The General Patton Memorial Museum in Ettelbruck

The General Patton Memorial Museum was officially opened on 7 July 1995 in Ettelbruck, the town the US Third Army liberated on Christmas Day 1944. It isn’t a national museum and doesn’t try to be. It’s the museum of a town that calls itself Patton Town and has turned its gratitude into a collection.

What’s inside

According to the museum, there are more than a thousand photographs and documents on the German invasion of May 1940, the Nazi occupation and the liberation of September 1944. A large section covers repression and persecution, Nazi organisations, the general strike of 1942, the conscription of young Luxembourgers, against their will, into the German labour service and the Wehrmacht, and the birth of the resistance. One room is given to the liberation of the Ettelbruck area, where neighbouring Feulen was freed three days earlier, on 22 December, according to its commune.

The Battle of the Bulge is represented by a diorama of an American heavy machine-gun position. And a military archaeology room shows weapons, ammunition and kit found between 1975 and 1995 on Luxembourg’s old battlefields.

Patton, his statue and a colonel

Two rooms are devoted to the general and to Remembrance Day, which Ettelbruck marked every year from 1954 to 2004. The most striking exhibit is the original plaster cast of the 3-metre statue of Patton by the American sculptor James Earle Fraser. The first bronze was raised at West Point in 1950, and a copy was unveiled in Patton Square in 1970 at the Patton family’s initiative. There are also original personal items belonging to Patton and to Colonel Lansing McVickar, commander of the 318th Regiment, killed in action near Ettelbruck on 14 January 1945.

It’s that human scale that interests me more than the numbers. The story of one colonel who fell a few miles from the room tells you more about the war than any map of divisions.

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The air war

This is what sets it apart from the Diekirch museum. The museum says around 250 military aircraft crashed on Luxembourg soil in the Second World War, and one room holds wreckage from some thirty German, American, British and French aircraft, including six complete engines. visitluxembourg singles out the engines and the flight instruments twisted by impact. If the air war is your interest, the little B-17 museum at Perlé, in Rambrouch, tells the story of one 1944 crash in detail.

Patton and Luxembourg

The museum also covers the general’s ties to the country. Patton first came to Luxembourg as a colonel at the end of January 1919 and, in a letter to his father, had some harsh words about the first country in the world without an army. On 21 December 1944 he set up headquarters in the Pescatore Foundation in the capital, using the refectory as his operations room, and stayed until 27 March 1945. He is buried at the American cemetery in Hamm, among his soldiers.

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Hours, prices and Patton Square

You can visit Tuesday to Sunday between 10:00 and 17:00; it stays closed on Mondays, 1 January, Carnival Sunday, National Day (23 June) and 25 December. Adults pay €5, and it’s €3 for teenagers aged 10 to 18, students and groups of ten or more; under-10s, disabled visitors and school classes go free. With the LuxembourgPass it costs nothing. A guided group tour of about 90 minutes, available in English, costs €70 per group and guide on top of entry. Be aware that, by the museum’s own account, it has no adaptations for visitors with reduced mobility.

The 2014 refurbishment expanded the displays to 650 m² over four floors. Outside, Patton Square has the 1954 memorial, with its eagle and sword driven into the ground, the 1970 statue and a tank. visitluxembourg gives the memorial’s address on avenue J.-F. Kennedy, which is already in Erpeldange-sur-Sûre. The front of the plinth reads «In Memoriam Lt.-Gen. G.S. Patton jr.», and the back lists the corps and divisions of the Third Army that took part in the liberation, from the 4th to the 90th Infantry Divisions, the 17th Airborne and five armoured divisions. A 2024 redesign brought a Liberation Route Europe marker and three silhouettes based on wartime photographs, donated by the US Embassy. There’s no parking at the square, so leave the car in the public car park by the petrol station 200 metres away. I’d combine it with the Diekirch military museum on the same day.

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