, and resistance fighters were also transported to camps on Dutch railroads.

That much is now widely known in the Netherlands, as is the notorious praise that Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who drew up plans for deportations and genocide, once offered the Dutch national railroad: “The transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see.”