Occupation, resistance and liberation in Luxembourg, 1940-1945

There’s a way of seeing Luxembourg as a calm, prosperous little country that history simply passed by. It isn’t true. Between 1940 and 1945 it was invaded, annexed in all but name, forced to send its young men into the army occupying it and, once liberated, torn apart again in the north. A great deal of what explains its attachment to its language and to Europe today goes back to these years.

10 May 1940

That morning the first German units crossed the Moselle, the Sûre and the Our. The country was prepared for an invasion but powerless against the war machine facing it, and after a few skirmishes its security forces had to hand over their weapons. It was the second time in less than 25 years that Luxembourg’s neutrality had been violated.

Warned that same night, Grand Duchess Charlotte and the government left. They went first to Portugal, then Canada and finally London, from where they encouraged the resistance. The official portal calls it a fortunate decision, because being on the Allied side guaranteed the country full international recognition after the war. For British readers it’s a neat link, London having been the setting for both treaties that shaped the country in the 19th century.

A country wiped off the map

Occupation meant the end of independence. In July and August 1940 the country came under direct German administration, run by Gustav Simon, Gauleiter of Koblenz-Trier. With the help of local collaborators, nicknamed «Gielemännercher», little yellow men, after their uniform, the occupiers abolished every state institution, banned French and launched an intense propaganda drive. In October 1940 they had the Gëlle Fra, the capital’s war memorial, taken down.

To give the annexation a veneer of legality, a census was held on 10 October 1941 with questions on nationality, ethnicity and language, in the hope that people would declare themselves German. Many answered «Luxembourgish» or left the boxes blank, and the administration called off the collection of forms. That date is now the National Day of Remembrance, though it isn’t a day off, as I explain in Luxembourg public holidays.

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Conscription, strikes and deportations

On 30 August 1942 Germany decreed Luxembourg’s forced incorporation into the Reich. Many Luxembourgers saw straight away what it meant. Young men would be treated as Germans and made to do military service. Strikes broke out across the country, and the response was martial law and the execution of 21 strikers.

In all, some 10,000 Luxembourgers were forcibly enlisted in the German forces. More than a third refused to put on the uniform and went into hiding, and their families paid with deportation, prison, camps such as Hinzert and executions. The Jewish community suffered worst. Of around 4,000 Jewish people living in the country before the war, more than 90% never saw it again, and of nearly 1,300 deported only 69 survived. The resistance began by smuggling fugitives and escaped Allied airmen to the French and Belgian maquis, and by the end of the war its groups had united as the Unio’n.

Liberation, and the battle that followed

On 10 September 1944 the US Army liberated the country. But the Germans stabilised the front along the Moselle and counter-attacked in December. The Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg devastated the north and east, and Vianden, the last town to be freed, wasn’t liberated until February 1945. The Grand Duchess returned on 14 April, and the war in Europe ended on 8 May. Among the traces of that winter are the 10,913 graves of the Sandweiler German war cemetery.

The official toll is 5,700 dead from the fighting and Nazi terror, about 2% of the population. One small story from those months is a favourite of mine. In December 1944, American soldiers stationed in Wiltz pooled the sweets from their care packages so the local children could have a St Nicholas party, and on 5 December a «Saint Nick» toured the town in a jeep. The tradition carries on.

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Where to remember it today

If you only have time for one visit, I’d make it Esch-sur-Alzette’s national museum of the Resistance and human rights, open since 1956. Then the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, with more than 5,000 soldiers and General Patton’s grave, and Sandweiler’s German military cemetery, holding 10,913 graves, the first Germany established outside its own territory. For something longer, the Liberation Route Europe crosses the country over about 253 km.

The war in the capital, on foot

In Luxembourg City itself there are three places hardly anyone looks for, and to me they’re the hardest-hitting. The first is Villa Pauly, at 57 boulevard de la Pétrusse. According to visitluxembourg, the Gestapo set up its headquarters there in August 1940, and its cellars, turned into cells, were where opponents of the annexation were interrogated and often tortured. Two plaques outside remember the victims of the Resistance and the 1,300 Jews whose deportation was organised in the building. Today it houses the Resistance foundation and the Shoah remembrance foundation, and it isn’t open to visitors.

The second is at 13 avenue Jean-Pierre Pescatore, in the Fondation Pescatore. Patton made it the headquarters of his Third Army, and in the first-floor chapel, shortly before Christmas 1944, he said the prayer he’d had his chaplain write for better weather in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. It’s a care home now and can’t be visited either, so I’d look from outside and fill in the story at the General Patton museum in Ettelbruck.

The third isn’t a building but a walk. The Shoah Memorial Trail from the capital’s tourist office takes about two hours over nine stops. It starts at the plaque in the glass hall of the central station, from where eight trains carried 659 Jewish men and women away from October 1941, and ends at the Mémorial de la Shoah on boulevard Roosevelt, with the Kaddish monument and a wall of 1,225 names. Of the roughly 4,000 Jews living in the country when the Germans arrived, 1,157 died in the genocide. It’s a walk I’d take slowly, without rushing on to anything else afterwards.

Beyond the capital, the Liberation Route Europe is a network of trails stretching over 10,000 km across Europe that follows the Allied advance. visitluxembourg puts the Luxembourg section at more than 270 km in all, from the Moselle to the Ardennes by way of the fortress and the Mullerthal, with a northern variant of almost 50 km. How it all fits into a thousand years of history is in history of Luxembourg.

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