When German troops swept into Belgium in May 1940, the trains stopped only briefly.
Within weeks, the country’s steel arteries were pulsing again, carriages shuttling across a landscape newly subdued by the swastika. The national rail company, NMBS/SNCB, resumed its operations in the name of survival – keeping food on tables, factories open, and a fragile sense of normality alive.
But the same trains that fed the Belgian economy also fuelled the Nazi machine. They carried Jews, Roma, and political prisoners to the camps. Each departure posed a question that has haunted the country ever since: could the NMBS/SNCB have done more to resist?
Choices
It was a compromise born of fear and pragmatism – what Belgians called the politique du moindre mal, the policy of the lesser evil. As historian Nico Wouters, director of war research centre CegeSoma and curator of a new exhibition at Train World, puts it: “Belgium felt it did not have a choice.”
The German invasion lasted just 18 days. By early summer, NMBS/SNCB director-general Narcisse Rulot, a former mining engineer and career technocrat, ordered staff back to work. Belgium’s trains rolled again — orderly timetables masking an uneasy compromise. Unlike in the Netherlands, the NMBS/SNCB remained under Belgian management throughout the war, though German officers were embedded across its operations, guiding everything from schedules to strategic priorities.
The company’s official mission was to serve Belgian civilians. Yet in the occupied state’s grim arithmetic, patriotism and coercion became indistinguishable. The company felt forced to carry out military transport for the Nazis. This included the deportation of 189,542 Belgian forced labourers, 16,081 political prisoners, 25,490 Jews and 353 Roma from Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen to the concentration camps.
German gunners on a Belgian train during the Second World War
For the NMBS/SNCB board, the moral ledger was blurred by a financial one. By 1945, the company was almost three billion Belgian francs in debt. Yet Wouters’ research shows that it had received around 51 million francs – roughly €21 million today – for the deportation transports.
His findings led to the Belgian government setting up a Wise Persons Group to look into this issue, subsequently issuing 30 recommendations focusing on “truth, transmission and reparation” in December 2023. “Receiving some payment from the Germans for services delivered would have appeared for the board of directors as a ‘just’ deal,” Wouters says.
The logic, stripped of emotion, was bureaucratic: the Germans paid for what they ordered, and the railways kept the lights on. But beneath that arithmetic lay a deeper moral deficit that would take generations to confront.
Could they refuse?
Could Rulot simply have refused? Wouters thinks not – at least not at first. “In 1940, there was no choice but to cooperate,” he says. “It was also Rulot’s legal duty to loyally cooperate with the occupier. Executing the trains ordered by the Germans was ‘a necessary evil to defend Belgian interests’.”
Yet, Wouters argues, legal duty did not preclude taking a stance against deportation. “Even if perhaps the Germans would not have accepted,” Wouters continues, “at the very least he should have tried to negotiate and refuse to execute German ‘military trains’. Especially since the deportation trains later in the occupation are the direct result of the decision to accept these military trains in 1940.”
By 1942, the stakes were clearer and Rulot’s authority firmer. The deportations of Jews had begun, and the NMBS/SNCB’s cooperation was essential. “The Germans were much more dependent on him, and so he could protest against German orders and still maintain his position,” Wouters says. But he did not.
Instead, the trains kept running on time. “The deportation trains were simply not on his radar,” Wouters adds. The board never even discussed them.
Collective responsibility
Blame, Wouters insists, cannot rest on one man. “It is better to speak about a ‘collective responsibility’ in the broad sense of allowing these transports to happen.” The indifference mirrored that of many ordinary Europeans who lived alongside atrocities without protest.
After liberation, no one at NMBS/SNCB was charged for deportation trains. Rulot’s punishment was symbolic: forced early retirement. “This illustrates that even the syndicates and communist resistance after the war considered this task as inevitable,” Wouters notes.
Only about 3% of the workforce was punished for “anti-patriotic” behaviour, and even those sanctions – salary cuts, suspensions – covered many other offences.
Line of forces labour workers during the Second World War in Belgium
Rulot’s story, however, is not one of simple collaboration. He was later recognised as a member of the Royalist Resistance Movement and argued until his death that he had been made a scapegoat. In the exhibition, visitors encounter an AI-generated Rulot defending himself: “I had to keep going or the Nazis would have just put someone else at the head of the company… and I received no instruction from the government at the time or during the war, one way or the other.”
Acts of defiance did occur. Four train drivers refused to transport German military goods. Many employees went into hiding or slowed their work.
The exhibition displays their small rebellions: a sabotage manual, a pair of pliers, a railway cap from worker Léon van der Ecken, deported to Buchenwald in 1944, embroidered with “Vive la Belgique” and “Soignies”, the letters S reversed in silent mockery of the SS.
NMBS/SNCB also hired 25,000 unqualified workers – on paper – to save them from forced labour in Germany. Their blank CVs are now on display. The company refused to dismiss staff convicted by German military courts and even founded a social service in 1941 to care for railway families in hardship.
Family of Roma who were made prisoners during the Second World War
By 1942, Wouters notes, NMBS/SNCB actively backed the resistance with massive financial support. “The company was crucial to the survival of hundreds of thousands of Belgians,” he says.
There were rare moments of open heroism. On April 19, 1943, three young Belgians – Youra Livchitz, Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon – halted a deportation convoy, freeing 238 Jews. A year later, the so-called phantom train left Brussels for Germany with 1,500 political prisoners. Sabotage forced it to turn back; the Allies freed them soon after.
The long silence
After the war, Belgium preferred rebuilding to soul-searching. With the rail network shattered – just 2,916 km of track left from 4,846 – the NMBS/SNCB needed every hand to rebuild.
For decades, the company celebrated its resistance fighters instead. Only when the Netherlands faced public outrage in the 2000s over its own railway compensation did Belgium begin to reckon with its past.
That reckoning now unfolds at Train World’s exhibition, which blends testimony, artefacts and survivor talks to explore what it means to act – or not – under tyranny.
