PARIS (AFP)---France's state-run railways said Friday it had handed over its digital copies of its archives for the period covering World War II, when it deported tens of thousands of Jews, to three Holocaust museums.   

The documents, covering the period 1939 to 1945, had been delivered to the Shoah Memorial in Paris, the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington over the last two months, said a statement.   

This gesture of openess was intended to help the work of researchers and reinforce the company's policy of transparency about its past, the statement added.   

SNCF president Guillaume Pepy admitted a year ago that the company had been "a cog in the Nazi extermination machine" during the occupation of France.  

It had provide space at the station in Bobigny, north of Paris, from where 20,000 Jews were sent to perish in death camps between 1943 and 1944.  

Goods trains carried 76,000 Jews to death camps and destinations in France between 1942 and 1945.  

"All the documents have been gathered and numbered. No sorting has been done so as to guarantee access to all documents from the period," the statement added.  

In 1995 France's then president Jacques Chirac acknowledged that the French state, under the Vichy regime that collaborated with the German occupiers, had "seconded" the slaughter.